An exhibition curated by Kristen Hutchinson
April 18 – June 21, 2025
Opening: Thursday, April 17, 2025, as of 6 PM @ Artexte’s exhibition space.
We’re Here. We’re Lesboqueer. We’re Still Fabulous is comprised of documents by and about Canadian lesboqueer artists from 1988 to 2002 from the Artexte collection, as well as posters and journals from the Archives lesbiennes du Québec. This exhibition seeks to bring the works and lives of Canadian lesboqueer artists into greater visibility, as they are often not included within the overly restrictive, traditionalist confines of the canons of Canadian art history. During their research residency at Artexte, Kristen Hutchinson discovered many lesboqueer artists that they had never heard of—despite having taught Canadian art history for many years. Hutchinson has chosen to transform the white cube of the exhibition space into a nineties-inspired living/reading room and asks viewers to consider what can be learned from earlier Canadian lesboqueer art and activism.
Read the exhibition booklet HERE
Take a look at the exhibited documents HERE
About the curator:
Kristen Hutchinson is a queer and gender fluid (they/she) visual artist, cultural critic, curator, writer, editor, and adjunct professor of art history, feminism, media studies, and popular culture. She received their PhD in History of Art from University College London in 2007 and has taught in numerous universities and colleges in Canada, the US, and the UK. They are the author of three books: Monsters No More: How We Came to Love Denizens of the Dark (Leanpub, 2025), Prairie Tales: A History (Alberta Media Arts Alliance Society, 2017) and Kiss & Tell: Lesbian Art & Activism (Art Canada Institute, June 2025). They have been a nationally syndicated art and popular culture columnist at CBC Radio and were the editor-in-chief of Luma Quarterly.
In her artistic practice, she uses collage, photography, video, installation, and performance art to investigate the realms of memory, beauty, mortality, embodiment, the environment, urban space, queerness, and the macabre. Kristen is the co-founder of fast & dirty, a Montréal and Edmonton based curatorial and artist collective that creates projects that challenge curatorial methods and exhibitions and art events for short durations in unusual environments. She also teaches independent seminars in her living room and online.
For their latest book, visit:
https://leanpub.com/monstersnomore
About the collaborators:
Founded in Montreal in 1975, Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV) is one of the few centers in the world dedicated to the preservation and promotion of media artworks by women (women is used here in the most inclusive sense of the term), distributing and disseminating them while actively supporting production. Anchored in an intersectional approach, GIV supports artists of different ages, backgrounds and communities, and the practice of media arts in its various forms and currents, both artistic and action-oriented.
Since 1983, the Archives Lesbiennes du Québec (ALQ) have been collecting, preserving and bringing to life the traces of Québec lesbians. The ALQ’s mission is to acquire et preserve all information, in any medium, relating to lesbianism, lesbians, gay women or queer people, homosexuals, and homosexuality in general. They are primarily interested in documents and artefacts produced in or related to Québec, regardless of the language in which they were written. They also preserve documents from or relating to the Canadian and international French-speaking communities. The ALQ organise and participate in research projects, exhibitions, workshops and talks on lesbian, queer and feminist history, in order to highlight its collections. The ALQ hope to encourage lesbians to become more aware of the richness of their history and culture.