Feminist Art Museum
The Feminist Art Museum (FAM) was an attempt to create an intersectional feminist art organization. FAM was active between August 2017 and March 2018. FAM is no longer active. We envisioned our project as described below:
The Feminist Art Museum secures space for women and gender non-binary people in contemporary art. Conceived of by Toronto based curators Xenia Benivolski and Su-Ying Lee, the project is currently in the research and development phase. We are prioritizing feminist spatial practices that take responsibility to the land into account and will be foundational to our approach in working with organizations and artists to produce exhibitions, discursive events and land-based art.
Rather than occupying a dedicated building, constituent art organizations across Canada come together as FAM. This allows us to avoid gentrification, and deeply consider the implications of taking up space on colonized land.
MANDATE the Feminist Art Museum is committed to contemporary art and its discourses with the historic, current and developing social situation of women and gender non-binary people at the fore. Feminists and those that identify with our values at the intersection of art and anti-oppression work undertake the governance, operations, curation and directorship.
It is an intersectional, inclusionary organization. As such, within museum, gallery and art organizational structures we will foreground the voices and contributions of individuals with group identities that have been historically excluded, underrepresented, underserved or who have experienced inequitable access to privileges or benefits available to others.
FAM residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Equal Justice Residency
February & March 2018
Attendance at this residency supported by the Ontario Arts Council
SFAI aims to explore the Equal Justice theme and with the following questions:
How can art be used to engage systems of power and foster social and racial equity?
How can community action creatively address accountability and responsibility for equal justice within legal, financial, and social systems?
How can creative practices bear witness and give testimony to those who suffer injustice, and in the process help to transform systems of structural oppression?
LAND ART OF THE AMERICAN WEST, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO
October 15 to November 1, 2017
Continuing on FAM's research into land and ways of knowing we joined the Land Arts of the American West program as visiting artists travelling to three locations:
Borderlands Restoration, Patagonia, AZ
Gila Wilderness, NM
White Sands, NM
Click below to read more about FAM's experience at LAAW
For more information about LAAW's 2017 visiting artist program and field investigations visit their blog
CREATIVE TIME SUMMIT, TORONTO 2017 - BREAK OUT SESSION
September 30
WHY INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE MATTERS: Creating New Moral Fabrics in Settler Colonial Societies
Led by Christine Migwans, Anishinaabe defender of Indigenous rights and presented by the Feminist Art Museum
Following on our Gardiner Museum program, FAM continues to carry out our research and development (R&D) through public conversations. We've developed our Creative Time Breakout Session with Christine Migwans to focus more in-depth on selected topics presented in her general talk at the Gardiner Museum. This session took place at Trinity Bellwoods Park.
Gardiner Museum of Ceramics, August 9-17, 2017
Christopher Willes with Anne Bourne and others, Tsēma T. S. Igharas, Christine Migwans and Ed Freeman
FAM's project at the Gardiner saw the installation of two piles of bricks, conceived of by Xenia Benivolski and Su-Ying Lee, as material and metaphoric references for building community, organizations, institutions and feminist practices as well as deconstructing, critiquing and dismantling conventional practices
Read: Quick Fire, 5 Questions with the Feminist Art Museum by the Gardiner Museum