2025-2026 Projects

 

2025-2026 Thematic: Transformational Ontologies

We live in a time when the validity of what is central to our existence is being questioned. Democratic social and political beliefs, structures, and institutions are being dismantled, AI is replicating/replacing our very thoughts, writings, and images, and we are acquiring our healthcare, clothing, even our food via web platforms. These changes lead us as artists and designers to activate critical and creative strategies to investigate these ontological breaks. How are we experiencing these insidious, often unwanted, disruptions that hit at the core of our very being? How might we capture, recover, and transform this moment?

Joanna Black (artist/researcher in residence) (BA Fine Arts & English Literature; MA, PhD in Arts Education) has since 1989 been active in visual art as an artist, curator, and speaker. She is a professor at the University of Manitoba in visual art education and is cross-appointed as an Adjunct Professor at the School of Art, University of Manitoba. Additionally, she has been recently (2019-2024) appointed as a Research Fellow at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University, Halifax, Canada. . She has also served as a Senior Artist/Researcher in Residence for the WIAprojects, Center for Women Studies in Education (CWSE), at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. She currently teaches visual art and digital art education at the University of Manitoba.

Black’s research, visual work, curating and teaching have centered upon creative digital art practices, feminist art, women in academia, human rights issues, learning for social change, and environmental art education. As a result of her research and art making  she has published books, articles, reviews in a variety of journals, art catalogues, and exhibition catalogues. For over thirty years she has worked as an art educator, art director, museum educator, curator, art consultant, and a visual art educator in formal and informal settings in Canada and the United States. Formerly she worked at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art and the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art near Atlanta Georgia teaching drawing, painting and sculpture. Black has received awards from the National Art Education Associations' (NAEA) Art Education Technology (AET) for Outstanding Research Award; the Centre for Human Rights Research at the University of Manitoba; The Manitoba Education Research Network’s (MERN) Research Achievement Award;  and the Provincial Affiliate Art Educator Award from the Canadian Society for Education through Art. She has recently co-written a book, along with Juan Carlos Castro and Ching-Chiu Ling entitled, “Youth Practices in Digital Arts and New Media: Learning in Formal and Informal Settings published by Palgrave MacMillan in New York.

Black has worked curating exhibitions in Atlanta Georgia planning shows including the artist, Milton Avery and Indigenous artwork from the American Deep South. She has been the Canadian co-curator for international art exhibitions held in Tallinn Estonia in 2011, 2014 and 2017 working with other artists, curators, art business leaders and educators throughout Europe. In Ireland she was co-curator for a travelling show that was held in three galleries in the country and she worked curating a national exhibition that was held in Germany. She has spoken at close to 80 international and national conferences. Recently, she has been a guest speaker dealing with such topics as, How can Artists Bridge the Communication Gap Between Art and Society and she was on a recent panel to discuss Overlapping Violent Histories: A curatorial Investigation into Difficult Knowledge at the University of Manitoba.

Black has exhibited her new media, paintings, multimedia and performance artworks in Canada and the United States in solo and group shows. Her focus has always been on the political: art for social change including the environment, human rights issues, and feminist issues. While socially engaged art, as a category of practice, is still a working construct, the artist who identifies as such is an individual whose specialty includes working professionally with/in society. In a similar vein Black believes in and encourages her students to focus not only internally in critical and creative making, but also outwardly among each other and in company with community. A complex dialogue ensues where social critique, understanding, and engagement are valued in relation to human rights issues. Her recent new media and performance artworks include Babble/Babel proVOKing CO-llaBORation/IN/performance at the University of Toronto; Provocation at OCADU Toronto; new media art, ECHoes & ReVERBS @ Ivory Towers at the CWSE Gallery, Toronto and MAWA Gallery Winnipeg; and new media art, Making Time: A Digital Exhibition, Audain Art Center, Vancouver.

Paola Poletto is an artist and arts professional based in Toronto, Canada. She is interested in multi-voiced narratives about creativity. She is the independent co-producer of art/lit projects including OOL (Office of Life), an imprint she started in 2019.

Poletto is currently pursuing practice-based doctoral research in Media and Design Innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University. This research aims to make a new museum experience map focused on artist-worker perspectives through an auto-theory lens. It includes a blog where she writes about what she is learning and thinking about for a transformational museum experience. It is ordered by panoramic images of the reflecting pool at Mel Lastman Square in North York, a series she took over 10 months during COVID lock down and titled Glitch in 2022. 

It moves through additional images she took of the AGO's Walker Court, where she considers the symbolic resonances of a seasonal and cyclical water cycle and the metaphor of the pool with site-specificity and her own position stitching the narrative. 

Delina Yohannes (TBC)