Lillian Allen & Joanna Black: Learning for Social Change
(Joanna Black) Work by Scott Boyko |
(Lillan Allen) Photo of HYP by Martin Reid |
Opening Feb. 5, 5.30 - 7 pm. Conversation 6 pm
Exhibition runs from Feb 6 - May 4, 2018 9 AM -8 PM daily.
CWSE Hallway Gallery
OISE/UT, 252 Bloor Street West (just east of St. George & Bloor), 2nd Floor, Toronto
FREE and accessible.
Link to images from the opening as photographed and reinterpreted by Miklos Legrady: http://www.mikloslegrady.com/joanna_black/social_change/index.html
Exhibition runs from Feb 6 - May 4, 2018 9 AM -8 PM daily.
CWSE Hallway Gallery
OISE/UT, 252 Bloor Street West (just east of St. George & Bloor), 2nd Floor, Toronto
FREE and accessible.
Link to images from the opening as photographed and reinterpreted by Miklos Legrady: http://www.mikloslegrady.com/joanna_black/social_change/index.html
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. Writes Pablo
Helguera (2011) in Education for Socially
Engaged Art, “Standard education practices – such as engagement with
audiences, inquiry-based methods, collaborative dialogues, and hands-on
activities – provide an ideal framework for process-based and collaborative
conceptual [creative] practices (p. xi).” “Students” facilitated by socially
engaged artists/educators become aware of why they are acting and learn how to
act in an effective way.
Toronto, dub poet, activist and writer Lillian Allen and
Manitoba artist, researcher and educator Joanna Black, as socially engaged
cultural workers, facilitate artists'/educators' creative work within
precarious and racialized communities. Both women are professors at
universities and value partnerships, process, and collaboration toward
action-in-community. Their students’ creative activity has been animated,
shared and presented locally and internationally.
Each woman mentors
young adult students: Lillian Allen works with artists, designers and writers
in liberal studies at OCAD University and Joanna Black facilitates emergent
teachers in visual art teacher education at University of Manitoba. Their
teaching encourages students to focus not only internally in critical and
creative making, but also outward among each other and in company with community.
A complex dialogue ensues where social critique, understanding, and engagement are
valued.
Black’s digiART project
provides a venue where emergent teachers, mostly young
adults, can examine human rights issues through the creation of new
media texts ranging from photographs, videos, and animations to
graphic novels and performance art; while
Allen’s students develop and facilitate interactive
creative writing and art workshops to connect youth to their
creative power in context of developing a collective voice. Allen's
projects are in collaboration with the Winsom Foundation in
Belize and the Hamilton Youth Poets.
These education–as–art projects aim to democratize viewers,
making them partners, participants, or collaborators in the construction of the
works. “This is a powerful and positive re-envisioning of education that can
only happen in art, as it depends on art’s unique patterns of performativity,
experience, and exploration of ambiguity (Helguera, 2011, p. 81).” It is a
productive and transformative activity.
Joanna Black would like to thank the University of Manitoba for funding assistance for this project.
Lillian Allen would like to thank OCAD University, the Hamilton Youth Poets, Winsom Foundation.
Joanna Black would like to thank the University of Manitoba for funding assistance for this project.
Lillian Allen would like to thank OCAD University, the Hamilton Youth Poets, Winsom Foundation.