Panel Conversation: Chief Bill Williams and Dr. Kristina Huneault

POSTPONED

In light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, the Gallery has postponed this Panel Conversation on March 14 and the Talk and Tour on March 17. In addition, all hands-on educational activities such as Weekly Family Programs, Spring Break programs and Described Tours are suspended until March 30.

At this time, the Gallery remains open during our regular business hours. We continue to closely monitor the evolving situation. For the latest updates, please check the Visit page here »

 

Free for Gallery Members or with admission. Registration is required.

Join us for a conversation, moderated by Tarah Hogue, Senior Curatorial Fellow of Indigenous Art, about the lives and work of Sewiṉchelwet (Sophie Frank) (1872–1939) and Emily Carr (1871–1945), whose 33-year friendship is explored within the exhibition lineages and land bases.

In 1906, Frank, a woman from the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation), knocked on the door of Carr’s Vancouver home, offering her baskets for barter or sale as a modest livelihood within the city’s growing settler economy. Both Carr and Frank were born and raised in this region, they both had creative practices tied to its lands and waters, and they were close contemporaries; yet their realities and their interactions with each other were profoundly shaped by the inequalities produced by colonialism.

Sewiṉchelwet’s great grandnephew, Chief Bill Williams will share his knowledge of Carr and Frank’s relationship and of Sḵwx̱wú7mesh culture and history. Art historian Dr. Kristina Huneault will present a thoughtful comparison of Salish basketry and weaving techniques with Carr’s landscape paintings, particularly those made after 1934. The discussion of these two distinct, yet interconnected, perspectives will foreground ideas of personhood and subjectivity that are related to the natural world and how such ideas are (differently) embedded within the materials and processes of basketry and painting.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Tarah Hogue is a curator, cultural worker and writer based in Vancouver, BC. She is a citizen of the Métis Nation, with French Canadian and Dutch ancestries, and was raised on the border between Treaty 6 and Treaty 7 territories in Red Deer, AB. Tarah is the inaugural Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery and an uninvited guest on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm [Musqueam], Sḵwx̱wú7mesh [Squamish] and səlilwətaɬ [Tsleil-Waututh] territories since 2008.

Dr. Kristina Huneault is Professor of Art History at Concordia University, a former University Research Chair and a founder of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative. She has an MA in Canadian art history from Concordia (1994) and a PhD in British visual culture from the University of Manchester (1998), where she was a Commonwealth scholar. She has taught at Concordia since 1999 and was the university’s emerging research fellow in 2004.  Dr. Huneault’s approach to art combines detailed historical research with theoretical questioning and close looking. She is the author of I’m not myself at all: Women, art and subjectivity in Canada (MQUP) and Difficult Subjects: Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain 1880-1914 (Ashgate), the co-editor of Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada (MQUP), and the author of numerous book chapters and journal articles on art, gender and colonialism.

Chief Bill Williams, találsamkin siyám is a Hereditary Chief of the Squamish Nation. His traditional name is találsamkin siyám. Throughout his career, he has negotiated historic land and accommodation agreements within the traditional territory of the Squamish Nation. He has also been a key negotiator for protocol agreements with other Coast Salish Nations.