Black Visualities and Protest: A talk with Charmaine Lurch

Charmaine Lurch is an interdisciplinary visual artist, whose work explores race and Blackness, outside normative racial scripts. She creatively insists that infrastructures of race certainly shape, but do not wholly define, Black life. Working with various materials, Lurch reimagines our environmental surroundings — from bees and taxi cabs to The Tempest and quiet moments of joy — by subtly connecting Black life and movement globally, drawing attention to human-environmental relationalities.

Lurch holds a master’s in environmental studies from York University. Her exhibitions include shows at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Station Gallery, the Toronto Centre for the Arts, the Gladstone, Nuit Blanche, the National Gallery of Jamaica and more.