Researching Historical Black Women Artists in Canada

African and  Black Canadian art have been gaining increasing interest as a field of enquiry; however the spectre of colonialism and anti-blackness presents researchers with the specific challenges of such pioneering work. What are these challenges, stakes, and how does one overcome them? In this conversation, emerging scholars Joana Joachim and Adrienne R. Johnson present their methods and discuss the issues they face in their  research.

Joana Joachim is a PhD candidate in the department of Art History and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill. She is also the Research and Exhibition Coordinator at Artexte. Joachim’s current work examines seventeenth and eighteenth century representations of Black women in New France, Saint-Domingue and Louisiana with a focus on ongoing discrimination against their hair.

Adrienne R. Johnson is currently a PhD student in Art History at McGill University. A passionate and long-time contributor to Montreal’s indie art scene, Johnson’s current research is focused on African Canadian landscape painting from the late nineteenth century as it relates to the exploration of African Canadian presence, creative authorship, (mis)representation, and the formation of identity.

Kim Rondeau is PhD candidate in the Interuniversity Doctoral Program in Art History at Concordia University. Her primary research interests are feminist art theory and the methods of feminist art history. This winter, she is teaching the undergraduate class “Themes in Visual Art Practices by Black Women Artists in North America.”