Charlotte Townsend-Gault will present at the Indigenous Arts in Transition
Seminar on Wednesday, April 17, at 6 pm. Her talk is entitled “Failed Social Relations
and the Volatility of Cultural Techniques in British Columbia.”
Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw and Haida coppers were broken in
front of Canada’s parliament in 2016. A mended canoe is prominently displayed
in the Museum of Anthropology. Both the break and the mend, in different
registers, restore and redirect the long local histories of specific
cultural techniques. They evade the misleading allure of “art” in
order to define the status of Indigenous people in contemporary
British Columbia and mark their fraught political engagement with colonial
institutions and the state.
Charlotte Townsend-Gault, PhD, is
Professor Emeritus in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory,
University of British Columbia, and Honorary Professor in Anthropology at
University College London. She has published widely on Indigenous arts in
Canada and the contemporary social relations of their reception, most recently “Vision
Control”, for Teachings: Theories and
Methods in Indigenous Art, edited by Heather Igloliorte and Carla Taunton.
She has curated exhibitions of the work of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Born to Live and Die on Your Colonialist
Reservations, Rebecca Belmore The
Named and the Un-named, and Backstory, the first public exhibition of
thliitsapilthim (Nuu-chah-nulth ceremonial screens) for UBC’s Belkin Art
Gallery. Northwest Coast Native Art: An
Anthology of Changing Ideas, co-edited with Jennifer Kramer and Ki-ke-in,
was awarded the 2015 Canada Prize in the Humanities.