2024/2025 Fine Arts Speaker Series

In Beyond the Gender Binary, poet, artist, and LGBTQIA+ rights advocate Alok Vaid-Menon deconstructs, demystifies, and reimagines the gender binary.

The LGBT agenda for too long has been dominated by pragmatic issues like same-sex marriage and gays in the military. It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist. Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future.

In Wild Things Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the twentieth century. Halberstam theorizes the wild as an unbounded and unpredictable space that offers sources of opposition to modernity's orderly impulses. Wildness illuminates the normative taxonomies of sexuality against which radical queer practice and politics operate.

What does it mean to be an icon and who, or what, becomes iconic? Icons carry authority, in their highly symbolic and instant recognizability. The new, landmark series Anti-icon : apokalypsis, by acclaimed photographer Martine Gutierrez, refuses ready understandings of identity, gender, and culture. Across seventeen self-portraits, Gutierrez embodies a pantheon of legendary figures--all female or feminized--from across the world's legends, histories, and myths. Her re-imaginings of such endlessly reproduced figures reference the long visual lineages in which these images circulate--from traditional iconography and Renaissance painting to contemporary fashion editorials and pop media--while offering an interpretation that challenges all these depictions. Through the "anti-icon," Gutierrez stretches the malleability of the self, and of the social imagination that shapes it.

Queer Insists is a memorial essay, a work of mourning, written for the queer theorist and performance scholar José Esteban Muñoz (1967-2013) shortly after his untimely death in December 2013. In a series of fragments, not unlike Roland Barthes's Mourning Diary, Michael O'Rourke shares memories of Muñoz, the stories and reflections of his friends in the wake of his passing, and readings of his work from Disidentifications to Cruising Utopia and beyond.

During the groundbreaking Charles Edenshaw exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2013, poet Colin Browne found himself returning often to study three large argillite platters carved by the Haida master in the late 1800s. Produced several years apart, each depicts an identical scene at the same moment: two frightened figures in a canoe appear to be on a mission. One is the Raven, in supernatural form, brandishing a spear; the other, in the stern, is a human-like figure with a circular head. On one platter he holds a paddle; on the other, two his arms are raised in a state of panic. He is the helmsman, known as Fungus, or Fungus Man, or Biscuit Man. The Raven and Fungus Man appear early on in the Haida epic poem "Raven Travelling," not long after the Raven releases human men from a clamshell. Their mission is to enable men and women to go forth and multiply. The three platters, celebrated not only for their craftsmanship but also for their insight into the psyche, are rarely brought together in one place, and the fact that Edenshaw returned, with a sense of humour, to this primal scene, suggests that the theme was as important to him as it was to his contemporary, Sigmund Freud. The author starts his journey of discovery with a simple question: 'Who was Fungus, or Fungus Man, and why did he become the one responsible for the miracle of human procreation?' The author ranges through the fields of art history, literature, ethnology, and myth to discover a parallel history of modernism within one of the world's most subtle and sophisticated artistic and literary cultures.

Art & Queer Culture  is an unprecedented survey of visual art and alternative sexualities from the late nineteenth century to the present. A group of new contributors - themselves gay, lesbian, queer and trans - join the primary authors in emphasizing the global sweep of queer contemporary art and the newfound visibility of gender non-conforming artists. In a compact, reader-friendly format, this revised volume packs over 130 years of queer art history.   Art and Queer Culture  features work by famous artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe alongside that of AIDS activists, lesbian separatists, and pre-Stonewall photographers and scrapbook-keepers who did not regard themselves as artists at all. The volume traces a spectacular history of queer life and creativity in the modern age.

The Ceramics Reader is an impressive editorial collection of essays and text extracts, covering every discipline within ceramics, past and present. Tackling such fundamental questions as "why are ceramics important?", the book also considers the field from a range of perspectives - as a cultural activity or metaphor, as a vehicle for propaganda, within industry and museums, and most recently as part of the 'expanded field' as a fine art medium and hub for ideas. Newly commissioned material features prominently alongside existing scholarship, to ensure an international and truly comprehensive look at ceramics.

More than 20 American ceramic artists present a broad variety of inspiring clay sculpture pieces and some unique techniques they used.

Crawford examines the growth of ceramics and pottery-making as an art form. A celebration of the Canadian artists who transform objects by fire.