The Owens is thrilled is to be collaborating with Nicole Porter of Amlamgoog and Scott Peters of We’koqma’q on two Introductory Mi’kmaw Basket Making Workshops.
These workshops are open to the public, but priority registration will be given to Indigenous students, staff, faculty, and community members. We encourage everyone interested in attending to sign up! The Basket Making Workshops are free, with all materials provided, but space is limited.
Both workshops will be held in the Mawita’mkw Centre, which is located in room 130 on the first floor of the Wallace McCain Student Centre, Mount Allison University, at 62 York Street, Sackville, New Brunswick.
Workshop 1 10 October 2024 12:00-4:00 pm Mawita’mkw Centre, WMSC 130
Workshop 2 10 October 2024 5:00-9:00 pm Mawita’mkw Centre, WMSC 130
Join us for a panel discussion organized in conjunction with the new exhibition Estuaries with Sylvia D. Hamilton, Joana Joachim and Thandiwe McCarthy.Â
Sylvia D. Hamilton is a multi-award-winning Nova Scotian filmmaker, artist and writer known for the documentaries Portia White: Think on Me, The Little Black School House and Black Mother Black Daughter, among others. She is the author of the poetry collection, And I Alone Escaped to Tell You, a finalist for the Nova Scotia Masterworks Award and the 2015 League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her latest collection titled Tender was a finalist for the League of Canadian Poets 2023 Pat Lowther Award and the winner of the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia Maxine Tynes Poetry Award. Other awards include the 2019 Governor General’s History Award for Popular Media and the Documentary Organization of Canada’s 2021 Luminary Award.
Thandiwe McCarthy is a 7th generation African Canadian spoken word poet, writer, and public speaker. After a residency at Arteles, Finland, Thandiwe has begun focusing on his writing practice. As the culture correspondent for Maritime EDIT magazine, he highlights Black community leaders and artists. He has delivered keynotes for the Atlantic Public Libraries Association, the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design’s 2024 graduation and has lectured on leadership at Saint Thomas University. He was a Co-founder of the New Brunswick Black Artists Alliance and Emancipation Celebration event and he has played a key role in helping to recognize August 1st as Emancipation Day in New Brunswick. His Canada Council funded project the “Still Here Initiative” celebrates fifteen generational Black New Brunswick families and will launch a national art exhibition and globally distributed book in July 2025.”
This panel discussion is made possible with support from the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University.
Join us for a poetry reading with Sylvia D. Hamilton and Amatoritsero Ede, organized in conjunction with the new exhibition Estuaries. Organized in collaboration with the Department of English at Mount Allison University.
Friday 4 October, 4:00 – 5:30 pm, in Tweedie Hall, (Wallace McCain Student Centre, Mount Allison University)
Amatoritsero Ede has published three well-received collections of poetry, “A Writers Pains & Caribbean Blues (1998), Globetrotter & Hitler’s Children (2009) and Teardrops on the Weser (2021) as well as one collection of literary nonfiction, Imagination’s Many Rooms (2022). He also appears in over 15 poetry anthologies and is the publisher and Managing Editor of the Maple Tree Literary Supplement, MTLS. He teaches English at Mount Allison University.
Sylvia D. Hamilton is a multi-award-winning Nova Scotian filmmaker, artist and writer known for the documentaries Portia White: Think on Me, The Little Black School House and Black Mother Black Daughter, among others. Her poetry collection, And I Alone Escaped to Tell You, a finalist for the Nova Scotia Masterworks Award and the 2015 League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her latest collection titled Tender was a finalist for the League of Canadian Poets 2023 Pat Lowther Award and the winner of the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia Maxine Tynes Poetry Award. She is an Inglis Professor Emeritus at the University of King’s College and recently she was appointed to the Order of Canada and the Order of Nova Scotia.
Join us on October 4th, 2024 at the Owens Art Gallery for the opening vernissage of the new exhibition Estuaries.
Curated by: Joana Joachim
Works by: Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, Sylvia D. Hamilton, John Hammond, Oluseye, Camille Turner, Denyse Thomasos, and Gary Weekes.
About the Exhibition: Estuaries form when freshwater rivers meet the ocean and become slightly salty. The Atlantic is the saltiest of the five ocean basins. It is also the body of water across which more than 30,000 ships carried over twelve million abducted Africans into slavery through the lethal crossing known as the Middle Passage. These ships returned laden with goods produced through the forced labour of Black captives. John Owens, eponym of the Owens Art Gallery, was a successful shipbuilder, as was his executor, Robert Reed. Using funds from Owens’ estate, Reed worked with artist John Hammond to develop a teaching collection now housed at the Owens Art Gallery.
The Maritimes, like the rest of Canada, profited from shipbuilding and colonial economies linked to transatlantic slavery and trade. Meanwhile, Black histories in New Brunswick and elsewhere were systematically washed away. To this day, the histories and contributions of small Black communities in New Brunswick and across Canada are overlooked due to their size, their seemingly limited archival presence, and, in some cases, the common, inaccurate belief that they simply do not exist. Estuaries floats in the space between these facts, musing on Black diasporic peoples’ relationship to the ocean. Featuring artworks by both contemporary and historical artists, as well as archival documents and artifacts, it contends with the tensions that arise once we allow the freshwater river of Canadian history to meet the ocean of Black Atlantic life. Read more…
The goal of this survey, conducted by Kelly Hill of Hill Strategies Research, is to investigate affordability and working conditions in the careers of New Brunswick based artists and other cultural workers, especially issues that are not covered by census data or other statistical sources.
January 13–May 5, 2024 Vernissage, January 13 at 2pm Curator: Lucy MacDonald
Artists Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky have worked collaboratively since 2004. Their work has increasingly incorporated communal aspects of making, such as DIY tutorial videos, and virtual crafting bees, in the context of economies of appropriation, trade, and the gift. Their exhibition at the Owens features two works: the new video installation Solaris, and a special Sackville presentation of the Pom-Pom Jam Mobile Hub.
Solaris originates in a series of collaborative workshops the artists gave at Marshview Middle School and the Owens Art Gallery in 2023. Participants made single-line drawings, small relief sculptures, and evocative soundscapes exploring the ways water connects all living things. The artists then cast the resulting sculptures in ice, filming each one as it melted into a puddle of water. Through this process of transformation, the sculptures appear to rise like monumental icebergs from the sea only to melt again, suggesting both the beginning and the end of the world.
The Pom-Pom Jam Mobile Hub uses craft yarn sourced on eBay. Commonly made using leftover yarn, pom-poms are flourishes requiring no special skills, tools, or financial means. Each pom-pom bin in the Hub contains a pom-pom making kit with distinct colour pallets of yarn that are identified by their source location. Echoing abandoned craft projects, the yarn is taken up anew by participants, as an internet-enabled collaboration across space and time.
Manuel Mathieu is known for vibrant, colourful paintings that seamlessly merge abstraction with figuration. His work reflects on our intertwined lives, in which the boundaries between the past and present or the personal and political are often blurred. Sharing recollections that depict everyday scenes, Mathieu also blends into his canvases an interrogation of the complex history of his familial homeland, Haiti. By unearthing the traumas of state violence, he addresses issues that remain as urgent today as they have been throughout Haitian history.
This exhibition features a collection of new and past works—including paintings, drawings, and ceramics—shedding light on Haiti’s relationship to the world. Positioned at the fault lines of modern political and environmental crises, Haiti epitomizes a global longing for liberation, and grassroots resistance to imperialist and capitalist exploits. At the centre of this exhibition is an examination of the long-lasting repercussions of Haiti’s pioneering revolt—launched in 1791, challenging slavery and colonialism—and its quest for self-determination, which have led in more recent decades to embroiling the nation in the intrigues of the Cold War. In Zapruder/313 (2016), Mathieu borrows from footage capturing the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy to raise questions about American support of Haiti’s ruthless dictatorships in pursuit of neo-colonial interests.
Other paintings delve into memories of the Duvalier dictatorships (1957-1986) to bring harrowing incidents back into contemporary consciousness. Fort Dimanche 2 (2017) hints at the atrocities committed at the infamous prison where countless political opponents vanished. Mathieu’s work is a reminder that commemorating the tragedies of the past does not fall solely on the shoulders of a nation’s local or diasporic communities. Instead, it is part of our collective responsibility. His works suggest a distinct understanding of Haiti’s history—a history defined by global currents, which occasionally collide to erupt in frenzied episodes of mass violence. Mathieu, therefore, proposes that the dynamics of the world might manifest themselves in one place, like Haiti. Underlining common links and struggles that unite us despite national borders, he invites us to enter a world discovered under other skies.
Meet us at the Owens next Friday for a BBQ to celebrate the start of the fall term and the current exhibition Endless Return.
We’ll be cooking up hamburgers, hotdogs, and vegetarian burgers. Snacks, sodas, and gluten-free buns will be available. If it rains, we will have sandwiches in the Lobby of the Owens. All are welcome!
Endless Return
On view 23 June – 8 October 2023 Curators: Emily Falvey and Jane Tisdale
Inspired by the lifecycles of plants, this exhibition explores themes of impermanence, regeneration, and resilience. It presents the work of artists Kaeli Cook and Roger J. Smith in conversation with a selection of work from the Owens’ permanent collection, including early botany studies by students from the Mount Allison Ladies’ College and artists such as Lizzie McLeod, Amy McLeod, and Violet A. Gillett. It also features Diaspora Series (2015), a recently acquired work by Innu/English artist Melissa Tremblett, in which she returns to her roots in Sheshatshiu, Labrador.
