Tour of the exhibition with Barbara Fischer
Curator of Toronto, London, Guelph
Saturday January 14 at 3 pm
At the Gallery
FREE ADMISSION

Barbara Fischer is the Executive Director/Chief Curator of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery as well as Senior Lecturer in Curatorial Studies in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto. She has held curatorial positions in galleries and museums across Canada and has curated major solo and group exhibitions of Canadian and international artists. She was appointed commissioner and curator of Mark Lewis’ project for the Canadian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Most recently, she partnered with four Canadian institutions to produce the first ever survey of conceptual art in Canada (Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980) which premiered at the University of Toronto Galleries in the fall of 2010. She was the recipient of the 2001 OAAG Curatorial Writing Award in the Historical category for Love Gasoline; the 2004 Melva J. Dwyer Award for Excellence in Canadian Publishing from ARLIS for General Idea Editions; and the 2008 Hnatyshyn Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art.

Lecture by Sean Mills
ALTERNATIVE IMAGININGS: MONTREAL IN 1960s
Wednesday January 18 at 6 pm
At the Gallery
FREE ADMISSION

Using Joyce Wieland’s film Pierre Vallières as a starting point, this talk will consider alternative social imaginations produced in Montreal during 1960s and early 1970s. The broad influence of Third World decolonization, as well as the local setting of Montreal’s urban history will be explored in terms of how these two contexts helped shape the contours of a vast array of social movements that transformed everyday life in the city.

Sean Mills is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. He is a historian of post-1945 Canadian and Quebec history, with research interests that include postcolonial thought, migration, race, gender, and the history of empire and oppositional movements. In 2009 he co-edited New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness, a major collection of essays reassessing the meaning, impact, and global reach of the period’s social movements. In 2010 he published The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal, a book which received the Quebec Writers’ Federation First Book Award (2010), as well as an Honourable Mention for the Canadian Historical Association’s Sir John A. MacDonald Award (2011). In 2011, Les Éditions Hurtubise published Contester l’empire. Pensée postcoloniale et militantisme politique à Montréal, 1963-1972.

Publication launch: ACTIONS THAT SPEAK
Wednesday January 18 at 7 pm
The publication launch will follow Sean Mills’ lecture
At the Gallery
FREE ADMISSION

Lecture by Johanne Sloan
CONCEPTUAL ART MEETS URBAN ATTITUDE: MELVIN CHARNEY AND THE 1972 EXHIBITION MONTRÉAL PLUS OU MOINS?
Wednesday January 25 at 6 pm
At the Gallery
FREE ADMISSION

This talk considers the intersection of conceptual art strategies and urban activism in Montreal during the 1970s, focusing on the exhibition Montréal plus ou moins? / Montreal plus or minus? held at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts in 1972. Only a few years after Expo 67, the world’s fair which proposed a technologized, future-oriented cityscape, some of Montreal’s artists would set out to unravel this urban paradigm. The organizer of the exhibition, the artist-architect Melvin Charney, drew a range of artists, activists, and community workers into the orbit of the museum, to reflect on the city’s social and material transformation. Montréal plus ou moins? addressed the city through a sequence of politicized conceptual-art gestures, and this distinctive form of cultural intervention would get taken up again a few years later, when Charney organized the infamous Corridart exhibition along Sherbrooke Street in 1976.

Johanne Sloan is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Art History, Concordia University. Her writings include the essays Conceptual Landscape Art: Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow (2007), Bill Vazan’s Urban Coordinates (2009), and Everyday Objects, enigmatic Materials for the Quebec Triennale 2011 catalogue. She is also the co-editor of Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir, a collection of essays published by University of Toronto Press in 2010.

View of the exhibition, TRAFFIC : CONCEPTUAL ART IN CANADA 1965-1980, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 2012, (Bill Vazan and Robert Walker). Photo by Paul Smith.

Tour of the exhibition with Michèle Thériault and Vincent Bonin
Co curators of the MONTREAL section
Saturday January 28 at 3 pm
At the Gallery
FREE ADMISSION

Michèle Thériault and Vincent Bonin, co curators of the Montreal section of Traffic will do a guided tour of that part of the exhibition. They will discuss various issues at work in the production of the overall project, and of the Montreal section in particular, which is composed of a series of constellations that foreground links and networks of intermediaries, places of production and modes of intervention within the socio-political context of the period.

Lecture by Adam Welch
BOUNDARY DISPUTES: CANADIAN AND AMERICAN ART AROUND CONCEPTUALISM
Wednesday February 1 at 6 pm
At the Gallery
FREE ADMISSION

Beginning in the late 1960s, artists working in Canada initiated a dialogue with their American counterparts that was, in many ways, unprecedented. Many took up the figure of the border as a means of reflecting on this newfound, and often fraught, transnational relationship. This talk will trace a few of these cases—including works by General Idea, Greg Curnoe, Dennis Oppenheim and Carl Andre—which engaged explicitly with the international boundary. Such engagements open onto larger political debates of the period: deep-seated fears of American cultural imperialism and a concomitant Canadian nationalism.

Adam Welch is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the University of Toronto; his dissertation is entitled Borderline Research: Art between Canada and the United States, 1965–1980. His writing centres on minimal, conceptual and institution critical art, as well as art systems and networks among artists, curators, museums, galleries and artist-run centres. His MA thesis from Columbia University was an account of the technological work of Vancouver-based artist Rodney Graham. Welch has worked in curatorial departments at the National Gallery of Canada, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and most recently at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto.

Lecture by Jean-Philippe Warren
LES HIPPIES QUÉBÉCOIS : TENDANCES LOCALES D’UN PHÉNOMÈNE GLOBAL
Wednesday February 8 at 6 pm
At the Gallery, in French
FREE ADMISSION

Other than a few superficial generalizations, little is known about the Québec hippies of the 1970s. Although it was part of a global – mainly American – phenomenon, the Québec hippie movement was also part of a local context. In this regard, the social and political career of Pierre Vallières can serve as an example: a former editor of Cité libre who became a terrorist leader, Vallières then became involved with the counter-culture. How did this transition occur? What were the steps and the notable influences? In reconsidering this period, which was colourful – to say the least – Jean-Philippe Warren describes one dimension of a changing Québec whose place in recent history we tend to underestimate.

Jean-Philippe Warren is Associate Professor of Sociology and holds the University Research Chair on the Study of Québec in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. In 2010-2011 he held the Contemporary Quebec Chair at the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3). Author of more than 150 scholarly articles, he has published on a wide variety of subjects related to the history of Québec, including Native peoples, social movements, pop culture, youth, the Roman Catholic Church, and the arts. His work has appeared in literary, sociology, history, religion, literary, and anthropology journals. His book L’Engagement sociologique was awarded the Clio Prize and the Prix Michel-Brunet in 2003. Among his latest publications is L’Art vivant. Autour de Paul-Émile Borduas (2011).