THE SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR INSTITUTE’S FEMINIST CAFÉ
Presents: Redressing Canadian Art History: Sherry Farrell Racette’s Indigenous-Feminist Textiles and Texts
With Lillian Robinson Visiting Scholar
Dr. Julia Skelly
PhD, Queen’s University
October 31, 2018 @ 2:00PM
MU 101
Simone de Beauvoir Institute
2170 Bishop
In 1990, Métis artist and scholar Sherry Farrell Racette (Timiskaming First Nation) produced a painting entitled Ancestral Women Taking Back Their Dresses. In 2018, the painting was chosen as one of several artworks by Indigenous female artists to be part of the Resilience Project, a series of billboards positioned along a Canadian highway. This metamorphosis of media—a painting depicting textiles transformed into a billboard that is part of a political act concerned with violence against Indigenous women—invites a consideration of Farrell Racette’s interdisciplinary practice as both artist and scholar. This talk will consider Farrell Racette’s texts and textiles that function as interwoven parts of a formidable, ongoing Indigenous-feminist project.
Dr. Julia Skelly received her PhD in Art History from Queen’s University. She recently completed a two-year contract as Faculty Lecturer in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Julia is the author of Wasted Looks: Addiction and British Visual Culture, 1751-1919 (Ashgate, 2014) and Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). She is the editor of The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600-2010 (Ashgate, 2014). Her current book-length project is entitled Skin Crafts: Violence, Affect and Materiality in Global Contemporary Art.
textiles + materiality research cluster 