As part of OPIRG’s Alternative Welcome Week, a presentation called “Gentrification and the Art Crawl” was held in the Student Centre on Sept. 14 about an hour before Supercrawl began. The talk addressed the changes happening on James Street North, and how the coffee shops and art galleries that have opened on the street are influencing this change.
“When I hear about that kind of thing, I always get tense,” said Tim Potocic, one of the main organizers of Supercrawl and an owner of the downtown Hamilton record label Sonic Unyon. “And it’s purely selfish, because I spend so much time trying so hard to avoid conflict, to try to appease as many people as possible.”
The basic idea of gentrification starts with a neighborhood where everything is cheap. People might not make much money, and there’s low-income housing and social services designed for the people living there. At some point, a person who is drawn to the neighborhood by the cheap rent is inclined to take a bit of a risk, and they start something that appeals to people outside the community. Quite often, these are artists who open galleries. The area then becomes trendy, and everyone wants to go there. Slowly, everything becomes more expensive.
“Instead of offering them food co-ops and affordable housing initiatives, we’re giving them very expensive café’s and galleries and apartments that aren’t going to be able to house low-income people,” said Riaz Sayani-Mulji, an organizer and facilitator of the gentrification talk.
In theory, the problem with gentrification is that the concerns of low-income people are forgotten. But the question is whether the way gentrification is theorized is actually the way it’s playing out on James Street North.
“Nobody has the thought, ‘I’m going to buy that building and I don’t care about those people that I’m going to put on the street,’” said Potocic. “These are not people that are buying buildings and turning them into giant Wal-Marts and only care about the mighty dollar and don’t care about the people they are putting on the street. They do, and they feel guilty about it. And they – actually, which nobody sees – make efforts to help those people.”
Potocic said that his ideal street has a diverse group of people with all different levels of income, and that new development doesn’t necessarily mean that low-income people are displaced. But, just as gentrification might be different in theory than in practice, Potocic’s vision of a street could have some problems.
“The one thing that I see most clearly when I’m at work is the increase in police presence on James,” said Sayani-Mulji. “With gentrification, when you’re trying to clean up the street and get rid of all the ‘undesirables,’ with that comes a social policing as well. And I’ve seen a lot of, I wouldn’t say brutality, but definitely rough-handling of youth, very aggressive behaviour. I’ve had to report the police on more than one occasion while I’ve been at work.”
Sayani-Mulji recently graduated from McMaster and has worked at youth shelters downtown for several years. He said that the Jamesville Community Centre, which he used to work at and was located a block away from James North, went into decline before being closed and relocated last May. The Hamilton Spectator reported that the relocation of Jamesville was always planned, and that it was simply because of more opportunities in the new location. But Sayani-Mulji said that the gentrification on James North also had a role.
“I think it’s just a difference in priorities,” he said. “The city has made its commitment to this creative class and revitalizing the community through art, but that comes with a sacrifice.”
The extent to which art is influencing City funding priorities is questionable, but Sayani-Mulji also had a more explicit example of how the changes on James North are affecting the community.
“The Notre Dame House, a shelter I used to work at, has received enormous pressure over the last few years to relocate because it’s almost seen as an eyesore along James Street North,” said Sayani-Mulji. “But what they’re doing, and what is great to see, is that they’re taking part in the Art Crawl. So the youth that are staying at the shelter and the youth they serve are getting involved in things like the Urban Arts Initiative and saying, ‘We’re part of this community, and like it or not, we’re going to take part in the events that you’re running, like the Art Crawl.’”
What remains to be determined is whether a coffee is shop just a coffee shop, or if it really does have some larger role in gentrification.
“I think that we all have to be cognizant that, and this is very true for McMaster students, that we’re entering into a living community,” said Sayani-Mulji. “It’s not something static that we can mould into what we like.”
Nolan Matthews, Senior ANDY Editor
The first time Hamilton saw HAVN (Hamilton Audio Visual Node) was at June’s art crawl, but the collaboration began many months before that, even before the founders moved into the studio/gallery space at 26 Barton St E. The members of HAVN – Aaron Hutchinson, Amy MacIntosh, Andrew O’Connor, Ariel Bader-Shamai, Chris Ferguson, Connor Bennett and Kearon Roy Taylor — came from diverse backgrounds at McMaster, with interests in new media, music and fine art. Despite these differences, they founded HAVN with the goal of creating a sustainable collaborative space with events involving interactive installation art and performance pieces.
People often come to Hamilton only for university and leave after graduating, but four of the seven HAVN members are Mac grads that have decided to stay. They’re all energized by Hamilton’s up-and-coming art scene.
“I just noticed there was this incredible rate of change taking place in the downtown community, and it was just a really inviting and supportive place to start out as a young artist,” said Taylor.
He emphasized the broader context for art in Hamilton and pointed to the city’s industrial past and more recent industrial decline.
“For this art scene to kind of come out as a really sincere cultural revival of the city, I think that there’s this general attitude of people downtown that this is something really special that has to be fostered and encouraged,” said Taylor.
Ferguson continued this idea, and said that Hamilton is “a good community because it’s supportive without being insular,” and that the way to help a community develop is not by being competitive or exclusive.
The members of HAVN readily made comparisons to Toronto, whose reputation as a cultural hub often overshadows Hamilton. Hutchinson agreed that entering the Toronto scene “seems super daunting,” and that in Hamilton “as long as you are saying something honest, people will dig it.” Bader-Shamai added, “It’s not competitive here like in Toronto.” Bennett nodded and continued, “It’s way harder to do what we’re doing in a more saturated environment like Toronto. I think that’s a really unique thing about the Hamilton art scene.”
Though James Street North is lined with galleries, getting to HAVN, which is located just off the street, is a bit like looking for a diamond in the rough. “Barton Street has this notion of being, like, the bad side of the tracks in Hamilton… It gives us some grittiness,” said MacIntosh.
All founders of HAVN feel that they are part of a big change downtown. “We’ve been here for four months and a print business across the street is opening and a ceramic studio is opening right beside us,” said MacIntosh. “I hear people talking about Barton Street like it’s like Parkdale, like it’s going to be the next hip place,” said Bader-Shamai. “So, maybe we’re just ahead of everybody else?” she added. “I kind of like that idea of being a pivotal space in Hamilon, like in terms of being at this crossing point… you’re starting to see spread off James Street North,” said Taylor.
Being so close to James Street has certainly provided opportunities for HAVN, with art crawls and Supercrawl attracting crowds. But the HAVN crew avoided the idea of being an art crawl-oriented space, and had lots of their own ideas for the future. “A community-based meditative painting practice that could happen any weeknight,” said Bennett. “Maybe lectures, maybe movie screenings,” he added.
HAVN is also going to be the new practice location for the Cybernetic Orchestra, who use live computer coding to make music. “[We’re going to] open it to the community… for participation as opposed to just being affiliated with McMaster,” MacIntosh explained.
But the biggest step for HAVN is their call for submissions, an open invitation to anyone who wants to do a project there.
“They can essentially have free reign as long as they don’t destroy it,” said Taylor. It all seems very fitting with the intended meaning of the word “node” in HAVN’s name. “It’s supposed to be like the intersection of a lot of different mediums, the intersection of ideas and art forms,” said Ferguson. The lines all come together but at the other ends they’re also going off in their own directions.”
If you are interested in checking out their work or submitting a project idea, go to havnode.com.
Isabelle Dobronyi
Tim Potocic has the job of being one of the main organizers of Supercrawl, and it’s a huge task for a huge event. Last year, 50,000 people attended the festival, and this year’s expected attendance was around 75 000.
Planning Supercrawl for so many people was a year-long job for Potocic. And as that year of organizing was whittled down until just one week was left before the event, the panic set in.
“I had late nights that weekend before, as well as Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” said Potocic. “It’s pretty panicked. I wish we were more organized.”
After Thursday, Potocic’s experience planning Supercrawl starts to sound more familiar to any student who has left a massive assignment until the day before it’s due.
“When I got up on Friday it was full-on,” said Potocic. “I didn’t get home until seven in the morning on Sunday, and I only slept for two hours on Friday night. And that’s the way it is. You just run on adrenaline because you know there’s an end. We know the street has to open up at 8 o’clock on Sunday morning.”
Even by forgoing sleep, Potocic didn’t really get to see much of the festival he was responsible for.
“This is the first year I’ve actually been able to catch one set of one band,” said Potocic. “I saw Change of Heart. They are reuniting to do very few shows, so I needed to see it.”
Before Change of Heart and the huge crowds, Supercrawl began four years ago as something much smaller. Potocic has been there since the very beginning of the idea.
As one of the founders of the Sonic Unyon record label, located just off James Street North, Potocic has always been part of the monthly Art Crawl, but he wanted the event to grow, to really push it and see what it could do.
“We got a big group of people together, there was at least 20 people in a room,” said Potocic. “We said that we wanted to close the street, because we thought it should be closed anyway during the regular monthly art crawls, even at that point in time, and we thought, let’s try to do a street festival. That was literally in June. Then everyone sat around and was like, ‘Yeah, it’s a cool idea.’ And we had twelve weeks to plan it, which is not enough time.”
With the initial plans approved by the city, the next problem was deciding what to call the event.
“We were batting names around, and I was like, ‘Well, its going to be super! Let’s call it Supercrawl,’” said Potocic. “It’s a dumb name, really. We’re specialists in dumb names, so it kind of fits. I mean, Sonic Unyon is a weird, dumb name.”
So with the name decided, the organizers rushed to get everything else finished under the impossibly tight timeline of a couple of months. Instead of happening in September, like the other Supercrawls, the first was pushed to October to give the organizers more time. And when that time was up, Potocic and the other organizers prayed they would be lucky with the one thing they couldn’t plan.
“It poured rain,” said Potocic. “But we still had thousands of people out with umbrellas, and we were like, ‘Huh, thousands of people came out and it was pouring rain, so clearly there’s a need for a street closure festival style-thing, so let’s start working on 2010 right now.’”
Since then, planning future Supercrawls has taken all year, and that means Potocic hasn’t really been able to catch his breath even though this year’s event has just ended.
“I’ve already had two conversations with two agencies that are good friends of mine about what we’re going to do next year,” said Potocic. “We’ll really need to have our wish-list of top five acts that we’re looking at to headline potential stages locked in before the end of the year.”
Though Potocic is responsible for organizing the big stuff, that’s only part of what allows Supercrawl to happen because, ultimately, the whole James Street North community is involved.
“That’s the key to making Supercrawl and art crawl and James Street North as amazing and vibrant as it is, because it is a community initiative,” said Potocic. “We do a lot of community outreach to make sure that we’re not taking liberties that we shouldn’t. I mean, there will always be critics, but we try our best to reach out with the limited staffing and resources we have to run something like this.”
Next week, part two of this article will look at what the critics are saying and Potocic’s response. Hint: it has to do with gentrification.
So here we are. It’s the year’s first ANDY. Only this time I’m behind the scenes, and I’m a bit nervous. I really hope you like the issue. In the future, I’m sure the layout will be nicer, the writing more expressive, and the criticism more humorous and true. But for now, we have this. What is this, anyway?
I think ANDY can be so many things. There’s the old standbys: interviews with artists, shrewd pop-culture analysis, and entertainment writing that is actually entertaining, like Bahar’s hilarious and expressive “Bahar’s Book Bag”.
We need all that stuff, but there’s something else ANDY can be. I think we have a great opportunity, being in Hamilton, to see the arts being an active part of this city’s growth. To see what I mean, check out Alex Epp’s thoughtful “Provoking Thoughts”.
Within the last 30 years, Hamilton has been trying to dust itself off after the decline of the industry that built it. You may have seen t-shirts around saying “Art is the New Steel”, and while the slogan might be unintentionally dismissive to the people who have lost their jobs, the shirts have a message: that when there’s nothing left, you have to make something yourself. And part of what people are making is art.
James Street North is the go-to example. In the 90’s, the street was written off by city councilors who said that shops would never return to the area. Now it’s the site of the city’s biggest arts street festival of the year, Supercrawl.
We have the chance to see why art mattrs in the growth of a community, and hopefully ANDY can be a part of documenting it.
Starting a new year at school seems as good a time as any for a good, old life reevaluation. It’s probably because it’s my last year here at Mac, but I’m finding myself wondering why things matter. It’s like some kind of mid-student-life crisis. Right now I’m writing about art, and why should that matter?
I asked Dr. Sévigny, a Mac professor in communication studies and multimedia, and he explained that art, and the humanities in general, have probably never mattered more than right now.
“I think the world is changing, in a pretty serious way,” he said. “This is something Marshall McLuhan predicted, that we’re moving away from a literate, alphabetized world and moving towards an oral culture.”
Moving away from a literate culture doesn’t mean that people have forgotten how to read. It means that information used to be stored in books, where it was unchangeable and has now moved to the Internet, where nothing is sacred. And the Internet has now moved into our pockets, which, along with social media, is moving us to an oral culture.
“Oral culture is much more fluid and it’s driven much more by principles, it’s driven much more by persuasion, by rhetoric, for which there was a lot less room before,” said Dr. Sévigny.
“There’s a benefit to that, and the benefit is that the world is a lot more human, people are a lot more persuadable,” he said.
People are more persuadable because information is presented as a conversation in an oral culture. If someone shares their views through Facebook, another person can quickly comment and disagree, linking to articles written by experts to back up their opinion.
“The downside to it is that it is harder to get to the truth of things - it is harder to understand what really happened. It’s always this game of broken telephone,” said Dr. Sévigny.
The truth isn’t necessarily important though, because it’s not the information that matters, it’s how it’s presented. And artists win when it comes to presentation.
In an oral culture, artists are able to control what information people believe is important.
“I think that the ‘humanities is useless’ nonsense that is going around would evaporate if we ditched all the layers of jargon and theory that we’ve opposed upon ourselves, because none of it is real,” said Dr. Sévigny. “What’s real is gaining a deeper understanding of human motivation and not from a neuroscience perspective, but from an aesthetic perspective. Or what people find beautiful or true, or not true. And that’s visceral stuff.”
If facts on their own are less able to make us feel something, there’s more room for the artists to have their way wwith our thoughts and feelings.
“In an oral culture, this is our century. I mean, McLuhan said it - it’s the century of the pattern-finder, the artist, the critic who can have this massive impact, because we are back to this world of human experience.”
Nolan Matthews
Senior ANDY Editor
Ilia Ostrovski
The Silhouette
Hartley Jafine (or simply “Hartley,” as he likes to be called) is a PhD candidate and instructor in the BHSc program whose research focuses on the role of the arts in healthcare settings.
He is concerned with exploring the benefits of theatre in health education and research.
Hartley’s line of work discusses the problems that arise as a result of the day-to-day routine that medical students are subject to and explores solutions to this problem.
“Students typically enter medical school when they are at the height of compassion, and the height of idealism, because, coming from an undergraduate program into a medical school, they want to be healers; they’ve chosen this profession for that very reason … but the problem , from my research and lived experience, is that, when medical students enter third year, they start to lose their compassion and empathy, and this is largely because the realities of medical school systematically convince them that there is no place for empathy,” Hartley said.
The “realities” to which Hartley refers undermine the importance of skills like active listening, appropriate bedside manner and many other issues that are widely recognized as crucial to the healthcare profession.
This defect in the environment of medical education breeds desensitized healthcare practitioners, whose apathy inflicts the patients and destines their students – the next generation of physicians – for a similar fate.
According to Hartley, the solution lies in the arts.
He advocates the widespread implementation of theatre-based programs that offer these students and physicians a unique opportunity to devote time to critically think about the experiences that their patients go through and to evaluate themselves from these patients’ perspectives.
Programs like this can rescue the students’ empathy and in doing so reinforce the importance of recovering skills that they have let fall by the wayside.
Furthermore, Hartley believes that theatre can provide healthcare professionals with a safe environment to do something that is essential to their continuing development – make mistakes.
“In the healthcare world, there is this overwhelming expectation for perfection,” he says. “Now, this expectation is understandable, given the stakes, but it gets to the point that admitting to one’s mistakes or sharing one’s anxieties becomes severely frowned upon.
The inability to discuss one’s fears and anxieties can be extremely detrimental to the mental health of someone in such a high-stress position and to a large degree deprives them of the opportunity to learn from their mistakes.”
Theatre offers physicians a forum to collectively discuss their fears as well as the mistakes they’ve made.
Openly speaking about their worries with other professionals who carry the same burden of responsibility inspires a sense of community in healthcare rather than that of judgment and criticism and ultimately leads to the improvement of their mental health.
This, in addition to discussing the experiences in which they have made errors, especially those that had considerable consequences for their patients, allows the practitioners to return to work unburdened and more aware.
According to Hartley, the shift towards recognizing the importance of the arts in healthcare settings has been underway for some time.
Among various examples of medical institutions implementing arts-based programs into their curriculum, he notes that 2012 will mark the one-hundred-and-one-year anniversary of University of Toronto Medical School’s musical, a persisting testament to the importance of this cause.
However, he asserts that these instances are few and far between. The fact remains that many medical institutions still fail to recognize the importance of this aspect of medical education and thus don’t consider it a budgetary priority.
These circumstances and his belief in his work are what motivate
Hartley to wholeheartedly fight for the establishment of programs that allow medical students to overcome the “realities” of medical education.
Dominika Jakubiec
Upon viewing the two current exhibitions at the McMaster Museum of Art (MMA), Liminal Disturbance and Unfallen, I was immediately filled with wonder at the ideas posed by Canadian artists Greg Staats and Ramona Ramlochand. Both exhibitions are an artful array of photographs and interactive
pieces that comment on the complexities and wonders of our society.
Greg Staats is a photographer and video artist whose work focuses on the concepts of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) culture. Despite having Mohawk heritage, Staat’s wasn’t raised in the Mohawk culture, and has always felt disconnected from its traditions and rituals. His art expresses this disconnect through the haunting portrayal of the indigenous ritual ceremony of condolence and repair; a ceremony which focuses on the loss of a loved one.
Liminal Disturbance is framed by two series of photographs: “Auto Mnemonic Six Nations” and “Six Nations Condolence,” as well as an installation entitled “Dark String Repeat.” These photographs represent the artist’s internal memory; images he’s seen, places he’s been, and the objects that represent his culture.
“Auto Mnemonic Six Nations” is made up of abstract photographs including a chair, trees, a forest and a wall. These black and white images are eerie, like images out of a horror movie, yet manage to express why the artist feels disconnected from his culture; the photographs bring with them a sense of loneliness. By viewing these photographs, the artist encourages us to interpret, experience, and respond to his work.
During his “Artist’s Talk” on November 24 at the MMA, Staats spoke of his displayed pieces. He expressed the importance of allowing people to experience the condolence ceremony through his work, even if they know very little about its history and rituals. Staats explained the significance in coming together to take part in an exhibition of works that display a culture that has witnessed so much change and loss.
The second exhibition is that of Ramona Ramlochand, whose work reflects the rapidly changing environment in which we live. Unfallen centres around a new kinetic work titled “Élan Vital.” This unusual piece is a tornado contained within a fishbowl, which holds a swirl of colourful hand-painted miniature figures including different people, a fire hydrant, bicycles, street signs, a variety of different animals, as well as many other figurines. This is by far my favourite piece of work from the exhibition. The swirling figures are mesmerizing, and instill a sense of tranquility in viewers. “Élan Vital” is whimsical, a child-like projection of the world.
“Élan Vital” is surrounded by a cluster of photographs taken by the artist over a long period of work and travel. Rather than representing a single place, the photographs represent movement, space, and
displacement. One of the main images, titled “unfallen (boys)” depicts two young boys attempting to do headstands on the beach. When turned upside-down, the boys appear to be holding up the world. When looking at the work, I imaged the young boys struggling to rise above the responsibilities put on us by society; the effect of this image is very powerful.
Ramlochand uses various techniques to re-order space by placing the photographs upside-down, and playing with the natural way of viewing images. In doing this, the artist explores the experience of simultaneously belonging to nowhere and everywhere. By this, I mean, that although there are people present in the photographs, the place itself almost becomes more significant, more important. I had to adjust the way in which I viewed the images, and rather than paying attention to the people in the photograph, I began to focus more on how distorted the world looks upside-down. Through the manipulation of space, the artist identifies with multiple geographic and ethnic sites, commenting on globalization and our technologically enhanced world.
As a student, I would highly recommend this exhibition to anyone who is interested in viewing the world from a slightly different angle. Liminal Disturbance forced me think of how isolated we can be, specifically living in Canada – a country so diverse without one particular cultural way of life. For me, this also translated to the feeling of isolation we can feel in foreign places, or in groups of people we do not necessarily know.
Ramona Ramlochand’s Unfallen reminded me of my own childhood - a point in my life during which I had no responsibilities and the world was as colourful and bright as I wanted it to be. As suggested by Haema Sivanesan, the Executive Director of Centre A in Vancouver, Ramlochand’s work can only be described as “toy-like, playful and hypnotic.”
Liminal Disturbance and Unfallen– despite being separate – complement one another, making this one of the most interactive museum exhibitions I have seen in quite some time.
Liminal Disturbance and Unfallen are on view at the McMaster Museum of Art (MMA) until January 28, 2012.
Farzeen Foda
Senior News Editor
The Holocasut has been extensively documented in numerous forms - through print, film and documentaries yet all modes share a common theme: they focus heavily on the stories and recollections of just a few of the millions of people affected by the tragedy that has been seen as one of humanity’s greatest failures.
In an effort provide a more in depth insight into the Holocaust and the experiences of the survivors who have lived to tell their story, the USC Shoah Foundation, founded by world renowned producer Steven Spielburg and Branko Lustig, a Holocaust survivor and Oscar Award-winning producer, has donated the Visual History Archive to McMaster.
The archive, offered through McMaster University’s online network for access from the University campus as well as through remote access to McMaster’s Virtual Privacy Network, is intended for use by students, faculty and researchers.
The archive is one of the largest of its kind, and McMaster is the only Canadian university to offer the collection of nearly 52,000 testimonies from Holocaust survivors coming from a variety of groups targeted by the genocide.
The archive contains testimonies from Jewish survivors, Jehovah’s Witness, homosexual, liberators and liberation witnesses, rescuers and aid providers, political prisoners, Sinti and Roma survivors, as well as participants of war crime trials and survivors of Eugenics policies.
Interviews were conducted in 52 different countries with approximately 3,000 of those interviews in Canada, 34 of which were conducted in Hamilton. The Visual History Archive houses interviews from survivors as well as letters written by Holocaust victims in a variety of languages.
Bringing a collection of this sort to McMaster has been an ongoing effort since 2009, and to commemorate those efforts, a launch event was held on Nov. 3 in CIBC Hall. The event saw prominent speakers from the McMaster, Hamilton and the Jewish community.
Notable speakers included University president Patrick Deane, University librarian Jeff Trzeciack, Hamilton Mayor Bob Bratina, the Consul General for the Republic of Croatia, and the president of the Hamilton Jewish Federation, as well as Lustig himself, who served as a strong driving force behind the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive.
Many of the speakers drew on their own experiences, emphasizing the impact of the Holocaust within Hamilton and the obligation to preserve the individual stories of each survivor.
Mayor Bob Bratina spoke of his journey to his grandfather’s home town where he learned of how the Holocaust swept through the town, taking with it some of his own ancestors.
Lustig, who was met with a standing ovation following his speech, explained the gruelling experience he endured during the Holocaust as a preteen boy, and how it led him to embark on a career in film and create the Visual History Archive.
Lustig sees his efforts as his way of giving back to the people he sadly left behind during his traumatic experiences in the concentration camps. “I do my best to fulfill my promise to these people in Auchwitz,” he said, after explaining his tumultuous experience being shunted between concentration camps around Europe.
From such experiences, and the Archive’s letters and interviews, history is made. Although written in different languages, it is these pieces of history that compose, outline, and chronicle humanity’s greatest example of unquestionable vileness and wretchedness.
And yet within each paragraph, each sentence, and each letter, comes the hope of eventual unity and peace that transgresses any boundary, any language, or any culture.
Artwork in key public space at McMaster does not reflect the current student body.
McMaster was a historically upper-class, white institution and this continues to be reflected in the key symbolic public spaces on campus like Council Chambers and Convocation Hall.
But McMaster’s student body is now fully inclusive of both male and female students of different racialized backgrounds, religious beliefs and abilities. Having students, faculty and staff from diverse experiences enriches critical discourse at our institution—but artwork in key public space predominantly represents the homogeneity of McMaster’s past.
The lack of diversity in McMaster’s most important public space is incongruous with our institution’s values and may be alienating to some students.
McMaster has a history of diversity to be proud of. It was among the first universities in Canada to welcome women, when an initiative led by William McMaster’s wife resulted in the creation of the Moulton Ladies’ College as an arms-length academic department of an otherwise male university in 1888. McMaster became fully mixed with the move to Hamilton from Toronto in 1930.
Since then, McMaster has become increasingly diverse. The latest University Factbook says faculty currently represent 70 countries and international students represent 92 countries. No other metrics of diversity are published, but the roster of student clubs demonstrates the diverse cultural affiliations of the student body.
Specific aspects of diversity are recognized as an asset in the Strategic Mandate Agreement that McMaster signed with the province of Ontario. McMaster’s SMA highlights our retention of aboriginal, first-generation and students with disability as areas of institutional strength.
Given this commitment to diversity, the degree to which McMaster’s predominantly Caucasian, upper-class history past continues to dominate public space on campus is surprising. Particularly in ceremonial and prominent areas of campus like Convocation Hall and Gilmour Hall’s Council Chambers, portraits of university administrators loom over the halls.
Professor Jane Aronson, the Chair of the President’s Advisory Council on Building an Inclusive Community (PACBIC) says the Council has tangentially examined public space, but mostly in terms of physical space rather than art.
“We often worry about what looks like public space on campus actually doesn’t offer space or resources to some students,” said Aronson.
“One thing we’ve addressed is working with indigenous communities and, for example, access to rooms where they can do smudging ceremonies—sometimes the design of space, sometimes the physical plan or the lack of space quantitatively or the ill design of space. Its effects aren’t random”
Aronson agrees that images, even within campus promotional material like the first-year lookbook, have in the past represented a stereotypical student that may not resonate with the current student body.
“While you don’t want to get tokenistic about having some greater diversity in that portrait, you have got to do something about it.”
The issue of representation in public space is not unique to McMaster, Hertford College at Oxford University recently addressed this issue with a special exhibition.
The college replaced the 21 portraits of men in their largest public space with an array of portraits of former female students from different generations and career paths. The display was meant to not only emphasize the importance of the anniversary of welcoming female students to the college, but also broaden what success looks like and what they are proud of.
“All institutions find it difficult not to just pick out people that are in some way celebrities or very rich or very senior in certain public roles, they’re people that you know, are very impressive but they’ve achieved in a very narrow sense of the word,” explained Emma Smith of Oxford University, who organized the project.
“We wanted to show that we are proud of these different things people have done with their lives… we’re not just proud of people that are wealthy and might give back to the college or who have been promoted or become famous or whatever.”
The display is currently planned to last for a year, but the administration is now discussing what will happen next.
She said this type of initiative can be viewed as more than a political statement, but also an artistic one.
“Maybe don’t just think about it in sort of a political or ideological statement but an artistic statement as well, many people feel that the old institutionalized style of portrait isn’t very welcoming,” said Smith.
A Canadian institution, King’s College in Halifax, is also trying to display more diversity, but rather than removing the current portraits, they are simply adding new ones.
“Putting these pictures up isn't about cutting men out, lessening their accomplishments, or even chastising the institution, it's about ensuring that our spaces on campus tell the story of who we are, and that recognizes the people that have made our school what it is today,” said Clare Barrowman, a third-year student at King’s involved in the project.
“Women have been part of that narrative and continue to be. It's important that female students don't just hear that, but see it and feel it.”
A major challenge with implementing this type of project in any of McMaster’s key public space is that there is no single entity which decides how public space is used and what part of McMaster’s history should be commemorated.
A PACBIC working group could hypothetically be created to recommend ways to increases diversity in artwork, but any initiative would have to be cautious and respectful of the important role of the figures from McMaster’s past.
“There are huge ironies because PACBIC meets in Council Chambers, of course the institution has the history the institution has, but sometimes that makes for the most bizarre sort of counterpoint. I think it would probably take an occasion to legitimate the removing, to make that possible because so many people would experience that as dishonoring the people that have gone before,” said Aronson.
In fact, the very nature of donor-driven statues and pieces of art on campus means that a strategic vision would be difficult.
But student input suggests imagery in public space is worth addressing.
For example, through student consultation in designing the Mills library learning commons, Vivian Lewis, the McMaster librarian found that students not only notice what is on the walls, but it also affects their learning.
“The one big criticism [students] had is that there are these giant white wall with nothing on it and they said please, please, please put some art on the wall and make it student art.”
The feedback was so overwhelmingly positive that they also sought student art for the Lyons New Media Centre and the Mills stairwell, which now features 5-foot by 6-foot self-portraits of McMaster art students.
“In terms of why [we wanted student art] was to meet the students’ need for the aesthetic part of learning… we recognized from talking to students that the aesthetic actually matters a great deal,” said Lewis.
As a research-focused, student-centred institution, it’s time to reflect on what our most important public space says about what we, as an institution, value.
Hamilton-based drag queen reveals the impact of the pandemic on drag shows and how she has kept her artistry alive
When the series of lockdowns began in Ontario last fall and all public gatherings were put on halt, live performers, including drag queens, were faced with the challenge of keeping the art and community alive from home. However, despite months of stay-at-home orders and cancelled shows, drag queens of Hamilton have proven their resilience and unfaltering devotion to their craft by employing creative digital ways of connecting with their audience.
Like many of us, Karma Kameleon, a Hamilton-based drag queen, didn’t initially know what to do with all the extra time or how to stay connected with her community. Kameleon started performing three years ago and was about to launch her full-time career in drag when the COVID-19 pandemic hit hard in March of last year, cancelling her shows in 10 cities across Ontario. It was devastating to have her long-awaited goal interrupted so suddenly without warning.
To cope with the loss of a physical stage, Kameleon and other drag queens turned to digital content creation. At first, most people remained hopeful that this would be a short-term solution and that live, in-person shows would be back on soon. However, as time went on and reliance on digital platforms became heavier and more important, more queens got creative with their online performances and experimented with various platforms, starting with livestreams.
One of the most memorable livestreams Kameleon did was for St. Patrick’s Day because everyone was still inexperienced in the digital drag era. It was filmed from her decorated basement and although she described it as a “disaster”, it was supported by a great audience. Besides the learning curve of online content creation, Kameleon said the biggest obstacle has been copyright infringements. As livestreams became more popular among drag queens, copyrights forced their videos to get taken down or blocked, pressuring them to get even more innovative with the types of content and move onto other digital outlets such as music videos, Instagram and TikTok.
Kameleon also took on a challenge to improve her makeup and sewing skills during the months in lockdown. She was more known for her comedy and stage performances than her looks. Having extra time for personal skill growth made her more proud, more confident and happier with her artistry.
Despite building a successful online presence during the pandemic and maintaining the art of drag digitally, Kameleon said ultimately, nothing could compensate for the lost experiences of in-house shows.
“I’ve tried every avenue of digital drag and at some point, it just kind of stagnates. I’m glad to have any amount of a platform or any amount of an audience, but after a while I just missed the instant gratification of saying something stupid and someone laughing,” Kameleon said.
Kameleon desperately missed the experiences of being swept up by the atmosphere of a crowd, fighting with seven other drag queens for a mirror and being able to develop a higher level of human connection through real, in-person interactions. Every moment of normalcy she got back during the gaps between lockdowns made her realize how much she missed every aspect of performing live and a greater appreciation for the community of continuous supporters. When Ontario announced its reopening plans, she was beyond grateful to have in-person shows started up again.
Her favourite part about live performances is when only one or two people are paying attention to her song in the beginning but by the end, watching more and more people begin to put down their phones and get captivated by her eccentric performance. That’s the kind of human connection that she longed for the most.
Kemeleon’s first return to live shows was on June 18 at Absinthe Hamilton with the House of Adam and Steve. Her biggest worry during the pandemic was whether she would still have an audience when she could have live shows again.
But to her surprise, the response was overwhelming. The patio reached full capacity and a long line up crowded the streets.
“[During the pandemic], you could have an audience, but you couldn’t necessarily charge a price for there to be audience . . . But as we’ve kind of moved forward, I’m trying this brand-new thing of actually charging for my shows and I was terrified no one would show up. But the response has been phenomenal,” Kameleon said.
Especially in a city like Hamilton without an established queer scene or a dedicated queer space, the resilience of the arts in the city was heartwarming to observe.
Kameleon also missed working with other queens during the months spent doing at-home online shows. The sisterhood of being in a community of individuals with similar struggles, experiences and backstories is an important source of support for any drag queen.
As Ontario enters the next stage in the reopening plan, Kameleon is most excited to showcase her growth as an entertainer over the past year. She also hopes to help reshape the drag scene to ensure artists are treated with respect and compensated fairly for the work that they do.
“[As we are] talking to the people who are part of the [drag] scene in every city, there is this understanding of, ‘Now that we know what it’s like not to have it and now that we know what we miss about it, we also kind of know what we deserve,’” Kameleon said.
More importantly, she is looking forward to more diversity in the drag community and the reopening of the world through the lens of everything that has happened last year, especially regarding the Black Lives Matter movement, Stop Asian Hate movement and the treatment of Indigenous peoples in Canada. She hopes to see the world and the drag community in Hamilton move forward with a more open and inclusive mindset and more credit given to people of colour in the drag scene.
If you love drag or appreciation for any of the arts, Kameleon encourages the local community to provide any form of support. Even if you can’t financially support an artist, every like, comment, or reshare is a form of support that can help boost their online platform and help their art feel more validated after a difficult past year.
