Black Art Study: Methods and Methodologies for a Black Studies Approach to Canadian Art History

Abstract

Black Art Study: Methods and Methodologies for a Black Studies Approach to Canadian Art History is a portfolio-based doctoral project that intervenes in the field of Canadian art history through the lens of black studies. It proposes a new framework for engaging with black contemporary art in Canada by employing “a black sense of aesthetics,” a concept that is built on and extends Katherine McKittrick’s “a black sense of place.” A black sense of aesthetics is rooted in diasporic experience and collaborative praxis; this research understands black aesthetics and black creative practice as a liberatory, relational, and anti-colonial modes of knowing. Drawing from interdisciplinary methodologies and a black sense of aesthetics, the project critiques and refuses canonical classifications and instead offers experimental modes of documentation, pedagogy, critique, and archival engagement. The dissertation comprises four interconnected components: Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art (the yellow book), a collection of art criticism centering black Canadian artists; Greyzone Pedagogies, a pedagogical archive of syllabi and workshops that enact Black feminist teaching strategies; Buseje Bailey: Reasons Why We Have to Disappear Every Once in a While, A Black Art History Project (the blue book), a research and archival publication project focused on the career of artist Buseje Bailey, which reimagines the work of art history through storytelling; and Black Art Study, a decentralized, citation-driven database of black Canadian art scholarship. Together, these components build toward a methodology for black Canadian art history that is relational, non-linear, and deeply attentive to the specificity of local black diasporic art practices. This portfolio resists tidy conclusions, instead proposing a living, growing archive of black life,iii knowledge, and creativity that challenges the disciplinary logics of art history. It advances a commitment to embodied, collaborative, and interdisciplinary research practices that foreground black women’s creative labor and intellectual genealogies. By embracing experimental methodologies and grounding itself in a black sense of aesthetics, this research contributes to the building of a sustainable, anti-racist, and anti-colonial art historical practice in Canada.