John Hampton. Photograph by Don Hall.

John Hampton, a 2014 graduate of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Visual Studies program, has just been appointed executive director and CEO of the Mackenzie Art Gallery, the oldest public art gallery in Saskatchewan. In the process, he has become the first Indigenous person ever to land a job as chief executive of a major public art institution in Canada.

Hampton first joined the MacKenzie in 2018 as director of programs. He was appointed interim CEO in June, before being made permanent in the role earlier this month.

He is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, a Native American nation based in southern Oklahoma. "'First Indigenous CEO' is a strange title for me to wear," he says. "Although I grew up in Regina and I've been adopted into this community, I am still a guest here. I look forward to a future where Indigenous voices are leading the cultural dialogue in our own territories and are active participants in the broader art world."

Hampton thinks the benefits of demographic change at the top of the Canadian art world go far beyond diversity. "When the vision and leadership of your cultural institutions have no input from the voices or the cultures that have been here since time immemorial, that's more than a blind spot," he says.

In his time at the MacKenzie, Hampton has already implemented a number of initiatives designed to broaden the gallery's horizons. He helped create a partnership with Mitacs and the University of Regina to offer internships in Indigenous and new curatorial practices, restructured the gallery's Indigenous Advisory Circle, and appointed the gallery's first elder in residence.

He intends to use his new influence to push for more inclusion at the MacKenzie. The gallery is currently in the process of performing a demographic audit of its collections, and is also reexamining its artist payment policies and hiring practices from an equity perspective.

"The MacKenzie has a long history of championing Indigenous art, and the collection reflects that," Hampton says. "But the story of Saskatchewan is more than just settlers and Indigenous people. There are many communities with their own vibrant cultures, artistic practices, and world views. We can't tell the story of Saskatchewan art just through a settler and Indigenous lens."

Hampton is still deeply involved with the University of Toronto art community. He remains an adjunct curator at the University of Toronto Art Museum. Starting in 2022, the MacKenzie and the Art Museum will be co-presenting an exhibition on the history, mythology, and impact of the concept of a "white race."

Now, reflecting on his time as a student in the Daniels Faculty MVS program, Hampton says the learning experience was foundational to his career in the Canadian art world. "When I came to U of T is when I really started connecting with the broader art community," he says. "The MVS Curatorial Studies program is unique in this country."

A recent New York Times Magazine story about the work of Suzanne Simard, a forestry professor at the University of British Columbia, derives much of its impact from the accompanying photography: a series of lush images of British Columbian trees and fungus. Those photos were taken by Brendan George Ko, a 2014 graduate of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Visual Studies program.

Ko began working as a freelance photographer while he was earning his undergraduate degree at OCAD University. In addition to his editorial photography — which has also appeared in publications like Vogue and Flux Magazine — he maintains an active artistic practice. His most recent solo exhibitions were Moemoeā, at Contact Gallery, and We Soon Be Nigh!, at LE Gallery.

Photograph by Brendan George Ko.

Ko's Times photographs illustrate the forest milieu that gave rise to Simard's seminal theories about underground fungal networks known as mycorrhizas, which connect the roots of plants and allow them to swap chemicals and nutrients.

"The first thing I noticed was the aroma," writes the story's author, Ferris Jabr, of a forest trek with Simard. "The air was piquant and subtly sweet, like orange peel and cloves. Above our heads, great green plumes filtered the sunlight, which splashed generously onto the forest floor in some places and merely speckled it in others. Gnarled roots laced the trail beneath our feet, diving in and out of the soil like sea serpents."

Read the full story, and see Ko's photographs in context, at the New York Times.

A Minaret for the General’s Wife, an art installation by visual studies lecturer Erdem Taşdelen, is now on display at Toronto's Mercer Union — at least, in theory. Although the west-end art gallery is currently closed to the public (for obvious reasons), there is a way to view Taşdelen's art without leaving home.

Taşdelen worked with Mercer Union to create a brief video walkthrough of the exhibition. In the video, he explains how he was inspired to delve into the history of a mysterious 19th-century minaret, located in a small city in Lithuania. The stories he discovered — a factual one about a Russian general and a probably-apocryphal one about the general's Turkish lover — formed the basis of a narrative, which Taşdelen embodied in a collection of interrelated writing and found objects.

"In A Minaret for the General’s Wife, the minaret becomes a metaphor for that peculiar and potent feeling of being corporeally out of place, for structures built in locations where they seemingly don’t belong, and for objects brought out of context," Mercer Union writes in its description of the exhibition.

Taşdelen's video walkthrough is embedded above. And it can also be viewed on the Mercer Union website.

Statement from the Dean's Office

Earlier today, President Gertler made a University-wide announcement about an important change in the start date for winter term. This shift is intended to support the U of T community's health and wellness during an unprecedented time. 

I understand how difficult this year has been for so many in our Daniels Faculty community, and I want to assure you the wellbeing of students, faculty, and staff remains our highest priority. That is why winter break will be extended by one week for all Daniels undergraduate and graduate students.

The new start date for Daniels Faculty winter 2021 undergraduate and graduate classes is January 11.

This extra time will allow us to regroup and refresh before our next term begins. As a reminder, all winter 2021 classes, labs, and tutorials will be conducted online.

Reading week dates will remain the same (February 15-19), and any previously scheduled field courses will continue remotely during that time as planned. Classes will end on April 9; final exams and reviews will be completed by April 30.

While our classes will start on January 11, the University will still be reopening on January 4. President Gertler also announced three additional paid days off for staff, to be taken individually or as a block. At the Daniels Faculty, only essential staff-related meetings are to occur during the week of January 4–January 8. Managers will meet with staff to discuss how we can organize this time to provide as much of a break as possible during this week.

We will share more information about what to expect next term very soon. The Daniels Faculty COVID-19 FAQs will be updated to reflect new information on an ongoing basis, as will the UTogether website.

For now, I want to reinforce how important it is to strike a balance between work and the other aspects of our lives. If you ever feel that it's impossible to find that balance, remember that we are here to support you. Ask for help, and you will receive it.

Last semester's Master of Visual Studies graduating exhibition was postponed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. But now, with the U of T campus once again open to small groups of visitors, the show is finally happening, a few months late.

The exhibition is an annual end-of-program showcase in which each year's graduating MVS students install their work at the University of Toronto Art Museum, where it can be admired by the public. The 2020 exhibition, which was originally scheduled to occur in spring, opened at the Art Museum on October 28 and will continue until November 21. Anyone who wants to visit the exhibition must pre-register for a time slot, and then obey the university's health and safety policies (including mandatory face mask usage) while on site. See the Art Museum's website for more details.

The exhibition includes the work of both studio students (who created original work) and curatorial students (who curated the work of others).

For anyone who needs more convincing to go experience the exhibition in person, here's a preview of some of what's on display.

The studio students

Emily DiCarlo's installation, titled The Propagation of Uncertainty, explores the way time works in the world. "I was thinking about a poetic distinction between how we, in our body, experience time, versus the external infrastructure of clock time," Emily says. "I'm interested in how those things are at odds and how they meet."

As part of her project, Emily visited the offices of the National Research Council, in Ottawa, where Canada's national time standards laboratory is located. There, a team of scientists maintains an extremely precise cesium atomic clock, which is part of a global network of similar atomic clocks that calculate Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC — a time standard used to synchronize timekeeping devices around the world.

Emily spent four hours filming in the laboratory and used the resulting footage to produce a three-channel video. A viewer sees the laboratory's dishevelled server racks and the odd bits of equipment used in the measurement of time. "I went in with the idea of surveying the space," she says. "It hasn't changed since the 1970s, so there is this really nice aesthetic that goes through it. You'll see a lot of poorly written notes hanging off things, and tangled wires. You can really sense the discord in the space, even though it's supposed to be the most precise temporal space in Canada."

The video barrage ends with an image of Emily on her back, on the laboratory's floor, breathing calmly among the equipment, as if to suggest that mechanical time and bodily time might not be totally at odds.

As part of the installation, Emily also created a website called Circular T: A Collection of Uncertainties. It's named after Circular T, a monthly time-adjustment memo distributed by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. Emily's website mimics the formatting of the real Circular T — except, rather than information about nanosecond adjustments to atomic clocks, Emily's circulars contain poetry and haunting stories about time researchers pushed to extremes.

Chris Mendoza's installation, yet you dream in the green of your time, takes inspiration from Toronto's Don River. The Don was originally a meandering waterway, with natural curves, but it was partially straightened in the late 19th century as a way of facilitating industrial development. The city is now at work on an ambitious project to renaturalize the river's mouth and redevelop the surrounding area into a condo commuinity. Chris saw this time of change as an opportunity for artistic intervention.

Taking inspiration from a 1969 protest against pollution in the Don River, during which participants held a mock funeral, Chris constructed a mirrored coffin. Dressed in a neon poncho that evokes both the high-visibility vests of construction workers and the athleisure wear of the condo-dwelling urban upper classes, he went to the mouth of the Don River and filmed himself performing with the coffin. The resulting video interweaves that footage with other scenes that relate to the river.

In Chris's gallery installation, the video shares space with other works meant to reference the Don River's semi-natural milieu, including a wall hanging made of pieces of paper that Chris dyed using inks derived from plants he foraged from the Don River Valley. At the centre of the installation is the mirrored coffin itself. Inside of it, Chris placed 19th century maps of the Don River and other archival materials.

"The work is critically engaging with the Don River's revitalization," Chris says. "It questions to what end the revitalization is being done. Is it being done because it's economically viable? There's a critique of that in the work. But it's also meant to pose questions about how revitalization is enacted, and about the historical and material relations between the city and the lower river valley."

Brandon Poole's installation, titled Blind Pilotage, began with a serendipitous discovery. During a research visit to IMAX's Canadian headquarters in Mississauga, he happened to get contact information for a former IMAX employee who had saved a stash of film from the company's earliest days, in the 1980s.

Brandon arranged to sort through the collection. Among it, he found a clip from Carla's Island, a short film produced in 1981 by a computer scientist named Nelson Max. The film, which shows waves lapping at the shores of a pair of islands, was one of the earliest (if not the absolute earliest) depictions of computer-generated water.

Brandon's installation juxtaposes a three-and-half-minute loop of part of Carla's Island with a much more recent instance of computer-generated water. For the latter, Brandon travelled to Memorial University, in Newfoundland, where he spent five days working inside the Centre for Marine Simulation's offshore operations simulator — a giant black box with a simulated ship's helm inside. The simulator accurately reproduces the feeling of being on a boat by using hydraulic lifts to simulate motion from waves and weather conditions. The system is used to train people in the safe operation of sea vessels.

For the purposes of his artwork, Brandon had a different goal in mind. Within the simulator's highly detailed virtual world, he created a replica of the islands from Carla's Island, with icebergs substituted for the original film's pleasant tropical landmasses. With that done, he captured high-resolution footage from both inside and outside the simulator. The resulting video projection takes up an entire wall of the art gallery, opposite Carla's Island.

"With the simulator, not only is it just a simulated image of water, it's simulating the motion of a ship on water," Brandon says. "So it's this further level of distance away from really being on the water." On the gallery wall, beside the simulator projection, an oil-lamp gimbal — a piece of equipment designed to keep a lamp upright as a ship pitches on waves — sways in time with the simulator's movements, as if to suggest an automated seafaring future that's still under construction.

There is one more component of Brandon's installation — and it's not necessary to go to the Art Gallery to experience it. Anyone with a decent computer can download and play The Far Far Splendour, a video game he created that (stay with us here) simulates the offshore operations simulator.

The inspiration for Jordan Elliott Prosser's installation, Assembly, came from close to home. His childhood home in Oshawa, Ontario, to be exact.

Oshawa was an auto-industry town for nearly a century — that is, until 2019, when General Motors ceased production at the local assembly plant. (A recent deal with workers may bring back some car production by 2021.)

"My parents worked at the General Motors Canadian corporate headquarters, which was in Oshawa," Jordan says. "And my grandparents before them worked in the assembly plant. I grew up within the auto industry, described by the suburban dynamic of living in cars and having this exurban house on a tree-lined street with a pool."

For his installation, he created a video about Oshawa that combines elements of documentary film, autobiography, and cinéma vérité. The video revolves around Parkwood Estate, the former home of Robert Samuel McLaughlin, one of the founders of Oshawa's auto industry and a one-time president of General Motors of Canada. The estate is now a national historic site, frequently used for weddings and film shoots. "There's this historical fetishization of the place, locked in history," Jordan says. "It's sort of like a shrine, in a way, to Oshawa."

The video also includes scenes from Cullen Gardens, a now-shuttered tourist attraction that once contained a miniature village with models of some Oshawa civic structures, including Parkwood Estate. Jordan found archival footage of the tiny village at the Whitby Public Library.

The bulk of the video is made up of scenes from significant sites in the Oshawa area, shot by Jordan as he travelled the city. In one instance, he put his camera in a shopping cart while he and his father wandered the aisles of a local Costco. "The film itself is a mosaic," Jordan says. "It's a portrait of Oshawa at this precarious moment in its identity. It's a town that's no longer an auto town. It hasn't been for a while. They closed the plant, so you don't even have that anymore as a last bastion of identity-making. I'm interested in why people hold on to particular points of their identity even as the hallmarks of it start to be eroded."

In the gallery, opposite Jordan's video screen, is an assemblage sculpture made from childhood objects he found in his mother's Oshawa basement, perched atop a neat cul-de-sac of beige, suburban-style carpeting.

The curatorial students

Yuluo Wei's exhibition, "if a turtle could talk," is a presentation of work by artists who use traditional Asian methods and materials to comment on Asian folklore. "I'm very interested in mythologies," Yuluo says. "Especially non-western mythologies."

Yuluo deliberately selected works that she felt would immerse viewers in this mythological world. The centrepiece of the exhibition is Earthly Delights, an installation by artist Ed Pien that looks like a round tent. Visitors are invited to duck into an opening in one of the tent's walls. Once inside, they're presented with a surprising display: the interior is covered in ink drawings that evoke scenes from Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. Visitors can peer into tiny peepholes to see Pien's illustrations of otherworldly monsters.

In an adjoining room, Yuluo has installed works by Chinese-Canadian artist Xiaojing Yan. Mountains of Pines, a series of gauzy fabric panels pierced with pine needles, resembles the ink-stroked peaks of a traditional Chinese landscape painting. Behind the semi-transparent fabric is Far from where you divined, a series of sculptures — a deer, rabbits, a young girl — that the artist swabbed with lingzhi mushroom spores. The ear-shaped mushrooms, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine and are symbols of health and longevity, sprout from the sculptures at odd angles.

To tie it all together, Yuluo composed an original story — a fairy tale about a turtle who becomes lost in the human world. She'll be doing an online reading of the story on November 21. For details on how to join the reading, visit the Art Museum website.

Fatma Yehia's exhibition, "Overt: Militarization as Ideology," presents a series of artworks that consider the concept of militarization — but not in the ordinary sense of the word.

Fatma is originally from Egypt, a country where military rule is an inescapable fact of everyday life. As she researched the concept of militarism, it occurred to her that Egypt's experience was only one end of a spectrum. Even in parts of the world where militarization isn't overt, military values and technologies still pervade societies. "When it comes to the western world, usually we don't see the destructive nature of military technologies," she says. "We only see the productive nature of them. But these two worlds are connected. It's the same technology."

One of the works included in the exhibition, a video installation by Harun Farocki titled War At a Distance, makes the connection between war and militarism explicit. The film, released in 2003, just as the United States was ramping up its second invasion of Iraq, explores the connections between US military facilities during the first Gulf War and modern factories that produce objects for use in everyday life.

Structural Ambiguity, a work by Lamis Haggag that Fatma commissioned specifically for her exhibition, is a water-filled sculpture that captures words spoken by visitors inside the gallery. "Lamis is interested in how the military state has an impact on the use of language," Fatma says.

Hidden microphones pick up snippets of conversation from passersby and then run those word fragments through Google's speech recognition library. The sculpture then translates that speech into movements in its internal water reservoir. For Fatma, the connection to Google's artificial intelligence systems is a vital one. "Google collaborates with military and state security services," Fatma says. "And so Lamis was wondering about the purpose of Google's speech recognition library. What could it be collecting from us, and how could it be used in training AI programs?"

Xenia Benivolski's exhibition, "The exhaustive thought," is the first-ever solo show for Zanis Waldheims, a Latvian-born, Montreal-based outsider artist who died in obscurity in 1993.

"Zanis is an interesting example of how one is forced to communicate in nuanced ways as a result of migration or exile," Xenia says. "If you don't have the vocabulary, how do you communicate otherwise?"

Waldheims was a lawyer in Latvia. He arrived in Canada in 1952 as a postwar refugee and lived the remainder of his life in relative isolation, never seeing the family and friends he'd left behind in eastern Europe. In the absence of familial or personal connections, he became obsessed with philosophy, history, natural sciences, and linguistics. He amassed a library of books and filled their margins with notes.

Most amateur scholars would have stopped there, but Waldheims took things further. He developed a system for taking the ideas in the texts he was reading and representing them visually, in diagrams. He got into the habit of rendering these diagrams in brilliantly colourful, geometric, pencil-crayon drawings. To a casual observer, the drawings look like abstract visual art — but, to Waldheims, each piece represented a system of thought. He produced over 600 works in his lifetime, all or most of which ended up in the possession of one of his few friends, a man named Yves Jeanson.

To mount her exhibition, Xenia travelled to Jeanson's home in Laval, Quebec and negotiated a loan. The exhibition includes not only several examples of Waldheims' finished compositions, but also vitrines full of his notes and marginalia. A patient visitor with some knowledge of French can attempt to follow the entire process of distillation, from text to drawing.

"When you look at these drawings, each line and shade has a described meaning," Xenia says. "For example, in some of the drawings, the lower periphery of the drawing means 'reason,' and the upper periphery means 'imagination.' And if there's a diagonal line going up, it means 'future.' Others use different systems. The works are illustrations of philosophical concepts. And not just philosophy, but also biology, phenomenology, physics, and mathematics. He saw them all as parallel systems."

Photographs by Harry Choi.

The choices architects make when they're designing buildings can have long-lasting consequences, not just for the people who live and work in those buildings, but also for the global natural environment. That's why, starting in the Winter 2021 semester, the Daniels Faculty will begin giving students the ability to enrol in a new curricular pathway, leading to a new academic designation: a Certificate in Sustainability of the Built Environment.

The new certificate program, the first of its kind at the University of Toronto, will be open to all current students in the Daniels Faculty's undergraduate architecture and visual studies programs. In order to earn the certificate, a student will be required to take at least four different Daniels courses that have been deemed, by the university, to be aligned with the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The full list of eligible courses can be found in the Daniels academic calendar.

In taking this sustainability-focused sequence of courses, students will gain understanding of sustainability's social, ecological, and economic dimensions. They will also learn about the ways sustainability practices in architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and art intersect with larger global issues like climate change, ecological preservation, and social justice.

The new certificate program is an outgrowth of U of T's President's Advisory Committee on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability. The university's sustainability pathways initiative was announced as one of eight sustainability measures in "Beyond Divestment: Taking Decisive Action on Climate Change," the university president's administrative response to the report of the President’s Advisory Committee on Divestment from Fossil-Fuels, in March 2016. The goal of the pathways initiative is to allow every undergraduate student at the university the opportunity to experience sustainability learning in their program.

The President's Advisory Committee on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability is currently hosting the Adams Sustainability Celebration — a four-month series of events designed to pay tribute to U of T's sustainability-minded students, faculty, and staff. The celebration includes the Adams Sustainability Innovation Prize, a competition for student-led innovation projects. The winners will split a $25,500 pot of prize money, which they'll use to further develop their ideas. The competition is open to all U of T students and recent alumni, and entries are due on October 23. See the Adams Sustainability Innovation prize website for more details.

More information on the Certificate in Sustainability of the Built Environment program will be available in March 2021. Enrolment will start the following spring. Watch the Daniels Faculty website for updates.

Yaniya Lee, a sessional lecturer in the Daniels Faculty's visual studies program, was one of two guest editors of the just-released fall 2020 edition of Canadian Art, a national arts magazine. The issue, titled "Chroma," is the first one in the publication's history to be focused entirely on the output of Black artists.

Lee and her co-guest-editor, curator and writer Denise Ryner, are both Black. In their introductory essay to the new issue, they explain the conditions that led to the decision to devote an edition of the magazine to Black art. They write:

[T]he twin pandemics of systemic racism and COVID-19 have brought to the fore societal inequities that touch all sectors of life and work. The loss of a “normal” has created the potential for rapid, dramatic change. These two realities formed the environment in which Chroma was developed and assembled.

Lee and Ryner attempted to include writing about Black artists from throughout Canada. The issue includes an essay by poet Cecily Nicholson about Cheeky Proletariat, a Vancouver gallery that has become a locus for the city's Black creative community. Another story, by culture journalist Kelsey Adams, is about David Woods, an artist and arts organizer who has spent the past four decades promoting work by Black artists from the Maritimes. Another piece is a transcript of a conversation between Imani Elizabeth Jackson, M. NourbeSe Philip, and S*an D. Henry-Smith, three Black poets.

The issue even contains some direct activism in the form of an open letter from the Black Curators Forum, in which the forum's members call upon Canadian art institutions to adopt more inclusive employment policies.

"We tried to show a little bit of everything that's happening, or that has happened," Lee says. "It was clearly impossible to cover all of Black Canadian art and all of Black Canadian art history in one magazine."

Most of the issue can be read online, for free, on Canadian Art's website. More stories from the issue will be posted to the website in coming weeks.

Take me to Canadian Art

The Daniels Faculty at the University of Toronto is excited to announce our Fall 2020 Talks & Lectures schedule featuring speakers and themes that simultaneously address the urgency of our contemporary challenges, and the opportunities of our diverse programs — architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, visual studies, and forestry.

The Fall 2020 Talks, a series of thematic discussions titled Resolutions and Agencies, explore design’s capacity to respond to activism, resilience, decolonization, density, narrative, and justice, among other topics.

Lectures provide an in-depth view on a topic by one speaker, while talks allow for thematic discussion with a diverse group of featured speakers. All programs are free, online, and open to the public. 

Find more details and register in advance at daniels.utoronto.ca/events.

Fall 2020 Talks: Resolutions and Agencies 

September 16, 4pm
Takes Action - Session I
Chris Roach (California College of the Arts)
Azadeh Zaferani (The Bartlett)
Lindsay Harkema (City College of New York)
Kees Lokman (University of British Columbia)
Moderated by Neeraj Bhatia (California College of the Arts) and Mason White (Daniels Faculty)
Hosted by California College of the Arts and the Daniels Faculty

September 24, 6:30pm   
Strange Primitivism and Other Things
Tei Carpenter (Daniels Faculty)  
Adrian Phiffer (Daniels Faculty)  
Moderated by Hans Ibelings (Daniels Faculty)  
  
October 1, 6:30pm   
The Great Indoors: Environmental Quality, Health and Wellbeing in a Quarantining Society
Kellie Chin (Workshop Architecture)  
Simon Coulombe (Wilfrid Laurier University)  
Steven Lockley (Brigham and Women’s Hospital & Harvard Medical School)  
Alejandra Menchaca (Thornton Tomasetti)  
Lidia Morawska (Queensland University of Technology)   
Manuel Riemer (Wilfrid Laurier University)  
Moderated by Bomani Khemet (Daniels Faculty) and Alstan Jakubiec (Daniels Faculty)  
 
October 7, 4:00pm  
Takes Action - Session II  
Lori Brown (Syracuse University)  
Samaa Elimam (Harvard University)  
Cesar Lopez (University of New Mexico)  
Albert Pope (Rice University)  
Moderated by Neeraj Bhatia (California College of the Arts) and Mason White (Daniels Faculty)  
Hosted by California College of the Arts and Daniels Faculty  

October 15, 6:30 pm   
Distancing Density  
Daniel D’Oca (Harvard University)  
Jay Pitter (Author & Placemaker)  
Moderated by Fadi Masoud (Daniels Faculty) and Michael Piper (Daniels Faculty)  
 
October 22, 5:00pm 
Future Forests: Renaturalizing Urban and Peri Urban Landscapes for People, Biodiversity and Resilience  
Simone Borelli (Forestry Division, United Nations)  
Liz O’Brien (Forest Research, UK Government)  
Fabiano Lemes de Oliveira (Politecnico di Milano)  
Jana VanderGoot (University of Maryland)  
Moderated by Danijela Puric-Mladenovic (Daniels Faculty)  

November 5, 6:30pm 
The Architect and the Public: On George Baird's Contribution to Architecture 
Andrew Choptiany (Carmody Groarke)
Roberto Damiani (Daniels Faculty)
Hans Ibelings (Daniels Faculty)
Michael Piper (Daniels Faculty)
Brigitte Shim (Daniels Faculty)
Richard Sommer (Daniels Faculty)

November 11, 4:00pm 
Takes Action - Session III  
Jill Desimini (Harvard University)  
Ersela Kripa & Stephen Mueller (Texas Tech University)  
David Moon (Columbia University)  
Lucía Jalón Oyarzun (Escuela SUR)  
Moderated by Neeraj Bhatia (California College of the Arts) and Mason White (Daniels Faculty)  
Hosted by California College of the Arts and Daniels Faculty 

November 12, 5:30 pm 
For Her Record: Notes on the Work of Blanche Lemco van Ginkel  
Phyllis Lambert (Canadian Centre for Architecture)  
Mary McLeod (Columbia University)   
Ipek Mehmetoglu (McGill University)  
Moderated by Brigitte Shim (Daniels Faculty)  

November 19, 12:30pm 
Architecture in Dialogue: 14th cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture  
Aziza Chaouni (Daniels Faculty)  
Farrokh Derakhshani (Aga Khan Award for Architecture)  
Andres Lepik (Architekturmuseum München)  
Nondita Correa Mehrotra (RMA Architects)  
Moderated by Brigitte Shim (Daniels Faculty) 

Fall 2020 Lectures

September 22, 5:30pm 
Chris Lee (Pratt Institute)
MVS Proseminar  

October 5, 12:00pm 
Sheila Boudreau (Spruce Lab)

October 16, 1:00pm  
Elisa Silva (Enlace Arquitectura)  

October 19, 12:00pm 
Aisling O'Carroll (The Bartlett)  

October 27, 12:00pm
Arthur Adeya  (Kounkuey Design Initiative)

October 30, 1:00pm 
Kelly Doran (MASS Design Group)  
Jeffrey Cook Memorial Lecture   

November 6, 1:00pm 
Jason Nguyen (Daniels Faculty)  
 
November 9, 1:00pm 
Luis Callejas (LCLA Office)  

November 20, 1:00pm  
Gilles Saucier (Saucier + Perrotte)   
 
November 23, 12:00pm  
Teresa Galí-Izard (ETH)   
Michael Hough/Ontario Association of Landscape Architects Visiting Critic  

November 25, 1:00pm
Jia Gu (Spinagu / M&A)

November 27, 1:00pm  
Elise Hunchuck (Royal College of Art & The Bartlett)  

November 30, 1:00pm  
Sergio Lopez-Pineiro (Harvard University) 

We are pleased to announce Douglas Cardinal OC, FRAIC, as the 2020-21 Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design (details forthcoming). 

Oscar Alfonso, Simon Fuh, Matt Nish-Lapidus, and Sophia Oppel — all of them current Master of Visual Studies students at the Daniels Faculty — aren't letting this summer's COVID-19 lockdown prevent them from making and displaying art.

The four students, in collaboration with Hearth, a Toronto artist-run space, have just launched "view recent changes," an online art exhibition that borrows the tools and aesthetics of Wikipedia and uses them for radically different purposes. The exhibition is part of Vector Festival 2020, and is presented with financial support from Joe Lobko and Karen Powers, via the Benjamin Hart Lobko Memorial Travel Award.

The students write:

This exhibition presents an assemblage that considers the ways in which the human, digital, linguistic, machinic, vegetal and animal correlate. Hosted as a wiki, a platform that allows for communal contribution, the project's focus on lateral hyperlinking reflects on the possibility of a digital commons. This project considers how to circumvent the individualizing, commodifying qualities of online spaces to explore positive forms of relationality and intimacy.

Visit "view recent changes" now

Daniels Faculty students know Yaniya Lee as a visual studies lecturer and writer — but, for the past year, she has had an unusual side gig.

As a research resident at Vtape — a video archive founded in 1982 by Daniels Faculty professors emiriti Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak — Lee has spent the past few months sorting through hundreds of pieces of video art created over the past four decades. From that collection of films, she has curated "Fractured Horizon — A View From the Body," an online screening series that will continue throughout the months of June and July.

Each Friday between now and July 31, a new video in the series will be posted to Vtape's website. Once the videos are posted, they can be viewed free of charge, at any time. Many of them are rarities, seldom seen outside of art galleries.

Lee's video selections are united by a common theme: they all somehow reflect on the experience of belonging to a marginalized social group. All of them are by Black or Indigenous artists. Lee's aim was to select works from a number of different time periods.

"I was raised by Black feminist activists," Lee says. "Growing up, I heard about so many of the struggles for social justice. My intention when I was going into the archive was to somehow find an aesthetic trace of what the particular equity challenges were in different eras."

The first three videos in the series are already available on Vtape's website. One of them, titled Sum of the Parts, is a family history by artist Deanna Bowen (MVS 2008), a Daniels Faculty alumna. The other — Janine, by Cheryl Dunye — is a short, personal reflection on the artist's complicated relationship with a white high-school friend. A third video, by Indigenous artist Thirza Cuthand, was released on the Vtape website earlier today.

The screening series comes at what seems like an ideal moment. Because of the killing of George Floyd and the resulting global wave of protests, the voices of nonwhite people are being sought and highlighted with a new intensity. "As an arts worker, I've been seeing and experiencing a lot of really intense things in the past few weeks that make me quite angry," Lee says. "Sure, this screening series is relevant right now. But this has been my work for years. The fact that a boiling point has been reached doesn't mean racism is new."

At the conclusion of the screening series, on July 31, Lee will release a scholarly essay in which she summarizes findings from her research in Vtape's archives. Lee will also, on a date to be determined, participate in a livestreamed conversation about her research, with curator and educator Andrea Fatona.

To find out more about the Fractured Horizon screening series, or to view the videos, visit the Vtape website.

Top image: Still from Cheryl Dunye's Janine.