Art Connects | Local Colour with Tarah Hogue and Zool Suleman

Thursday, August 20 | 4:30 PM

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Stay home. Stay safe. Stay connected with our series of online gatherings, Art Connects!

In this conversation, Tarah Hogue, Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art, at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and Zool Suleman, Editor of Rungh Magazine, will discuss histories and legacies of artists organizing for equity in the arts.

In particular, they will look to the early 1990s, when the Artists’ Coalition for Local Colour picketed the Vancouver Art Gallery and when the Rungh Cultural Society was formed, highlighting important precedents for the current moment.

Finally, as cultural workers from different generations, they will speak to the convergence of their activities and how their recent work draws upon this past.

The event will be moderated by Melissa Lee, Director of Public Programs, and Stephanie Bokenfohr, Public Programs Coordinator.

Questions? Submit them during the Zoom presentation using the Q&A function. You can also engage with your fellow attendees and panelists during the event using the Chat function.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Tarah Hogue is a curator, cultural worker and writer. A citizen of the Métis Nation with French Canadian and Dutch ancestries, she was raised on the border between Treaty 6 and Treaty 7 territories in Red Deer, AB. Tarah is the inaugural Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2017–20), and an uninvited guest on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm [Musqueam], Sḵwx̱wú7mesh [Squamish] and səlilwətaɬ [Tsleil-Waututh] territories since 2008. She will join the Remai Modern in Saskatoon as the first Curator (Indigenous Art) in October 2020, as well as continuing to support the Vancouver Art Gallery in the role of Indigenous Advisor. Her practice responds to the complex histories and present circumstances of place by engaging adjacent or resonant gestures embodied within contemporary artistic practices and through collaboration. Recent curatorial projects include lineages and land bases (2020), Transits and Returns (2019) and Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: how do you carry the land? (2018) at the Vancouver Art Gallery; The Commute at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; and #callresponse, which toured Canada and the United States in partnership with grunt gallery (2016–19). She has contributed essays to exhibition catalogues such as Maureen Gruben: QULLIQ (Libby Leshgold Gallery, Vancouver, 2020) and Tania Willard: dissimulation (Burnaby Art Gallery, 2017), and her writing has appeared in BlackFlash, c magazine, Canadian Art, Inuit Art Quarterly, MICE Magazine and others. She is the 2019 recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation – TD Bank Group Awards for Emerging Curator of Contemporary Canadian Art. Hogue is the co-chair of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones. She holds an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia and a BA(H) in Art History from Queen’s University.

Zool Suleman is an advocate, writer and cultural collaborator. He is the Editor of Rungh Magazine and the Executive Director of the Rungh Cultural Society. In the early 1990s, he co-founded Rungh (1991), a national South Asian focused arts initiative; protested against the Vancouver Art Gallery (1991), as an active member of the Artists’ Coalition for Local Colour; and was a founding member of the Minquon Panchayat (1992), a national IBPOC-led artist movement which challenged the lack of anti-racism initiatives in Canada’s artist-run-centres and arts institutions. In 1993 he was appointed by the BC Minister of Culture to co-chair a province-wide Status of the Artists’ Committee, which in its report (1994), recommended the creation of an arms-length Artists’ Council of British Columbia. Over the last three decades, he has been involved in various capacities with the Canada Council for the Arts, Heritage Canada, Province of BC and the City of Vancouver. In all his work and community activities, he advocates for immigrants and refugees and has been active in national and local civil society initiatives against racial profiling and Islamophobia.