Reformed?

How does what is owned define the owner? In the Manual of Curatorship, Peter Cannon-Brookes stresses that the “process of collecting cannot be considered separately from the cultural characteristics of the society undertaking it.” Institutions still beholden to outdated mandates and protocols will have collections that are reflective of that. Many curators working within these institutions are attempting decolonial methodologies, in a recent and expanding move toward museological reform, to include the work of underrepresented, misrepresented or never-represented artists. When institutions haven’t had major contributions to their collections of contemporary Indigenous art, it’s simply because they haven’t had someone with the specialized knowledge or the initiative to advocate for it.

I started at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG) with a curatorial residency supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. When I was hired as the curator of Indigenous and contemporary art after my residency, in 2017, I was one of the first Indigenous curators hired in a full-time and permanent position. Standing on the shoulders of activators before me who pushed to make such positions available in Canadian institutions, I’ve been an activator in shifting the imbalanced narratives in collecting and exhibiting