Public Art Programming During COVID
EVERY TIME MAY APPROACHES, I EAGERLY AWAIT not only the cherry blossoms in nearby High Park, but also the changing of the images displayed on billboards around my neighbourhood. For a few weeks, rather than an ad for, say, the latest meal prep service, I get to enjoy art, courtesy of the CONTACT photography festival. In 2018, I merely had to step out onto my building’s fire escape to stare at Kent Monkman’s delightfully provocative work featuring his two-spirit alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. A few years earlier, during my first spring in the city, all I had to do was take a walk along my street to appreciate the equally alluring and subversive images of Dana Claxton, including a candy-coloured bison, and other emblems of colonial imagery that she had digitally altered. Both artists urge us to reconsider our relationship with iconography, how it has been used to stereotype, reduce and erase Indigenous lives and culture. Not your standard advertising billboard experience! In fact, the support itself plays deeply into the messaging since both also consider the commercialization of their traditions—Monkman is Cree and Claxton is Lakota.
Since 2003, CONTACT has been organizing a substantial public art program, taking over not only billboards but also a host of
