CHALLENGING HERITAGE: HOW ARTISTS ENVISION THE TERM

Heritage Moments | Carly Wolowich

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During my time writing for Heritage Moments I have been compelled to constantly contemplate the meaning of heritage. As museum professionals, our goal is to capture, conserve, and present heritage to the public in a demarcated manner, however, I have come to learn that values, culture, and traditions cannot be so easily delineated. I have found artists living in Canada and across Turtle Island to profoundly remind me of the intangible and ephemeral nature of heritage and the myriad of ways it can be presented. I thought I would share some of the artists whose work inspires me to challenge my own preconceived ideas of what heritage should look and feel like.

 

Shelley Niro, The Shirt, 2003. One of the nine durations transparencies. Source.

Growing up on the Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve, near Brantford, Ontario, Shelley Niro’s art challenges the expectations placed on Indigenous people by telling their stories and heritage from her own unique perspective. In her work, The Shirt, Niro poignantly critiques colonialism with witty souvenir T-shirt slogans. Progressing from one frame to the next, an Indigenous woman is shown to literally have her shirt taken from her back, serving as a metaphor for what Indigenous people were left with after colonialism.

Niro is profoundly aware of the commodification of Indigenous women’s image. As a Mohawk artist, Niro rejects the clichéd interpretations of Indigenous people in the media by putting those she knows and loves in her work. As Niro notes,

"It’s really about having those images out there in the public, and people seeing. It’s like breaking that barrier where people see images of Native women and it becomes more approachable". 

In The Shirt is an artist and friend of Niro, Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, and Veronica Passalacqua – Tsinhnahjinnie’s real-life wife. These women boldly challenge the stereotypes of Indigenous women that persist today.

Morris Lum, Chinese Freemasons Toronto, 2017. Source.

Morris Lum is a Mississauga-based, Trinidadian born artist whose work explores the hybrid nature of the Chinese-Canadian community through photography, installation, and documentary practices.

Over the last eight years, Lum has been searching for the clusters of Chinatown communities that have been built across Canada and the United States for the purpose of settlement and growth. In Tong Yan Gaai, he aims to focus and direct attention towards the functionality of Chinatown, and explore the generational context of how “Chinese” identity and heritage is expressed in these structural enclaves. These images are what Lum notes to be “visual records of historical and contemporary cultural fixtures” such as small mom and pop shops, Chinese restaurants, and community organizations.

 

Luther Konadu, Figure as Index, 2019. Source.

A writer and artist of Ghanaian descent based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Luther Konadu’s reflective tangential practice touches on themes of identity and the power of voice. I find that his work critically discusses the integral yet flawed nature of presenting heritage itself.

Like heritage, personal identity is mutable. In his powerful photographic works, Konadu shows identity as a construction of groups and of the people around us. Konadu notes, “I’m always trying to make a photograph look more like a photograph, an object, as opposed to a portal into the realities of those who appear in my images”. By making the surface of his photographs more tactile is a means to “snap viewers out of the illusion of representation” and to create a tension between the real and the fictional. In his own words, “I essentially want viewers to second-guess what they’re looking at”.

Lucy Montgomery, Woodwose Series 1, 2016. Source. 

A common household object, known for its often familial and delicate nature, Lindsay Montgomery’s  ceramic artworks are simultaneously “fierce and fiery, radical and robust, and glorious and grotesque”.

As both of her grandmothers were painters, Montgomery’s artistic ancestry led to her attendance at Sheridan College to study ceramic art. Today, Montgomery’s more recent work is what she calls “neoistoriato”. Isoriatio was a popular style of pottery decoration made in Italy during the Renaissance that later proliferated in Europe from the 16th through to the 19th century. Inheriting this ancient form of art and its focus on storytelling in her own artwork, Montgomery has reframed Istoriato from a feminist perspective to talk about current issues that are going on in her life and the world.

“At the heart of everything I do is this idea of storytelling, of mining history. I look at so many different periods of art history, and my work is a collage of all these different times and places. That’s what’s exciting for me about being an artist”. 

-Lucy Montgomery 

Anique Jordan, Sixth Company Battalion, 2016. Source. 

Anique Jordan is an artist, award-winning writer, educator, curator, and entrepreneur. Her recent work thinks about working-class aesthetics, time travel, invisibility, Caribbean carnival, and Black Canadian futurities.

Jordan’s work Sixth Company Batallion is based on the history of a particular group of Black loyalists, who became freed people of colour, in the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago of which her family descends. According to Jordan, “I dramatize and materialize this history as a meditation on survival and an exploration on the ways in which the unacknowledged histories of the past haunt and possess present day life in incredibly complex ways”. Featuring images of her mother and two of her five aunts poised as soldiers in uniforms from the war, the images offer a “de‐colonial, gendered incursion in the archives of Canadian, Caribbean and familial history”.


To represent heritage in museum spaces can be daunting for those of us entering into the museum field. However, these artists affirm the importance of remembering the histories that have created the spaces and communities we live in today. I have come to realize that presenting heritage requires that in which museums require most; reciprocal sharing and intent listening.

What challenges your perceptions of heritage? Please feel free to comment below!