Jana Sterbak is a multidisciplinary artist of Czech origin.
Neurodiversity is a proposed framework that argues there is intrinsic diversity in human brain function and cognition, and that certain things currently classified as neurodevelopmental disorders are differences and disabilities but are not necessarily pathological. The framework grew out of the autism rights movement and builds on the social model of disability, arguing that disability partly arises from societal barriers, rather than attributing disability purely to inherent deficits. It instead situates human cognitive variation in the context of biodiversity and the politics of minority groups. Some neurodiversity advocates and researchers argue that the neurodiversity paradigm is the middle ground between strong medical model and strong social model.
Valie Export is an avant-garde Austrian artist. She is best known for provocative public performances and expanded cinema work. Her artistic work also includes video installations, computer animations, photography, sculpture and publications covering contemporary art.
Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven (née Else Hildegard Plötz; was a German-born avant-garde visual artist and poet, who was active in Greenwich Village, New York, from 1913 to 1923, where her radical self-displays came to embody a living Dada. She was considered one of the most controversial and radical women artists of the era.
Irene F. Whittome, is a multimedia artist.
John Greer is a Canadian sculptor who likes to bring cultural and natural history together. One critic calls him one of Canada's most philosophically minded artists. He looks to ancient Celtic stones and Greek sculpture for inspiration. Greer was the catalyst behind "Halifax Sculpture," a 1990s movement, rooted in minimalism and conceptualism.
Rebecca Belmore D.F.A. is an interdisciplinary Anishinaabekwe artist who is notable for politically conscious and socially aware performance and installation work. She is Ojibwe and member of Obishikokaang. Belmore currently lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Geneviève Cadieux is a Canadian artist known for her large-scale photographic and media works in urban settings. She lives in Montreal.
Kiss and Tell is a Vancouver, British Columbia based performance and artist collective whose work is concerned with lesbian sexuality. In 1990, collective members Persimmon Blackbridge, Lizard Jones and Susan Stewart used the intense debates within the queer community around sexual practice in the early 1990s to create the photographic exhibition Drawing the Line. Their photographs depicted a continuum of lesbian sexual practice ranging from kissing to whipping, bondage, and voyeurism. The project encouraged gallery viewers to comment on what they saw and how it made them feel by writing directly on the walls around the prints; allowing the viewer to "draw the line" and examine their ideas and beliefs about different sexual behaviors. “Drawing the Line” was made in response to the “porn wars” of the late 80’s-the feminist debate of if female sexual imagery was more oppressive to women, or if it was empowering to women. Kiss and Tell’s work explicitly embraced depictions of female sexuality, and encouraged the conversation between anti-porn feminists and sex positive feminists. The art was controversial, even more so as it was released in the era of the Red Hot Video Store bombings. The collective displayed their work to point out the double standard in which artists exploring politics and sexuality are “cause for alarm” and yet adult films and magazines that are much more explicit are of no concern. The show traveled widely in Canada and the United States in the 1990s, as well as showing in Australia and the Netherlands. In the summer of 2015 Kiss and Tell had redisplayed and revisited their exhibition “Drawing the Line.” This was featured at the Vancouver Queer Arts Festival in celebration of the work’s 25th anniversary, and was the first time in 13 years that it had been displayed.
Geoffrey Farmer is best known for extensive multimedia installations made of cut-out images which form collages.
Dana Claxton is a Hunkpapa Lakota filmmaker, photographer, and performance artist. Her work looks at stereotypes, historical context, and gender studies of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, specifically those of the First Nations. In 2007, she was awarded an Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art.
Ron Terada is a Vancouver-based artist working in various media, including painting, photography, video, sound, books, and graphic design.
Bobby Baker is a multi-disciplinary artist and activist working across performance, drawing and multi-media. Baker is the artistic director of the arts organisation Daily Life Ltd. A hallmark of Baker's work is food being used as an artistic medium. As John Daniel writes, 'Food - shopping for it, cooking it, serving it, consuming it - is a consistent feature in Baker's work, which focuses on the seemingly mundane, everyday details of life' (2007:246) Drawing from her own personal and family experiences, her work explores the relationship between art and lived experience and addresses the splitting of women's domestic and professional lives. Claire MacDonald points out how her artistic trajectory - moving from early food sculptures to later performances and installations - reflects the changing agenda of women's movement.
Maud Sulter was a Scottish contemporary fine artist, photographer, writer, educator, feminist, cultural historian, and curator of Ghanaian heritage. She began her career as a writer and poet, becoming a visual artist not long afterwards. By the end of 1985 she had shown her artwork in three exhibitions and her first collection of poetry had been published. Sulter was known for her collaborations with other Black feminist scholars and activists, capturing the lives of Black people in Europe. She was a champion of the African-American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, and was fascinated by the Haitian-born French performer Jeanne Duval.
Persimmon Blackbridge is a Canadian writer and artist whose work focuses on feminist, lesbian, disability and mental health issues. She identifies herself as a lesbian, a person with a disability and a feminist. Her work explores these intersections through her sculptures, writing, curation and performance. The novels she has written follow characters that are very similar to Blackbridge's own life experiences, allowing her to write honestly about her perspective. Blackbridge's struggle with her mental health has become a large part of her practice, and she uses her experience with mental health institutions to address her perspective on them. Blackbridge is involved in the film, SHAMELESS: The Art of Disability exploring the complexity of living with a disability. Her contributions to projects like this help destigmatize the attitudes towards people with disabilities. Blackbridge has won many awards for her work exploring her identity and the complexities that come with it.
The spoon theory is a metaphor describing the amount of physical and/or mental energy that a person has available for daily activities and tasks, and how it can become limited. It was coined by writer and blogger Christine Miserandino in 2003 as a way to express how it felt to have lupus; explaining the viewpoint in a diner, she gave her friend a handful of spoons and described them as units of energy to be spent performing everyday actions, representing how chronic illness forced her to plan out days and actions in advance so as to not run out of energy.
Diane Borsato is a Canadian visual artist whose work explores pedagogical practices and experiential ways of knowing through performance, intervention, video, installation, and photography. Her multidisciplinary and socially engaged works are often created through the mobilization of distinct groups of people including arts professionals, artists, and naturalists. Her work has been widely exhibited in galleries, museums and artist-run-centres across Canada and internationally, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, The Art Gallery of York University, the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, Art Metropole, Mercer Union, the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal, and in galleries in the US, France, Germany, Mexico, Taiwan and Japan. Borsato was a Sobey Art Award nominee in 2011 and 2013 and the recipient of the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award in 2008 for her research and practices in the Inter-Arts category from the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2013, she was an artist in residence at The Art Gallery of Ontario where she created actions, like Tea Service(Conservators Will Wash the Dishes) and Your Temper, My Weather, that animated the collections and environments of the gallery. Borsato is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studio at the University of Guelph where she teaches in the areas of 2D Integrated Media, Extended Practices and in the MFA program. She creates advanced, thematic studio courses that explore social and conceptual practices that have included Food and Art, Special Topics on Walking, LIVE ART and Outdoor School.
Valérie Blass is a Canadian artist working primarily in sculpture. She lives and works in her hometown of Montreal, Quebec, and is represented by Catriona Jeffries, in Vancouver. She received both her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts, specializing in visual and media arts, from the Université du Québec à Montréal. She employs a variety of sculptural techniques, including casting, carving, moulding, and bricolage to create strange and playful arrangements of both found and constructed objects.
Ann Kipling L.L.D is a Canadian artist who creates impressionistic portraits and landscapes on paper from direct observation. Kipling's distinctive style of overlapping, temporally suggestive linework is formed through her working process, which involves drawing her subject over time, recording subtle shifts in movement in the sitter or landscape during that period. Her work is characterized by a flat sense of space, where lines are used to frame a vibrating and gestural idea of her subject, rather than a direct representation of form. While not directly connected to any art movement in particular, connections can be made to Chinese landscape painters and the watercolours of Paul Cézanne. Using colour minimally, her primary media is etching, drawing, watercolours, pen, pencil, pastels and pencil crayons. She lives and works in Falkland, BC, a location which serves as a focus for her recent landscapes.
Judith Schwarz is a Canadian visual artist. Her work has been featured in exhibitions since 1979.
