Susan Blight

Last updated

Susan Blight
Nationality Couchiching First Nation, Canadian
Alma mater
  • University of Windsor
  • University of Manitoba
Known forFilmmaker, activist, arts educator
Website www.susanblight.com

Susan Blight is an Anishinaabe visual artist, filmmaker, and arts educator from Couchiching First Nation. [1] [2] Her work, especially her public art throughout the city of Toronto, Ontario, often explores themes of "personal and cultural identity and its relationship to space". In 2016, the City of Toronto placed several street signs with Anishinaabe names throughout a neighborhood as a response to the Ogimaa Mikana Project co-founded by Blight. [3]

Contents

Education

Blight holds a Master of Fine Arts in Integrated Media from the University of Windsor, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film studies from the University of Manitoba. She is currently a PhD candidate in Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. [4]

Career

Blight's interdisciplinary work includes projects that combine public art and Anishinaabe culture, language, and history. [1] [2] [5] In 2008, Susan Blight was featured in a group photograph exhibition at the Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography. [6]

During the early 2010s, Blight co-hosted a radio show, Indigenous Waves. [7]

In 2013, Blight and colleague Hayden King co-founded the Ogimaa Mikana Project, [8] [3] [9] an artist collective that reclaims Indigenous place names for Toronto's streets by posting billboards with Anishinaabemowin phrases around the city and pasting stickers with Anishinaabemowin names on street signs. [3] [10] She described one billboard in Parkdale, Toronto, as "reminding people of the 15,000 year [indigenous] history here in Toronto and to affirm our relationship to our language, which is part of our spiritual presence, our political presence, our governance, our health..." in response to the neighborhood's rapid gentrification and loss of its indigenous inhabitants. [11] Three years later, the City of Toronto and a local business group collaborated with Ogimaa Mikana to place several official Anishinaabe street signs at the north end of The Annex neighborhood, with Blight and King as advisers. [3] [12] In 2018, Ogimaa Mikana participated in the exhibition Soundings: An exhibition in Five Parts curated by Candice Hopkins and Dylan Robinson. [13] They created an outdoor public installation entitled Never Stuck, a vinyl transfer installed on Mackintosh-Corry Hall at Queen's University main campus. [14]

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References

  1. 1 2 "Susan Blight". Feminist Art Collective. February 28, 2014. Archived from the original on November 8, 2018. Retrieved August 31, 2018.
  2. 1 2 "Susan Blight". Gallery 44.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Kestler-D'Amours, Jillian. "First Nations reclaim the streets of Toronto". www.aljazeera.com. Archived from the original on November 20, 2018. Retrieved November 21, 2018.
  4. ↑ "Artist Talk with Susan Blight". SoCA Visual Arts. Archived from the original on June 20, 2018. Retrieved August 31, 2018.
  5. ↑ "SusanBlight | Bio". Artist | Susan Blight. Archived from the original on November 8, 2018. Retrieved August 31, 2018.
  6. ↑ Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography. (2008). Proof 15: Susan Blight, Michele Crockett, Keesic Douglas, Michael Love, Bradley Olson, Erik Osberg, Celia Perrin Sidarous.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  7. ↑ Poet, Black Coffee (February 29, 2012). "INTERVIEW WITH INDIGENOUS WAVES RADIO PRODUCER JAMAIAS DACOSTA AND CO-HOSTS LINDY KINOSHAMEG AND SUSAN BLIGHT". Black Coffee Poet. Archived from the original on February 22, 2019. Retrieved February 22, 2019.
  8. ↑ "Ogimaa Mikana Project". Archived from the original on October 17, 2019. Retrieved October 17, 2019.
  9. ↑ "Place Making: Indigenous street naming". The Ontario Association of Landscape Architects. Retrieved February 22, 2019.
  10. ↑ Hunt, Dallas; Stevenson, Shaun A. (July 3, 2017). "Decolonizing geographies of power: indigenous digital counter-mapping practices on turtle Island". Settler Colonial Studies. 7 (3): 372–392. doi:10.1080/2201473X.2016.1186311. ISSN   2201-473X. S2CID   156888937.
  11. ↑ "Susan Blight and Anishinabemowin in art". CBC. Archived from the original on August 21, 2018. Retrieved November 21, 2018.
  12. ↑ "Indigenous street names in Toronto get noticed and made 'official'". Public Radio International. Archived from the original on February 22, 2019. Retrieved February 22, 2019.
  13. ↑ "Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts". Agnes Etherington Art Centre At Queen's. Archived from the original on August 2, 2019.
  14. ↑ "Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts". Kingston Arts Council. Archived from the original on October 30, 2019.
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