This event kicks off with a talk from multi-disciplinary artist and founder of Black Arts Vancouver, Chase Keetley, who created the multimedia altar installation We Lost People: Diasporic Departure (2021) alongside Berlynn Beam in MOA’s feature exhibition, Sankofa: African Routes, Canadian Roots. Keetley will discuss his work and the ideas and process behind his artistic practice.

This will be followed by poetry readings and a book signing from artist, poet and award-winning educator, Chantal Gibson, whose installation, Souvenir (2017) is also on display in Sankofa. Gibson will be reading from her two recent books of poetry, How She Read and with/holding (available for purchase at the MOA Shop). Gibson will be available for book signings.

Bios

 Chase Keetley is a multi-disciplinary African-Canadian artist whose work is based in the Black Experience. He investigates the mimicry and use of Blackness, such as the appropriation of cultural practices and iconography rooted in Pan-African Ethnography. Keetley’s practice takes a close look at the identities, desires, and the investments of non-Black people and how they live vicariously through Black Culture without actively dismantling the issues that coincide within its existence. Keetley’s work continually confronts forms of oppositional representations put on Black Bodies.

Chantal Gibson is an award-winning writer-artist-educator. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her work confronts colonialism head on, imagining the BIPOC voices silenced in the spaces and omissions left by cultural and institutional erasure. Her visual art has been exhibited in galleries and museums across Canada and the US.

Her book of poetry How She Read (Caitlin Press, 2019), which explores the representation of Black women in Canadian history, art, and literature, won the 2020 Pat Lawther Memorial Award and 2020 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her follow-up collection, with/holding (Caitlin Press, 2021) brings a critical lens to the representation and reproduction of Blackness across digital media.

Proof of vaccination

As per provincial orders, all special event participants 12 and older will be required to provide proof of full vaccination (eg. BC Vaccine Card). MOA reserves the right to deny entry or participation to anyone who doesn’t comply with MOA’s stated policies, procedures and visitor code of conduct.