This Week at Agnes

Zina Saro-Wiwa: Assembly #6

A social sculpture and a secular ritual that carries resonances of fellowship and solidarity, Zina Saro-Wiwa’s Assembly is a living, evolving performance piece created in collaboration with local audience-participants to share and express her findings on African sociality, botanicals, spirituality, and science. They make space for new stories to bubble forth from older forms and connect people, places and histories. This is the first major presentation of Saro-Wiwa’s work in Canada. The event is free, sign up.

Made possible through funding from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario / Agence federale de developpement economique pour le Sud de l’Ontario.

Hilos Conductores 

Hilos Conductores brings together arpilleras created during the Chilean dictatorship with recent work of textile artists and collectives to follow the threads linking our lives and futures across the continent.

While grounded in personal histories and local resistance, the textile pieces by Bélgica Castro, Memorarte, Soledad Muñoz, Tamara Marcos and Autorretazo are hilos conductores that reflect on accumulation schemes and supply chains that connect distant geographies. By presenting these works together with arpilleras created between the 1980s and the early 1990s, this exhibition honours the work of arpillera makers and the longstanding struggles, now more urgent than ever, against authoritarianism, free-market orthodoxy and extractivism. Curated by Nathalia Santos Ocasio

Keep your eye on Digital Agnes in late May for an online exhibition of Hilos Conductores.

Co-presented by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Sur Gallery, and the Textile Museum of Canada.

Chaka Chikodzi

The first commissioned film in the Artists at Agnes series features Zimbabwean-Canadian stone sculptor Chaka Chikodzi and is produced by Naomi Okabe and Tess Girard. The film debuted at the Kingston Canadian Film Festival and received the Best Local Short Film Award! It also screened online and in-person at the Belleville Downtown DocFest. It is now available for you on Digital Agnes >

Generously supported by the Elizabeth L. Gordon Art Program, a program of the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation and administered by the Ontario Arts Foundation.

Sweet Grass, Boiled Eggs and Table Manners

In this episode, poet Billie the Kid talks with Qanita Lilla about honouring stories as living entities. Through storytelling she manifests light, hope and joy. Billie’s practice takes us on a journey through a tapestry of family, poet communities, and resonant connections with mentors. The fundamental humour in her writing emerges as speaking back to what it means to be an Indigenous poet living in Kingston.

New episodes of the second season are available online every month on Digital AGNES and distributed by our partners at CFRC 101.9 FM to popular podcasting platforms. The podcast is supported by The George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University; the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Fund; and Young Canada Works Building Careers in Heritage, a program funded by the Government of Canada.

E-commerce for Artists, with Jill Glatt

Do you want to know how to better tap into selling artwork online? Maybe you are a vendor at markets, and having e-commerce would help you manage inventory and payments. Maybe you want to reach a farther audience and be able to make more passive income from your artwork. Making a living as an artist means understanding how to build an audience, how to price art products and the unique requirements for shipping art.
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This series is co-presented by Agnes, Modern Fuel and Union Gallery.

Digitizing the entire historical dress and textile collection

Marissa Monette, Textile Conservation Technician and Julia Popsin-Gomes, Textile Technician Assistant have been working on digitizing the entire historical dress and textile collection. There are over 2500 objects, including 475 complete dresses, 151 fans and purses, 235 headwear items, and 177 objects associated with childrenswear. Read more about what’s involved with preparing this collection for digitization and long-term storage during our closure.