UNION GALLERY — FERTILE GROUND READING GROUP

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

FERTILE GROUND READING GROUP

As we welcome in our annual curatorial theme of home/land, we invite interested community members to join us in a unique peer-to-peer teaching and learning program, Fertile Ground. Each participant will lend 1-2 books to a wall display at Union Gallery throughout the summer, meeting with the larger group to gather, get inspired, and co-create group activities prompted by the library we create together. Books of all kinds are welcome (novels, essay collections, comics, poetry, etc.) and will be available for visitors to read from June 6–July 24.

APPLY NOW

Header Image: Close-up of Jill Price's PhD thesis Unsettling to UN/making growing in the Gallery Garden, 2023

DATES

Apply with interest by: May 27, 2024
Meet + Greet: Wednesday, June 5 at 6pm
Reading Group Programs: Wednesdays, June 12, July 3, 24 at 6pm

ABOUT THE THEME

Union Gallery’s broad curatorial theme for this year is home/land, which centres Indigenous stories of kinship, harvest, healing, resistance, and dreaming—expanding the conversation outward to include other perspectives on the idea of belonging to place. Join us for a year of gallery installations, gatherings, and gardening, beginning in May 2024. Here are some suggested ways of approaching this theme in your book selection:

What types of knowledge does the land inherently hold? How should it be accessed and shared to create a more just and livable society?
Searching for home: experiences of immigration, housing, colonization, and diasporic or marginalized identities.
Land use in terms of belonging, ownership, and control. How do our current systems of control on this land reproduce harm and what changes are needed? What might positive and sustainable engagement with land look like? Who needs to be involved and how?

Join the Fertile Ground Reading Group!

EQUITY STATEMENT

Union Gallery is committed to equity, diversity and inclusion in all aspects of our programming and operations. We welcome applications from qualified 2SLGBTQ+ individuals of all races, gender identities, socioeconomic statuses, and (dis)abilities. We strongly encourage applications from equity-seeking communities. We recognize that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour), QPoC (Queer People of Colour) and 2SLGBTQIA+ (Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, +) are disproportionately underrepresented within institutional art spaces. Due to ongoing systemic barriers, we prioritize applicants who self-identify as BIPOC, QPOC, 2SLGBTQIA+.

UNION GALLERY is funded and supported by Queen's University, Alma Mater Society (AMS), Society of Graduate and Professional Students (SGPS), Ontario Arts Council, City of Kingston Arts Fund–Kingston Arts Council and the City of Kingston, with partnerships with Stauffer Library, Cultural Studies, Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies, and Art History and Art Conservation.