Creating Communities Through Art is a collaborative research project and partnership between Union Gallery and the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning. An interdisciplinary team of 6 graduate students are conducting research on community-led arts pedagogy initiatives in the Katarokwi-Kingston region—past, present and future.

The aim of the project is to explore and understand community-led artistic production and education as forms of social engagement and worldmaking. Instead of focusing on the existing scholarship on community-based arts pedagogy and socially engaged art, their research centres voices and perspectives that have not yet been fully considered in analyses of the impact of these movements on the field of contemporary art.

Shifting the research question from “how does the nature of teaching and learning in community-based contexts differ from that experienced in more conventional contexts?” to “how does the nature of teaching and learning in community-based contexts reflect and serve the communities in which they are embedded?” promises to open generative new discussions about the meanings and roles of socially engaged art and arts education in contemporary life.

This research project is generously funded by the Mitacs Accelerate Fellowship and supported by the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning.

To learn more about the project, please reach out to Research Fellow & Curator, Jung-Ah Kim, ug.researchfellow@gmail.com

Creating Communities Through Art is an ongoing project—check back for updates on the research process and stay tuned for details on an upcoming exhibition in Summer 2022.

Research Team

Jung-Ah Kim

Jung-Ah Kim is a Ph.D. student in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. Prior to coming to Queen’s, she received her MFA in Documentary Media from Northwestern University (2019) in Chicago. Her areas of research include migration experiences, textile art in relation to time-based media, and media archaeology all contributing to developing a system of non-narrative filmmaking practice. Coming to this project, she is looking forward to expanding her interests and experience in conducting oral histories and working with communities that inform her curatorial practice.

Drew Burton

Drew Burton is a PhD student in Art History at Queen’s University studying the censorship of queer art in American museums and galleries. His MA research focused on the scandalization and censorship of the art and biography of Egon Schiele. His PhD research builds on this research by extending key questions related to the social, political, and financial motivations that drive campaigns to censor and alter the presentation of modern art into the contemporary period. He has lived in Katarokwi/Kingston since beginning his education at Queen’s University in 2013 and serves as the Co-Chair of the Board of Directors at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre. Currently, he is learning to embroider as a way to cope with the pandemic.

Peggy Fussell

Peggy Fussell is a PhD student in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. She studied visual communication at Pratt Institute and comes to this project with professional experience as an animator and museum educator. She has training in a variety of museum pedagogies and has created accessible experiences with art for all ages and abilities. These learning environments support intergenerational fun and learning outside of the classroom and include installations, obstacle courses, collaborative art projects and events in museums and arboretums. Currently, she is researching and making craft based animation and optical toys.

Tia Bankosky

Tia is in the one-year Masters of Cultural Studies program. She completed her Bachelor of Arts Honours in Indigenous Environmental Studies and Sciences at Trent University in 2021. Broadly, Tia is interested in exploring storytelling and justice. Through Cultural Studies, she hopes to learn more about the potential for stories in fostering empathy for others, developing understanding of equity, and facilitating reciprocal relationships with nature and more-than-human beings. Tia is very excited to be involved in this art-based pedagogy and storytelling research project with Union Gallery and the Tett Centre as a way to learn about the art organizations in Ka’tarohkwi and improve her research skills.

Prerana Das

Prerana is a first-year PhD student at Queen’s University and her thesis aims to explore the impacts of intergenerational mobility among women on Darjeeling’s tea plantations in India. She is a documentary filmmaker and researcher with a particular interest in stories of migration, border politics, and processes of displacement. Her work strives for visual advocacy and often explores embodied histories within landscapes and spaces, as well as their relationship to cultural and personal memory. Prerana has worked as an oral historian and is excited to apply collaborative methodologies to the study of arts-based pedagogy in Katarokwi.

Jessa Laframboise

Jessa Laframboise is a feminist artist and art historian from Northern Ontario. She holds a BFA from Nipissing University, an MA in Art History, and a graduate diploma in Curatorial Studies from Carleton University. She currently resides in Kingston, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in the Art History program at Queen’s University. Jessa is interested in praxis-based, feminist-oriented research methods, autotheory, and blending creative writing techniques into her projects. Her research focuses on feminist art education, alternative centres, community-oriented collectives, and experimental programming and pedagogy developed by second-wave feminist artists. Jessa is currently working on a project that places the past and the present in conversation, reinterpreting and reactivating 1970s feminist art pedagogy to suit the needs and values of contemporary art students.

Jen Kennedy

Jen Kennedy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Queen’s where her teaching and research focuses on contemporary art history and theory with an emphasis on feminisms, transnationalism, and intersections between art, mass media, and politics since the 1950s.

Carina Magazzeni

Carina Magazzeni is a curator, digital designer and arts worker. Magazzeni is the Director of Union Gallery and maintains an independent curatorial practice. Her work is driven by queer, feminist and decolonial politics and strategies within and beyond gallery spaces.