Join Armando Perla, acting Co-Director and Chief Curator of the Textile Museum of Canada, along with artist and independent curator Michaëlle Sergile and associate professor Miranda Smitheram, in a conversation around textiles, art, fashion and cultural institutions.
Textiles contain many stories. This session looks at the many stories and histories untold and misrepresented through colonial narratives, as well as current practices that are actively rewriting histories and collaboratively imagining futures.
This event is organized as part of the Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction exhibition on view at the National Gallery of Canada until March 2nd. This transformative exhibition explores how abstract art and woven textiles have intertwined over the past seventy years.
Before the main event, Textiles & Materiality cluster invites you to joinsWoven Stories, a panel discussion between led by PhD student Morris Fox. This session, featuring members, artists, and PhD scholars will take place in the Milieux Learning Atelier prior to the main conversation.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Armando Perla is a non-binary queer mestizo curator currently acting as Co-Director and Chief Curator at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto. Previously, Perla was Chief Curator for the City of Toronto, and Vice-President of the Canadian Museums Association.
They also worked as an Assistant Professor on Decolonization and Race in the iSchool at the University of Toronto, and served as International Advisor on Museums for the City of Medellin, Colombia. In addition, they were part of the founding team for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and Project Leader for the Swedish Museum of Migration and Democracy. In 2021, they were awarded the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Doctoral Fellowship.
Michaëlle Sergile is an artist and independent curator working mainly on archives including texts and works from the postcolonial period from 1950 to today. Her artistic work aims to understand and rewrite the history of Black communities, and more specifically of women, or communities living in diverse intersections, through weaving. Often perceived as a medium of craftsmanship and categorized as feminine, the artist uses the lexicon of weaving to question the relationships of gender and race.
She has exhibited at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art de Joliette and the Off Biennale de Dakar. Her name was also on the long list of the prestigious Sobey Award for the Arts in 2022. In 2023, she won Visual Artist of the Year at the Gala Dynastie and began a residency at the Darling Foundry. She exhibited her work at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto and the McCord Stewart Museum in 2024.
Associate Professor Miranda Smitheram is an artist, design researcher and educator. Miranda was raised within a bicultural context in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and draws upon her Māori and settler-colonial heritage in her work.
Developing new hybrid materials to contribute to sustainable, relational and postcolonial futures, she centres her approach on crafting with the environment. This is explored through digital, physical and hybrid materialities. Miranda’s current research investigates ontologies of kinship, contested places, and decolonizing matter through research-creation, by rematerializing invasive plant species and contaminants into soft surface, biocomposite and textile applications.
📅: February 20, 2025 | 6-7:30 PM
📍: National Gallery of Canada, Auditorium / Live-broadcasted into Milieux Learning Atelier EV 11.425
The event will be held in English with simultaneous French interpretation.
Organized in partnership with Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, the Textiles and Materiality Research Cluster at Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology and the National Gallery of Canada.