A trove of paintings is held on McMaster’s campus. Monet, Matisse and Van Gogh are just some of the artists in the collection. Staples in galleries around the world, immortalized in art prints or socks, these artists have reached the pinnacle of the art world, but also having a place in Hamilton.
The collection of European masterpieces comes from Herman Levy, a Hamilton businessman and art lover who once took art history classes at McMaster. Levy was a jeweler by trade and in his spare time an engaged member of the McMaster and Hamilton art communities. His interest in European art prompted him to collect famous works from the canon throughout his lifetime, including German expressionists and French painters.
Levy donated his private collection to the McMaster Museum of Art in 1984, and upon his death in 1990 left a bequest so the collection could be expanded. The accumulated art works now belong to McMaster and have toured the world, a testament to the collection’s prestige.
The Levy collection’s return from a cross-Canada tour brings 185 European and American art works back to their Hamilton home. But first the works had to be curated into an exhibit that would resonate with viewers nearly 30 years after Levy’s death. Faced with this challenge, Pamela Edmonds, the senior curator at the MMA, interpreted the pieces to provoke new ideas and interpretations in the homecoming exhibition.
French masters Monet and Matisse now hang on the white walls of the MMA. Monet’s painting of Waterloo bridge shows an industrial scene against a hazy sky, not unlike the real scenes of Hamilton’s shores. Except this image is worth millions. Another work by the impressionist sold for $110.7 Million in May 2019.
But cost doesn’t necessarily equal value.
“The Monet is something I’ve been told is in demand all the time for people to see, but is it more about the cachet or whatever around the artist, or is it the actual object. And so I was trying to play with the hierarchy — of why something if it’s worth $50 million makes it more important? Does it really? . . . For me, I could be just as connected to something if I don’t know the artist,” said Edmonds.
Levy’s donations reflected his art interests: artists are predominantly European, and almost exclusively white. Edmonds, throughout her career as a curator, has questioned why galleries and exhibits didn’t seem to reflect perspectives beyond the western canon. Without curation, dominant voices within the art canon remain unchallenged, despite representing very few experiences captured in the visual form. This prompted the curator to consider how to include more works from the long history of non-western visual arts in the newest presentation of the Levy collection.
The latest exhibition of the collection, it is from here that the world unfolds, which opened Aug. 24 and will run through Dec. 14 2019, prompts viewers to reconsider the familiar art works.
In this exhibition, the big names in the Levy collection are accompanied by artworks that speak to the gaps of a history without much diversity. Contemporary, modern and historical works come together to create an aesthetic experience that contradicts the elitism of the art world. It doesn’t pretend to represent all of art history, but nods to what is missing.
Reflecting on her curatorial practice, Edmonds says, “it was a great opportunity for me to bring together a show . . . from a lens that critiques that canon but still does so respectfully — these are amazing artists — but trying to put a spin on it that’s questioning the way that art has been presented in that linear, universal, humanist way.”
The exhibit, titled it is from here that the world unfolds goes against curatorial convention by avoiding linearity. It doesn’t present a history. Instead, it presents moments in time, space and aesthetic perspectives that speak to one another and to the viewer. That’s what Edmonds thinks that art spaces should be about — a conversation between the art, creator and the person experiencing it.
“The museum, the library, those are kind of the few spaces left that you can congregate to talk about ideas, or to engage in ideas. And I think that specifically within the university, we should be having an engaging conversation around art and ideas … I wanted to take a collection that was maybe more historic but bring it into the 21st century.”
The MMA holds a unique position compared to other galleries and museums in Hamilton. Situated on McMaster’s campus, the MMA has a responsibility to the students, staff and community members who live, work and study here. Edmonds wants students to feel comfortable coming through the front doors. The rules and etiquette of galleries-past do not need to deter visitors. No longer should art spaces exist as stuffy and exclusive places, they should exist for everyone, equally. At the MMA, the quiet is welcome, but not mandatory. As long as you don’t touch it, the art is yours to engage with however you like.
As the world moves faster and public spaces are closed, the museum is one of the last few spaces that exist for the public good. It is one of the few places that are quiet, free of charge and open for all.
Museum goers can expect to see historic works alongside yarn-like sculptures and red squares. If the viewer finds themselves frustrated, then Edmonds says: good. She wants to set up questions without answers and evoke feelings from viewers. Even negative emotional reactions are good, because it means the art is speaking to someone.
For students, the MMA could be a space to decompress or learn something new — but it’s up to you. Edmonds encourages on-lookers to take what they want from the exhibit, even if there isn’t any further engagement beyond viewership.
Visiting it is from here that the world unfolds, time periods and emotions collide. Looking at the giant canvas of Wailing Women (1990) by Ken Currie along with Sun Ra’s chaotic jazz accompaniment, there is a confrontation of eras and aesthetics. The interplay is jarring, and be advised, so is Currie’s painting of a mob of dismembered women. But it is also a reminder of the non-linearity of the exhibit.
Just around the corner from Currie’s work is a set of 16th century religious icons beside a mid-dentury mixed-media piece that is almost erotic and references a variety of eras. The exhibit is jarringly ahistorical, but purposefully so.
Museums are places for the free flow of ideas and dialogue around art and the world in which it is created. The MMA is a place to see important works from the European art canon, but it also gives students, staff and community the opportunity to think about dominant narratives in the art world. Levy’s legacy is held in trust for present and future generations, and will continue to spur creativity and criticism for years to come.
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By: Donna Nadeem
The Disability Justice Network of Ontario is a Hamilton-based organization launched in September by McMaster alumni Sarah Jama and Eminet Dagnachew and McMaster student Shanthiya Baheerathan.
The co-founders initially got together because of their aligning interests. For instance, Jama was working with the McMaster Students Union Diversity Services as an access coordinator, trying to push the university to create a service for people with disabilities.
“I always think that there is more that could be done, that the institution doesn’t do a good job of supporting people with disabilities in terms of responding to professors who don’t want to accommodate. There is still a lot from what I’m seeing as a person who has graduated,” said Jama.
Last year, the co-founders received an Ontario Trillium grant over 36 months to create and run the organization. The basis of DJNO is to pose questions to the community of people with disabilities to see what it is they want to work on and how DJNO can use their resources to support the community it serves.
One of DJNO’s larger goals is to politically activate and mobilize people with disabilities who consistently get left out of conversations that affect their lives.
“Our goal is to politically activate and mobilize people with disabilities across the city and the province over time and to be able to hold the institutions and places and people accountable for the spaces that they create,” said Jama.
The research committee for DJNO has recently been working on data collection for a study on issues for racialized people with disabilities.
According to Jama, there is a lack of data collection on this subject.
The DJNO also has a youth advisory council that teaches people with disabilities how to politically organize.
In just a few months of being in operation, the DJNO has hosted several events, such as a community conversation event about the Hamilton light rail transit project, a film screening and panel discussion about Justice For Soli, a movement seeking justice for the death of Soleiman Faqiri, who was killed in prison after being beaten by guards.
The film screening and panel discussion was organized alongside McMaster Muslims For Peace and Justice and the McMaster Womanists.
On March 26, the DJNO will be hosting an event called “Race and Disability: Beyond a One Dimensional Framework” in Celebration Hall at McMaster.
This discussion, being organized in collaboration with the MSU Maccess and the MSU Women and Gender Equity Network, will tackle “the intersections of race/racialization, disability, and gender for all McMaster Community Members.”
Next week, the DJNO will also be organizing a rally with Justice for Soli in order to speak out against violence against people with disabilities.
“The Justice for Soli team has been tirelessly advocating for justice, accountability, sounding the alarm of deeply systemic issues in the prison system, namely the violence that it inflicts on racialized peoples, and people with disabilities,” reads part of the event page.
For McMaster students interested in getting involved with the organization, DJNO has some open committees and is looking for individuals to help identify major community issues.
The campaign committee meets at the Hamilton Public Library monthly. Students can email info@djno.ca for more information.
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The paper received an email asking for a response to a few questions by July 25 for an article that will be up on J-Source, which is a collaboration of post-secondary journalism schools led by Ryerson, Laval and Carleton. It will be about whether student media represents the diversity of Canada.
The questions mainly had to do with the self-identification of the editorial board, our staff, on a number of different categories. These were based on gender, race with specific note to Indigenous people, disabilities and gender or sexual minorities. While they could have divided a few of these categories to be more specific, analysis of diversity in the workplace continues to be a positive endeavour that should be undertaken and explored more in-depth.
McMaster’s Employment Equity Working Committee released a new report on July 23 in a similar vein. It provides a detailed roadmap based on input from different parts of campus, e.g., each of the different faculties and research departments. The focus is primarily on “... a more complete understanding of representation of all four groups designated by the Federal Contractors Program: women; First Nations, Metis and Inuit (FNMI) peoples; persons with disabilities; and members of visible minorities, as well as the representation of trans and LGBTQ+ employees.”
The last recent example for this article will be a comment piece by the Public Editor over at The Varsity, which is the University of Toronto’s student newspaper. While a lot of it has to do with online commenting platforms, it transitions into the commitment the paper has, “... to diversity in its newsroom and reporting.” Their primary focus seems to be on gender and race.
These three examples from university campus media and McMaster have varying degrees of data collection and analysis, but all of them miss a few categories. While there are more categories of diversity, these three are, arguably, the most apparent ones missing.
The first is socioeconomic status. However, that would have less influence if you are considering only university student journalists or McMaster employees in your sample. The second would be ideologies, e.g., political beliefs and religious beliefs. I can understand not asking these respondents may not be comfortable answering accurately or answering at all, and may change at a more variable rate over time. The third is age.
While certainly not as attractive a stat, diversity in age should be deemed an importance if your goal is to represent the population in what you report about, who is reporting and the demographics of your employees.
University is always idealized as a place where you develop and grow. It is easy for anyone to note the differences between a first year and a fourth year and someone fresh out of university to someone about to go into retirement. When you are getting survey data or considering your workplace’s diversity, why would you ignore something as important as age?
It is simply too important. When it comes to reporting at The Silhouette, diversity and different perspectives have a significant influence on our articles in every section. The diversity of who is reporting it or who is being reported on is vital to allow a full representation of the McMaster student body, and to continue to progress and pass on information to the younger members of staff before graduating.
We cannot afford to ignore age. If other organizations or the university have missed the point by filling quotas instead of noting the benefits and embracing all types of diversity, including one as obvious as age, then that is disappointing.
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In April, two reports based on racial equity in education involving data from the Toronto District School Board were published. These detailed a number of issues facing Black students including an increased likelihood of being streamed into non-academic programs, a higher likelihood of suspension due to attitude rather than behaviour and higher drop-out rates.
These reports mainly concerned high school policies. These issues of racial equity are hypothesized to continue at a post-secondary level given that the pathways to this level have these concerns.
The influence of high school policies can be observed, but the effects of universities’ policies cannot.
As revealed by a CBC News investigation in March, 63 out of 76 Canadian universities could not provide a breakdown of their student populations by race. The data is not there to draw any conclusions from.
“How can you decide if access programs are working if you have no way of measuring the population that should be most affected by these access policies?” said Karen Robson, head of the Gateway Cities team and the Ontario Research Chair in Educational Achievement and At-Risk Youth.
The Gateway Cities Project, a four year program funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, is centered on examining the determinants of post-secondary pathways for high school students in five cities: Toronto, Vancouver, Chicago, New York and London, England. One of the main concerns brought up by Robson is this inability to access pathways from the perspective of Canadian post-secondary institutions.
McMaster is one of the 63 could not provide a breakdown. They do not ask students to provide information about their racial identity.
“How can you decide if access programs are working if you have no way of measuring the population that should be most affected by these access policies?”
Karen Robson
Ontario Research Chair
Educational Advancement and At-Risk Youth
There are a few reasons why there is opposition to this in Canadian universities. The first is that there is misinformation about the legality of collecting the data. Concordia stated it is illegal to ask in Quebec in the CBC investigation, but this is not the case.
Robson mentioned that there is a lot of misinformation that universities have about the legality of asking for data even if they did not state this upfront.
“A lot of administration believes that collecting race data is a violation of human rights when in fact, it is not. I don’t know where this came from, I really don’t, and it’s a total red herring.”
The “Policy and guidelines on racism and racial discrimination” paper created by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, approved in 2005, mentions that the collection of data about race is permissible and recommended.
The second issue is the threat of being seen as racist. The investigation stated Mount Royal University had this worry, and University of Waterloo explained it does not collect the data because the school does not discriminate based on race or any other grounds.
“It’s not so surprising that we’re not collecting race data if we can’t even have conversations about race without feeling like we might be being racist just by talking about it,” said Robson.
There appears to be some progress being made at McMaster towards collecting data.
“McMaster’s not particularly special in that they don’t collect race data. … I’m working with admin on retention strategies. I have brought this up, and they are receptive to collecting this kind of data,” said Robson.
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Sarah Kay makes stories into poetry and poetry into therapy, a war cry for the fallen and a fireplace for the restful. No Matter the Wreckage is a collection of her poems which you may have heard spoken out loud at a poetry slam contest or during her iconic TED Talk. For those who yawn at the mere mention of a poem, Kay will change how you see poetry.
Kay shines a light into all the corners of life that are rough and cracked, the ones most of the rest of us try so hard to hide from. In one of her poems, Kay describes people as boats. Some of us are battle ships, others rowboats. Some of us are hole-ridden, but we still say we’re only a little banged up. But all of that doesn’t matter, because “no matter [our] wreckage, there will be someone to find [us] beautiful.”
She tells tales of love – motherly love, passionate love that consumes you, lingering love for a ghost of someone that has moved on, and unconventional love. In “Hands”, Sarah talks about hands holding hands, hands holding pencils, hands making fists. She says hands are about love, not politics, yet “each country sees its fists as warriors/ and others as enemies, even if fists alone are only hands.”
In a moment of anxiety, Kay frets about the importance of making our actions meaningful now because we don’t know how much time we have left. Which words will be our last, and will they be worth it? What about all of our constant doubt? We are so obsessed with the past and enamoured with the future, that we are surprised when the present has passed us by. “The Paradox” takes a look at our constant worry that there is something better that we could be doing, when really we should be thankful for all the things we did, or at least all the things we knew for sure we didn’t want to do.
In one of my personal favourites, “Hand-Me-Downs”, she compares hatred that makes its way down generations to hand-me-down clothes. At first the clothes fit a little loosely, but as we grow into them they mould to us, become a part of us. And so we are part genetics and part expectation, when maybe we should be a little bit less predetermined and always a size too small for our hand-me-downs.
The cover on my copy of No Matter the Wreckage is a drawing of a woman playing an accordion in a boat on choppy waters. Kay is the woman and the accordion her poetry, a dry haven for when the winds become wild and the waters are choppy. Kay should never worry if her last words will be worthwhile, because the words seen in this collection provide reassurance to anyone who reads them.
By: Michelle Yeung
"We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life.”
The Opposite of Loneliness is a posthumous collection of stories and essays written by the late Yale University graduate Marina Keegan. Through her work, Keegan showed that there are few things in life more incredible than being young and hopeful and endlessly frustrated.
“We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time,” she said. Perhaps that’s why her words resonate with me so deeply – like her, the possibility of youth baffles me.
These are stories about falling in love and falling out of love, late-night drinking and early morning hangovers. They are stories about balancing the recklessness of youth with the responsibilities of adulthood, about the moments we realize the mortality of our parents, about the late nights spent wondering whether we love what we do enough to be poor. She perfectly captures what it’s like to be at the cusp of adulthood. This is what makes her work so powerful – it’s incredibly relatable.
But her collection of stories do not stay in the confines of university; it spans the world, from a submarine stuck undersea to a military base in Baghdad to her 1990 Toyota Camry in her driveway back home. In Against the Grain, she discusses living with celiac disease. In Reading Aloud, she dives into the relationship between a blind man and a naked woman. In Why We Care About Whales, she wonders why people are so strange about animals, especially large ones. Each story is about something entirely different, but all are entertaining as they are thought-provoking. It isn’t Keegan’s death that captivates people – it is her charm and raw, indisputable talent. She is young, but not naive. She is ingenious. She is a wordsmith. She can craft a beautiful, poetic sentence just to hit you in the face with a blunt and evocative statement.
The Opposite of Loneliness is an ode to youthful exuberance, a symphony for those who are equal parts fearless and afraid. It is a collection of ballads and rap remixes and alternative rock medleys; there’s something for everyone. Pick it up when you’re feeling a little lonely and you’ll know that there is someone else in this vast, unforgiving world who feels the same. You will be reminded of all that’s out there just waiting for you to grab hold of. Marina Keegan has left behind an anthem of salvaged hope, one that I will put on repeat for a very long time.
Farzeen Foda
Senior News Editor
The Holocasut has been extensively documented in numerous forms - through print, film and documentaries yet all modes share a common theme: they focus heavily on the stories and recollections of just a few of the millions of people affected by the tragedy that has been seen as one of humanity’s greatest failures.
In an effort provide a more in depth insight into the Holocaust and the experiences of the survivors who have lived to tell their story, the USC Shoah Foundation, founded by world renowned producer Steven Spielburg and Branko Lustig, a Holocaust survivor and Oscar Award-winning producer, has donated the Visual History Archive to McMaster.
The archive, offered through McMaster University’s online network for access from the University campus as well as through remote access to McMaster’s Virtual Privacy Network, is intended for use by students, faculty and researchers.
The archive is one of the largest of its kind, and McMaster is the only Canadian university to offer the collection of nearly 52,000 testimonies from Holocaust survivors coming from a variety of groups targeted by the genocide.
The archive contains testimonies from Jewish survivors, Jehovah’s Witness, homosexual, liberators and liberation witnesses, rescuers and aid providers, political prisoners, Sinti and Roma survivors, as well as participants of war crime trials and survivors of Eugenics policies.
Interviews were conducted in 52 different countries with approximately 3,000 of those interviews in Canada, 34 of which were conducted in Hamilton. The Visual History Archive houses interviews from survivors as well as letters written by Holocaust victims in a variety of languages.
Bringing a collection of this sort to McMaster has been an ongoing effort since 2009, and to commemorate those efforts, a launch event was held on Nov. 3 in CIBC Hall. The event saw prominent speakers from the McMaster, Hamilton and the Jewish community.
Notable speakers included University president Patrick Deane, University librarian Jeff Trzeciack, Hamilton Mayor Bob Bratina, the Consul General for the Republic of Croatia, and the president of the Hamilton Jewish Federation, as well as Lustig himself, who served as a strong driving force behind the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive.
Many of the speakers drew on their own experiences, emphasizing the impact of the Holocaust within Hamilton and the obligation to preserve the individual stories of each survivor.
Mayor Bob Bratina spoke of his journey to his grandfather’s home town where he learned of how the Holocaust swept through the town, taking with it some of his own ancestors.
Lustig, who was met with a standing ovation following his speech, explained the gruelling experience he endured during the Holocaust as a preteen boy, and how it led him to embark on a career in film and create the Visual History Archive.
Lustig sees his efforts as his way of giving back to the people he sadly left behind during his traumatic experiences in the concentration camps. “I do my best to fulfill my promise to these people in Auchwitz,” he said, after explaining his tumultuous experience being shunted between concentration camps around Europe.
From such experiences, and the Archive’s letters and interviews, history is made. Although written in different languages, it is these pieces of history that compose, outline, and chronicle humanity’s greatest example of unquestionable vileness and wretchedness.
And yet within each paragraph, each sentence, and each letter, comes the hope of eventual unity and peace that transgresses any boundary, any language, or any culture.
