ART TALK
In Conversation: Sandra Brewster & Betty Julian
Saturday, May 25th at 2 pm
Free event! Please RSVP through this link.
Join artist Sandra Brewster and special guest Betty Julian, Adjunct Senior Curator, McMaster Museum of Art, for an engaging discussion and walking tour of Lullaby of Birdland currently on view at Olga Korper Gallery.
Learn more about Lullaby of Birdland here.
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Sandra Brewster is a Canadian artist based in Toronto whose work employs a range of media to engage concepts of movement that express an internal relationship with identity. Her practice is grounded in people of the Caribbean diaspora, who maintain a relationship with “back home”. Born to Guyanese parents, she is interested in a multilayered sense of being made up of a collision between geographies and temporalities. She expresses these complexities via the unfixed nature of her work’s materiality and presentation.
Sandra’s work has been featured internationally. Recent group and solo exhibitions have been held at Kenderdine Art Gallery / College Art Galleries in Saskatoon, Leonard & Bina Art Gallery in Montreal, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Les Rencontres d’Arles in France, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Or Gallery in Vancouver, Rajko Mamuzic Gallery in Novi Sad, Serbia and Lagos Photo Festival in Nigeria.
Sandra Brewster is a recent residency fellow of Artpace San Antonio, Loghaven Artist Residency in Knoxville and Sacatar Brazil. She has been awarded the Gattuso Prize for outstanding featured exhibition of CONTACT Photography Festival 2017, the Toronto Friends of Visual Arts Artist Prize in 2018, a finalist for the 2023 Scotiabank Photography Award, and the recipient of the prestigious Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award in 2024. She is represented by Olga Korper Gallery.
Betty Julian is the Adjunct Senior Curator at the McMaster Museum of Art, who brings to her role over thirty years of experience working in the visual arts in many diverse capacities, including as independent curator of contemporary art, art educator and consultant. Julian has developed a specialization and expertise in photography, film, and video from her years of working at renowned Canadian art institutions including at Prefix ICA as Adjunct Curator (2019 to 2021), and as Assistant Professor and Sessional Faculty in the Photography program at OCAD University (2001 to 2015). Her multi-disciplinary curatorial practice concentrates on the aesthetic, critical and cultural interrogation of still and moving images and places emphasis on the critical and transcultural discourses on colonialism and the intersectional dialogues on gender, representation, and psychoanalytic thought.
Born in Halifax, Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia) and based in Toronto, Julian is
of the Black diaspora and is an off-reserve citizen of Sipekne’katik First Nation in Mi’kma’ki, on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq Nation. She began her professional arts career in 1988, when she assumed the role of Administrative Coordinator and then director of A Space, a pioneering artist-run centre in Toronto.
Since 2004, she has been a member of the curatorial council for Prefix ICA, where she curated 31 by Lorna Simpson (2005), the group exhibition Trade Marks (2013), Facing by Renée Green, her first solo exhibition in Canada (2016), and the group exhibition Movers and Shakers (2018). As Adjunct Curator she curated Listen, speak and sing (2019) a solo exhibition of new artworks by Nadia Myre, Mirage (2020) a solo exhibition by Toronto based artist Lyla Rye and Movers and Makers (2021) a group exhibition that toured to McMaster Museum of Art (2022). With Pamela Edmonds, she has co-curated the M(M)A critical collection exhibition Chasm (2023).