Andrea Fatona: Making Our Way

Onsite Gallery’s Annual Curatorial Lecture

Andrea Fatona: Making Our Way

Wednesday, February 25, 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

MCA 190 (Auditorium) 100 McCaul Street, OCAD University

Onsite Gallery is thrilled to announce its annual Black History Month guest curatorial lecture featuring esteemed curator Andrea Fatona. Co-presented with the Centre for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora, this event highlights the vital role of fostering dialogues on Black history, art, and culture within and beyond our communities.

For Making our Way, Andrea Fatona will present a powerful reflection on her 35-year journey as a curator and researcher dedicated to making visible the work of Black Canadian cultural producers. Drawing from decades of curatorial and research practices, she explores how exhibition-making and archival research can become vital tools for navigating questions of belonging, memory and power. In the lecture, she will weave together three interrelated strands that shape her work: collaboration, research as relational practice and space-making, offering an insight into how cultural work can foster connection, care and possibility. 

Joining this talk, Dr Joanne Joachim will be in conversation with Andrea Fatona, inviting us to consider: How do we "make our way" within institutions while also imagining alternatives?

ASL Interpretation will be provided for this lecture. A reception will follow.

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About Andrea Fatona

Andrea Fatona is an independent curator and an associate professor at OCAD University. Her curatorial and research practices are concerned with creating spaces of engagement for Black cultural producers in Canada. She is the recipient of awards from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Hnatyshyn Foundation. Fatona is a Canada Research Chair, Tier II in Black Canadian Cultural Production.

Photo credit: Bidemi Oloyede

About Dr. Joana Joachim

Dr. Joana Joachim is an Assistant professor of Black Studies in Art History and Social Justice at Concordia University. Her scholarship has appeared in the Routledge Companion to African Diaspora Art (2024); History, art and Blackness in Canada (2022); RACAR (2022 and 2018); Canadian Journal of History (2021); and C Magazine (2020). Her SSHRC-funded project, Stillness as Black Creative Practice considers how stillness creates the opportunity for sustainable Black creative practices in a Canadian context which enforces untenable cycles of hyperproduction. Her manuscript, There/Then, Here/Now (working title), traces Black women's networks of feeling across time and space via the visual culture of self-preservation and self-care in sites of French colonial domination. She earned her PhD in Art History at McGill University and her MA in Museology at Université de Montréal. In 2025 she was appointed as Deputy-Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University.

Photo Credit: Cassandra Cacheiro, 2020.