Events by this organizer

“Style writing and graffiti are not about art. For many, it’s about having a voice. A voice that, once bright, erodes, decays and disappears. It is erased by weather, time and status quo. It is about staking monuments in a place that often casts you out.” –ORIAH SCOTT

This summer we host Oriah Scott, EronOne, HONE, HUNGR, AJ Little, Emily May Rose and guest graffiti artists from across the Montreal-Toronto corridor as Agnes’s Stonecroft Foundation Artist(s)-in-Residence. An extended research and design phase culminates in a site-specific commission for the exterior façades of Agnes’s current facility. Transformations remains until the construction for Agnes Reimagined begins in summer 2023.

This reciprocal relationship-building project celebrates the long vernacular tradition of street art in Kingston, points to alternative art histories embedded in our city streets and provides a framework for experiential learning and co-curriculum development conceived in collaboration with faculty and students from Queen’s Art Conservation Program. In the classroom, we trace the lineages of “acts of urban chaos;” in the conservation lab, we consider why certain paint colours fade more quickly; in the gallery, we have honest conversations along the way, exploring the ethics of preserving street art, the conundrum of being an art institution working along-side submerged cultural practices without co-opting them and collectively questioning who benefits from exchanges with imbalanced power dynamics. And we produce the first-ever in-situ graffiti project on the actual architectures of Queen’s!

The residency, large-scale, site-specific commission and experiential education initiative are conceived and produced by Emelie Chhangur, Agnes Director and Curator in partnership with Patricia Smithen, Assistant Professor, Paintings Conservation and Director, Art Conservation Program, Queens University.

Generously funded by the Stonecroft Foundation and the City of Kingston Arts Fund, Kingston Arts Council.

Presented by Johnson, Johnston, and Macrae Investment Group, CIBC Private Wealth Wood Gundy

With Count Care, we lovingly turn our attention to the collection. Over 17,000 works of art and culture are housed at Agnes. And in June, we begin to pack that collection in preparation for the building of Agnes Reimagined, our new future-oriented facility. As we pack, we take stock, and consider what it means to care for and be accountable to a public collection. Curated works in twos and threes hold space, or “take the stage,” for biweekly intervals, as we say goodbye to them temporarily. In the process, we bring stewardship forward to the gallery from back of house.

Count Care seeks relationships within and conversations across the collection at Agnes and acts as a revolving access point through which to reflect on legacies of collecting, of holding but also homing.  These works find themselves here through various means, whether a purchase, donation or transfer, tracing histories of artistic practice and curatorial priorities. Through inventory, Count Care looks at what has been collected at Agnes and infers what should be collected in addition. The project not only revisits the well-known but also reveals the under-recognized in Agnes’s collection, those who may not yet have had an opportunity to speak through or about their collectivity. What stories do they tell? Come hear what the collection has to say.

Mauna Kea. Standing Rock. Kanesatake. Wet’suwet’en. These are a few of the many places on Turtle Island (North America) that are respected, honoured and continue to be safeguarded by Land Protectors in the face of extreme opposition. This exhibition pays tribute to the Indigenous artists and peoples who, since time immemorial, have protected something most precious to us all—the land. Works by Carl Beam, Rebecca Belmore, Robert Houle, Roy Kakegamic, Jane Ash Poitras, and other artists from Agnes’s collection, bring awareness to the consequences that arise if we over-exploit what Mother Earth provides.

Curated by Paige Van Tassel

This exhibition is supported by the City of Kingston Arts Fund, Kingston Arts Council and Celebrating Agnes Fund, Queen’s University. 

The ability of art to closely mimic nature formed a well-established trope in European painting of the early modern period. The intensified circulation of goods in trade-based empires such as the Dutch Republic therefore inevitably transformed illusionistic representation and its artistic and affective functions in art. Products and naturalia foreign or novel to early modern European audiences, such as shells, foodstuffs, and imported fabrics and gemstones provided artists with opportunities to represent myriad material qualities, yet were also coveted by patrons as items that signalled access and possession, and therefore wealth and status. Non-European textiles and forms of dress also fueled the artistic imagination in regards to the depiction of Biblical characters and ancient worlds, raising questions about the role of such uses in constructions of alterity.

This exhibition draws from a variety of Agnes’s collections to highlight how European painting genres such as still life, portraiture and history painting employed elements of an increasingly global material culture to new representational ends. In addition to realistically rendering a large variety of surfaces and textures, painters were advised to combine their skills in observation with their imagination to invent deceptively lifelike compositions. Representation, in this sense, takes on a double meaning—of artistic likeness as well as a complex process of signification. Works on display include recently acquired seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings by Carstian Luyckx, Pieter Claesz, Constantijn Verhout and Jan van Noordt.

Curated by Suzanne van de Meerendonk

Generously supported by the Bader Legacy Fund.

Through experimentation with sound, image, found texts and acts of counter-archiving of personal and political experiences, Where Were You in ‘92? brings forth the embodied archives of the ground-breaking legacy of Fresh Arts, a Black artist-led program that was born out of the fury of impassioned youth. Pamila Matharu, one of the mentees of Fresh Arts, returns not only to this pivotal moment but also to her mentor, Winsom Winsom, who’s more than decade-long activist history in Kingston ON is under-recognized. This research project begins with the basic premise that archives are manifested in living bodies, in repeated stories, in unfinished conversations, sparked by events of the past that persist into the present, and, importantly, in the healing practices of intergenerational connectivity. Interested in forms of feminist genealogies that cite what came before and using the archive as a forum for recognition, resilience and radical love, Matharu looks back to Toronto’s 1992 youth-led uprising on Yonge Street that gave rise to Fresh Arts. Where Were You in ‘92? traces new lines of connection across history and geography, drawing in those who inherit its legacy and holding up those who mobilized its centrifugal forces. A series of public and education programming is presented as an integral component of this exhibition.

The Masks We Wear is an installation made by Ashanti Maroon artist Winsom Winsom. She has a remarkable career as a multi-media artist with a background working in varied media: textiles, painting, video, installation and puppetry.

The installation includes Me Myself & I, a self-portrait of Winsom wearing a mask. In her notes for the I Rise exhibition (AGO, 2018), Winsom writes, “The covering mask that we wear, no one sees the real us due to all the hurts, oppression, disadvantage, that we experience in a lifetime, from generation to generation. The mask can change but to rid ourselves of it fully we need healing from the elements.”

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she immigrated to Canada in the 1970s and lived in the Kingston, Ontario area from 1974 to 1989. As the co-founder of Kingston’s Black Women’s Collective she worked with the Mayor’s office on issues of racism and attracted many Black activists to Kingston, including Angela Davis, Odetta, Dr Mavis Burke and Lincoln Alexander. Entwined with her career as an artist and activist, Winsom has a longstanding history as an art educator. She influenced the emergence of several Canadian artists, such as Pamila Matharu and d’bi.young anitafrikan.

This recent acquisition is on view, alongside Winsom’s mentee Pamila Matharu’s exhibition Where Were You in ’92?.

The artists Nicolas Fleming, Sf Ho, Cindy Mochizuki, Lisa Myers, Laura Pitkanen, Camille Turner and Alize Zorlutuna in Fugitive Rituals examine belief systems embedded within institutional architecture and ask how we make changes with care to the systems that we have lived with for a very long time. The exhibition, as a discursive platform for a series of activations, offers intentional rituals to give palliative care to old systems that no longer work; to grieve and mourn what is lost; and to project into a speculative but collective future grounded in care and ecological considerations. Approaching the exhibition as an iterative ritual itself, where repeated acts of building, installing, disseminating, viewing and deinstalling transform the site, we might see the possibilities for escape from old colonial systems and seek sustenance through practicing each artist’s intentional ritual. The work in this exhibition engages with waste produced from previous exhibitions as well as selected objects from Agnes’s significant collection of cultural belongings as ways to consider ecological and relational concerns in art and exhibition-making.

Curated by Myung-Sun Kim

Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts; the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario; David Bain Memorial Fund, Robert Sutherland Visitorship and the Inclusive Community Fund, Queen’s University.

In-Person at Agnes, Thursdays 15 September–17 November 2022

4­–6 pm

Sign up for one or all workshops: https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/classes-workshops-camps/art-hive-fall-2022/

Artmaking is innately therapeutic and can improve general wellbeing. We invite adults 16 to join us and explore the creative process through experimentation and play.

Art Hive is free; materials are provided and no prior art experience is necessary. If you are looking for guidance, our art therapist/facilitator offers weekly projects and visits to our current exhibitions.

This program is made possible through the generous support of the Birks Family Foundation.

In-Person at Agnes, Thursdays 15 September–17 November 2022

4­–6 pm

Sign up for one or all workshops: https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/classes-workshops-camps/art-hive-fall-2022/

Artmaking is innately therapeutic and can improve general wellbeing. We invite adults 16 to join us and explore the creative process through experimentation and play.

Art Hive is free; materials are provided and no prior art experience is necessary. If you are looking for guidance, our art therapist/facilitator offers weekly projects and visits to our current exhibitions.

This program is made possible through the generous support of the Birks Family Foundation.

In-Person at Agnes, Thursdays 15 September–17 November 2022

4­–6 pm

Sign up for one or all workshops: https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/classes-workshops-camps/art-hive-fall-2022/

Artmaking is innately therapeutic and can improve general wellbeing. We invite adults 16 to join us and explore the creative process through experimentation and play.

Art Hive is free; materials are provided and no prior art experience is necessary. If you are looking for guidance, our art therapist/facilitator offers weekly projects and visits to our current exhibitions.

This program is made possible through the generous support of the Birks Family Foundation.

Creation Station is a free studio program designed to give families and children ages 2 and up an exploratory artmaking experience. Art educators ignite curiosity through painting, drawing, clay and mixed media activities. Creation Station takes place in the bright and airy André Biéler Studio.

This program is made possible by the Birks Family Foundation.

Sign up for one or all of the workshops: https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/classes-workshops-camps/creation-station-2022/

In-Person at Agnes, Thursdays 15 September–17 November 2022

4­–6 pm

Sign up for one or all workshops: https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/classes-workshops-camps/art-hive-fall-2022/

Artmaking is innately therapeutic and can improve general wellbeing. We invite adults 16 to join us and explore the creative process through experimentation and play.

Art Hive is free; materials are provided and no prior art experience is necessary. If you are looking for guidance, our art therapist/facilitator offers weekly projects and visits to our current exhibitions.

This program is made possible through the generous support of the Birks Family Foundation.

“Style writing and graffiti are not about art. For many, it’s about having a voice. A voice that, once bright, erodes, decays and disappears. It is erased by weather, time and status quo. It is about staking monuments in a place that often casts you out.” –ORIAH SCOTT

This summer we host Oriah Scott, EronOne, HONE, HUNGR, AJ Little, Emily May Rose and guest graffiti artists from across the Montreal-Toronto corridor as Agnes’s Stonecroft Foundation Artist(s)-in-Residence. An extended research and design phase culminates in a site-specific commission for the exterior façades of Agnes’s current facility. Transformations remains until the construction for Agnes Reimagined begins in summer 2023.

This reciprocal relationship-building project celebrates the long vernacular tradition of street art in Kingston, points to alternative art histories embedded in our city streets and provides a framework for experiential learning and co-curriculum development conceived in collaboration with faculty and students from Queen’s Art Conservation Program. In the classroom, we trace the lineages of “acts of urban chaos;” in the conservation lab, we consider why certain paint colours fade more quickly; in the gallery, we have honest conversations along the way, exploring the ethics of preserving street art, the conundrum of being an art institution working along-side submerged cultural practices without co-opting them and collectively questioning who benefits from exchanges with imbalanced power dynamics. And we produce the first-ever in-situ graffiti project on the actual architectures of Queen’s!

The residency, large-scale, site-specific commission and experiential education initiative are conceived and produced by Emelie Chhangur, Agnes Director and Curator in partnership with Patricia Smithen, Assistant Professor, Paintings Conservation and Director, Art Conservation Program, Queens University.

Generously funded by the Stonecroft Foundation and the City of Kingston Arts Fund, Kingston Arts Council.

Presented by Johnson, Johnston, and Macrae Investment Group, CIBC Private Wealth Wood Gundy

With Count Care, we lovingly turn our attention to the collection. Over 17,000 works of art and culture are housed at Agnes. And in June, we begin to pack that collection in preparation for the building of Agnes Reimagined, our new future-oriented facility. As we pack, we take stock, and consider what it means to care for and be accountable to a public collection. Curated works in twos and threes hold space, or “take the stage,” for biweekly intervals, as we say goodbye to them temporarily. In the process, we bring stewardship forward to the gallery from back of house.

Count Care seeks relationships within and conversations across the collection at Agnes and acts as a revolving access point through which to reflect on legacies of collecting, of holding but also homing.  These works find themselves here through various means, whether a purchase, donation or transfer, tracing histories of artistic practice and curatorial priorities. Through inventory, Count Care looks at what has been collected at Agnes and infers what should be collected in addition. The project not only revisits the well-known but also reveals the under-recognized in Agnes’s collection, those who may not yet have had an opportunity to speak through or about their collectivity. What stories do they tell? Come hear what the collection has to say.

Mauna Kea. Standing Rock. Kanesatake. Wet’suwet’en. These are a few of the many places on Turtle Island (North America) that are respected, honoured and continue to be safeguarded by Land Protectors in the face of extreme opposition. This exhibition pays tribute to the Indigenous artists and peoples who, since time immemorial, have protected something most precious to us all—the land. Works by Carl Beam, Rebecca Belmore, Robert Houle, Roy Kakegamic, Jane Ash Poitras, and other artists from Agnes’s collection, bring awareness to the consequences that arise if we over-exploit what Mother Earth provides.

Curated by Paige Van Tassel

This exhibition is supported by the City of Kingston Arts Fund, Kingston Arts Council and Celebrating Agnes Fund, Queen’s University. 

The ability of art to closely mimic nature formed a well-established trope in European painting of the early modern period. The intensified circulation of goods in trade-based empires such as the Dutch Republic therefore inevitably transformed illusionistic representation and its artistic and affective functions in art. Products and naturalia foreign or novel to early modern European audiences, such as shells, foodstuffs, and imported fabrics and gemstones provided artists with opportunities to represent myriad material qualities, yet were also coveted by patrons as items that signalled access and possession, and therefore wealth and status. Non-European textiles and forms of dress also fueled the artistic imagination in regards to the depiction of Biblical characters and ancient worlds, raising questions about the role of such uses in constructions of alterity.

This exhibition draws from a variety of Agnes’s collections to highlight how European painting genres such as still life, portraiture and history painting employed elements of an increasingly global material culture to new representational ends. In addition to realistically rendering a large variety of surfaces and textures, painters were advised to combine their skills in observation with their imagination to invent deceptively lifelike compositions. Representation, in this sense, takes on a double meaning—of artistic likeness as well as a complex process of signification. Works on display include recently acquired seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings by Carstian Luyckx, Pieter Claesz, Constantijn Verhout and Jan van Noordt.

Curated by Suzanne van de Meerendonk

Generously supported by the Bader Legacy Fund.

Through experimentation with sound, image, found texts and acts of counter-archiving of personal and political experiences, Where Were You in ‘92? brings forth the embodied archives of the ground-breaking legacy of Fresh Arts, a Black artist-led program that was born out of the fury of impassioned youth. Pamila Matharu, one of the mentees of Fresh Arts, returns not only to this pivotal moment but also to her mentor, Winsom Winsom, who’s more than decade-long activist history in Kingston ON is under-recognized. This research project begins with the basic premise that archives are manifested in living bodies, in repeated stories, in unfinished conversations, sparked by events of the past that persist into the present, and, importantly, in the healing practices of intergenerational connectivity. Interested in forms of feminist genealogies that cite what came before and using the archive as a forum for recognition, resilience and radical love, Matharu looks back to Toronto’s 1992 youth-led uprising on Yonge Street that gave rise to Fresh Arts. Where Were You in ‘92? traces new lines of connection across history and geography, drawing in those who inherit its legacy and holding up those who mobilized its centrifugal forces. A series of public and education programming is presented as an integral component of this exhibition.

The Masks We Wear is an installation made by Ashanti Maroon artist Winsom Winsom. She has a remarkable career as a multi-media artist with a background working in varied media: textiles, painting, video, installation and puppetry.

The installation includes Me Myself & I, a self-portrait of Winsom wearing a mask. In her notes for the I Rise exhibition (AGO, 2018), Winsom writes, “The covering mask that we wear, no one sees the real us due to all the hurts, oppression, disadvantage, that we experience in a lifetime, from generation to generation. The mask can change but to rid ourselves of it fully we need healing from the elements.”

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she immigrated to Canada in the 1970s and lived in the Kingston, Ontario area from 1974 to 1989. As the co-founder of Kingston’s Black Women’s Collective she worked with the Mayor’s office on issues of racism and attracted many Black activists to Kingston, including Angela Davis, Odetta, Dr Mavis Burke and Lincoln Alexander. Entwined with her career as an artist and activist, Winsom has a longstanding history as an art educator. She influenced the emergence of several Canadian artists, such as Pamila Matharu and d’bi.young anitafrikan.

This recent acquisition is on view, alongside Winsom’s mentee Pamila Matharu’s exhibition Where Were You in ’92?.

The artists Nicolas Fleming, Sf Ho, Cindy Mochizuki, Lisa Myers, Laura Pitkanen, Camille Turner and Alize Zorlutuna in Fugitive Rituals examine belief systems embedded within institutional architecture and ask how we make changes with care to the systems that we have lived with for a very long time. The exhibition, as a discursive platform for a series of activations, offers intentional rituals to give palliative care to old systems that no longer work; to grieve and mourn what is lost; and to project into a speculative but collective future grounded in care and ecological considerations. Approaching the exhibition as an iterative ritual itself, where repeated acts of building, installing, disseminating, viewing and deinstalling transform the site, we might see the possibilities for escape from old colonial systems and seek sustenance through practicing each artist’s intentional ritual. The work in this exhibition engages with waste produced from previous exhibitions as well as selected objects from Agnes’s significant collection of cultural belongings as ways to consider ecological and relational concerns in art and exhibition-making.

Curated by Myung-Sun Kim

Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts; the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario; David Bain Memorial Fund, Robert Sutherland Visitorship and the Inclusive Community Fund, Queen’s University.

In-Person at Agnes, Thursdays 15 September–17 November 2022

4­–6 pm

Sign up for one or all workshops: https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/classes-workshops-camps/art-hive-fall-2022/

Artmaking is innately therapeutic and can improve general wellbeing. We invite adults 16 to join us and explore the creative process through experimentation and play.

Art Hive is free; materials are provided and no prior art experience is necessary. If you are looking for guidance, our art therapist/facilitator offers weekly projects and visits to our current exhibitions.

This program is made possible through the generous support of the Birks Family Foundation.

In-Person, 5–6 November, 10–5 pm daily

$150, $135 for members (bursaries available)

During this comprehensive two-day workshop participants dive deep into the world of acrylics, acrylic mediums and colour mixing.

This workshop provides participants with the knowledge they need to take full advantage of different contemporary acrylic mediums, increase their artist material literacy and understand how to improve their studio practice to better care for their acrylic paintings. Explore acrylic paints and contemporary painting mediums in-depth, discuss their functions and applications, and focus on colour mixing and palette creation with acrylics to expertly include colour in your work.

Experiment with the materials and processes discussed during the workshop, and build, stretch, prime and develop one acrylic painting on canvas with a curated colour palette using the knowledge gathered in the class.

This program and the bursaries are made possible by the Rita Friendly Kaufman Fund and Iva Speers Fund for Art Education.

In-Person at Agnes, Thursdays 15 September–17 November 2022

4­–6 pm

Sign up for one or all workshops: https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/classes-workshops-camps/art-hive-fall-2022/

Artmaking is innately therapeutic and can improve general wellbeing. We invite adults 16 to join us and explore the creative process through experimentation and play.

Art Hive is free; materials are provided and no prior art experience is necessary. If you are looking for guidance, our art therapist/facilitator offers weekly projects and visits to our current exhibitions.

This program is made possible through the generous support of the Birks Family Foundation.

Creation Station is a free studio program designed to give families and children ages 2 and up an exploratory artmaking experience. Art educators ignite curiosity through painting, drawing, clay and mixed media activities. Creation Station takes place in the bright and airy André Biéler Studio.

This program is made possible by the Birks Family Foundation.

Sign up for one or all of the workshops: https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/classes-workshops-camps/creation-station-2022/

Creation Station is a free studio program designed to give families and children ages 2 and up an exploratory artmaking experience. Art educators ignite curiosity through painting, drawing, clay and mixed media
activities. Creation Station takes place in the bright and airy André Biéler Studio.

This program is made possible by the Birks Family Foundation.

Sign up for one or all of the workshops: https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/classes-workshops-camps/creation-station-2022/

In-Person at Agnes, Thursdays 15 September–17 November 2022

4­–6 pm

Sign up for one or all workshops: https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/classes-workshops-camps/art-hive-fall-2022/

Artmaking is innately therapeutic and can improve general wellbeing. We invite adults 16 to join us and explore the creative process through experimentation and play.

Art Hive is free; materials are provided and no prior art experience is necessary. If you are looking for guidance, our art therapist/facilitator offers weekly projects and visits to our current exhibitions.

This program is made possible through the generous support of the Birks Family Foundation.

“Style writing and graffiti are not about art. For many, it’s about having a voice. A voice that, once bright, erodes, decays and disappears. It is erased by weather, time and status quo. It is about staking monuments in a place that often casts you out.” –ORIAH SCOTT

This summer we host Oriah Scott, EronOne, HONE, HUNGR, AJ Little, Emily May Rose and guest graffiti artists from across the Montreal-Toronto corridor as Agnes’s Stonecroft Foundation Artist(s)-in-Residence. An extended research and design phase culminates in a site-specific commission for the exterior façades of Agnes’s current facility. Transformations remains until the construction for Agnes Reimagined begins in summer 2023.

This reciprocal relationship-building project celebrates the long vernacular tradition of street art in Kingston, points to alternative art histories embedded in our city streets and provides a framework for experiential learning and co-curriculum development conceived in collaboration with faculty and students from Queen’s Art Conservation Program. In the classroom, we trace the lineages of “acts of urban chaos;” in the conservation lab, we consider why certain paint colours fade more quickly; in the gallery, we have honest conversations along the way, exploring the ethics of preserving street art, the conundrum of being an art institution working along-side submerged cultural practices without co-opting them and collectively questioning who benefits from exchanges with imbalanced power dynamics. And we produce the first-ever in-situ graffiti project on the actual architectures of Queen’s!

The residency, large-scale, site-specific commission and experiential education initiative are conceived and produced by Emelie Chhangur, Agnes Director and Curator in partnership with Patricia Smithen, Assistant Professor, Paintings Conservation and Director, Art Conservation Program, Queens University.

Generously funded by the Stonecroft Foundation and the City of Kingston Arts Fund, Kingston Arts Council.

Presented by Johnson, Johnston, and Macrae Investment Group, CIBC Private Wealth Wood Gundy

With Count Care, we lovingly turn our attention to the collection. Over 17,000 works of art and culture are housed at Agnes. And in June, we begin to pack that collection in preparation for the building of Agnes Reimagined, our new future-oriented facility. As we pack, we take stock, and consider what it means to care for and be accountable to a public collection. Curated works in twos and threes hold space, or “take the stage,” for biweekly intervals, as we say goodbye to them temporarily. In the process, we bring stewardship forward to the gallery from back of house.

Count Care seeks relationships within and conversations across the collection at Agnes and acts as a revolving access point through which to reflect on legacies of collecting, of holding but also homing.  These works find themselves here through various means, whether a purchase, donation or transfer, tracing histories of artistic practice and curatorial priorities. Through inventory, Count Care looks at what has been collected at Agnes and infers what should be collected in addition. The project not only revisits the well-known but also reveals the under-recognized in Agnes’s collection, those who may not yet have had an opportunity to speak through or about their collectivity. What stories do they tell? Come hear what the collection has to say.

Mauna Kea. Standing Rock. Kanesatake. Wet’suwet’en. These are a few of the many places on Turtle Island (North America) that are respected, honoured and continue to be safeguarded by Land Protectors in the face of extreme opposition. This exhibition pays tribute to the Indigenous artists and peoples who, since time immemorial, have protected something most precious to us all—the land. Works by Carl Beam, Rebecca Belmore, Robert Houle, Roy Kakegamic, Jane Ash Poitras, and other artists from Agnes’s collection, bring awareness to the consequences that arise if we over-exploit what Mother Earth provides.

Curated by Paige Van Tassel

This exhibition is supported by the City of Kingston Arts Fund, Kingston Arts Council and Celebrating Agnes Fund, Queen’s University. 

The ability of art to closely mimic nature formed a well-established trope in European painting of the early modern period. The intensified circulation of goods in trade-based empires such as the Dutch Republic therefore inevitably transformed illusionistic representation and its artistic and affective functions in art. Products and naturalia foreign or novel to early modern European audiences, such as shells, foodstuffs, and imported fabrics and gemstones provided artists with opportunities to represent myriad material qualities, yet were also coveted by patrons as items that signalled access and possession, and therefore wealth and status. Non-European textiles and forms of dress also fueled the artistic imagination in regards to the depiction of Biblical characters and ancient worlds, raising questions about the role of such uses in constructions of alterity.

This exhibition draws from a variety of Agnes’s collections to highlight how European painting genres such as still life, portraiture and history painting employed elements of an increasingly global material culture to new representational ends. In addition to realistically rendering a large variety of surfaces and textures, painters were advised to combine their skills in observation with their imagination to invent deceptively lifelike compositions. Representation, in this sense, takes on a double meaning—of artistic likeness as well as a complex process of signification. Works on display include recently acquired seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings by Carstian Luyckx, Pieter Claesz, Constantijn Verhout and Jan van Noordt.

Curated by Suzanne van de Meerendonk

Generously supported by the Bader Legacy Fund.

Through experimentation with sound, image, found texts and acts of counter-archiving of personal and political experiences, Where Were You in ‘92? brings forth the embodied archives of the ground-breaking legacy of Fresh Arts, a Black artist-led program that was born out of the fury of impassioned youth. Pamila Matharu, one of the mentees of Fresh Arts, returns not only to this pivotal moment but also to her mentor, Winsom Winsom, who’s more than decade-long activist history in Kingston ON is under-recognized. This research project begins with the basic premise that archives are manifested in living bodies, in repeated stories, in unfinished conversations, sparked by events of the past that persist into the present, and, importantly, in the healing practices of intergenerational connectivity. Interested in forms of feminist genealogies that cite what came before and using the archive as a forum for recognition, resilience and radical love, Matharu looks back to Toronto’s 1992 youth-led uprising on Yonge Street that gave rise to Fresh Arts. Where Were You in ‘92? traces new lines of connection across history and geography, drawing in those who inherit its legacy and holding up those who mobilized its centrifugal forces. A series of public and education programming is presented as an integral component of this exhibition.

The Masks We Wear is an installation made by Ashanti Maroon artist Winsom Winsom. She has a remarkable career as a multi-media artist with a background working in varied media: textiles, painting, video, installation and puppetry.

The installation includes Me Myself & I, a self-portrait of Winsom wearing a mask. In her notes for the I Rise exhibition (AGO, 2018), Winsom writes, “The covering mask that we wear, no one sees the real us due to all the hurts, oppression, disadvantage, that we experience in a lifetime, from generation to generation. The mask can change but to rid ourselves of it fully we need healing from the elements.”

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she immigrated to Canada in the 1970s and lived in the Kingston, Ontario area from 1974 to 1989. As the co-founder of Kingston’s Black Women’s Collective she worked with the Mayor’s office on issues of racism and attracted many Black activists to Kingston, including Angela Davis, Odetta, Dr Mavis Burke and Lincoln Alexander. Entwined with her career as an artist and activist, Winsom has a longstanding history as an art educator. She influenced the emergence of several Canadian artists, such as Pamila Matharu and d’bi.young anitafrikan.

This recent acquisition is on view, alongside Winsom’s mentee Pamila Matharu’s exhibition Where Were You in ’92?.

The artists Nicolas Fleming, Sf Ho, Cindy Mochizuki, Lisa Myers, Laura Pitkanen, Camille Turner and Alize Zorlutuna in Fugitive Rituals examine belief systems embedded within institutional architecture and ask how we make changes with care to the systems that we have lived with for a very long time. The exhibition, as a discursive platform for a series of activations, offers intentional rituals to give palliative care to old systems that no longer work; to grieve and mourn what is lost; and to project into a speculative but collective future grounded in care and ecological considerations. Approaching the exhibition as an iterative ritual itself, where repeated acts of building, installing, disseminating, viewing and deinstalling transform the site, we might see the possibilities for escape from old colonial systems and seek sustenance through practicing each artist’s intentional ritual. The work in this exhibition engages with waste produced from previous exhibitions as well as selected objects from Agnes’s significant collection of cultural belongings as ways to consider ecological and relational concerns in art and exhibition-making.

Curated by Myung-Sun Kim

Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts; the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario; David Bain Memorial Fund, Robert Sutherland Visitorship and the Inclusive Community Fund, Queen’s University.

Creation Station is a free studio program designed to give families and children ages 2 and up an exploratory artmaking experience. Art educators ignite curiosity through painting, drawing, clay and mixed media activities. Creation Station takes place in the bright and airy André Biéler Studio.

This program is made possible by the Birks Family Foundation.

Sign up for one or all of the workshops: https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/classes-workshops-camps/creation-station-2022/

“Style writing and graffiti are not about art. For many, it’s about having a voice. A voice that, once bright, erodes, decays and disappears. It is erased by weather, time and status quo. It is about staking monuments in a place that often casts you out.” –ORIAH SCOTT

This summer we host Oriah Scott, EronOne, HONE, HUNGR, AJ Little, Emily May Rose and guest graffiti artists from across the Montreal-Toronto corridor as Agnes’s Stonecroft Foundation Artist(s)-in-Residence. An extended research and design phase culminates in a site-specific commission for the exterior façades of Agnes’s current facility. Transformations remains until the construction for Agnes Reimagined begins in summer 2023.

This reciprocal relationship-building project celebrates the long vernacular tradition of street art in Kingston, points to alternative art histories embedded in our city streets and provides a framework for experiential learning and co-curriculum development conceived in collaboration with faculty and students from Queen’s Art Conservation Program. In the classroom, we trace the lineages of “acts of urban chaos;” in the conservation lab, we consider why certain paint colours fade more quickly; in the gallery, we have honest conversations along the way, exploring the ethics of preserving street art, the conundrum of being an art institution working along-side submerged cultural practices without co-opting them and collectively questioning who benefits from exchanges with imbalanced power dynamics. And we produce the first-ever in-situ graffiti project on the actual architectures of Queen’s!

The residency, large-scale, site-specific commission and experiential education initiative are conceived and produced by Emelie Chhangur, Agnes Director and Curator in partnership with Patricia Smithen, Assistant Professor, Paintings Conservation and Director, Art Conservation Program, Queens University.

Generously funded by the Stonecroft Foundation and the City of Kingston Arts Fund, Kingston Arts Council.

“Style writing and graffiti are not about art. For many, it’s about having a voice. A voice that, once bright, erodes, decays and disappears. It is erased by weather, time and status quo. It is about staking monuments in a place that often casts you out.” –ORIAH SCOTT

This summer we host Oriah Scott, EronOne, HONE, HUNGR, AJ Little, Emily May Rose and guest graffiti artists from across the Montreal-Toronto corridor as Agnes’s Stonecroft Foundation Artist(s)-in-Residence. An extended research and design phase culminates in a site-specific commission for the exterior façades of Agnes’s current facility. Transformations remains until the construction for Agnes Reimagined begins in summer 2023.

This reciprocal relationship-building project celebrates the long vernacular tradition of street art in Kingston, points to alternative art histories embedded in our city streets and provides a framework for experiential learning and co-curriculum development conceived in collaboration with faculty and students from Queen’s Art Conservation Program. In the classroom, we trace the lineages of “acts of urban chaos;” in the conservation lab, we consider why certain paint colours fade more quickly; in the gallery, we have honest conversations along the way, exploring the ethics of preserving street art, the conundrum of being an art institution working along-side submerged cultural practices without co-opting them and collectively questioning who benefits from exchanges with imbalanced power dynamics. And we produce the first-ever in-situ graffiti project on the actual architectures of Queen’s!

The residency, large-scale, site-specific commission and experiential education initiative are conceived and produced by Emelie Chhangur, Agnes Director and Curator in partnership with Patricia Smithen, Assistant Professor, Paintings Conservation and Director, Art Conservation Program, Queens University.

Generously funded by the Stonecroft Foundation and the City of Kingston Arts Fund, Kingston Arts Council.