The transformation of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre is beginning to take shape.

The galleries are currently closed, as more than 17,000 objects in Agnes’s collection are being packed and moved off site, and after a year of community-engagement, two architectural renderings have been released, giving the Queen’s community its first look at a transformed art centre.

Director and Curator Emelie Chhangur commends Queen’s for supporting Agnes’s commitment to a community-engaged design process and a close collaboration with the architectural team comprised of the internationally renowned Toronto-based firm KPMB Architects, led by architect Bruce Kuwabara and Indigenous Affairs consultant Georgina Riel.

“By enacting the values of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Indigenization and Accessibility (EDIIA) in the very making of Agnes Reimagined, we ensure that we truly transform Agnes, from the ground up, and demonstrate Queen’s commitments to honouring the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions Calls to Action,” Chhangur says.

In 2026, Agnes will emerge as the largest public university-affiliated museum in this country and a champion of museological change where Indigenous and Western world views sit side by side as equals. 

Agnes Reimagined would not be possible without the leadership and philanthropic support of the late Alfred Bader (Sc'45, Arts'46, MSc'47, LLD'86), Isabel Bader (LLD’07), and Bader Philanthropies, Inc., who are longtime supporters of Queen’s and the arts. Bader Philanthropies is the lead donor with a total US$75 million transformational gift. The Bader Collection at Agnes is made up of more than 500 works of art and is and the most comprehensive collection of authenticated paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn and his circle in any institution within Canada.

“Alfred Bader envisioned Queen’s having the finest art museum of any university in Canada,” says Vice-Principal (Advancement) Karen Bertrand (Artsci’94). “The transformative gift from the Baders will build on the initial vision of Dr. Bader and position Queen’s as a premier destination for education and research in the visual arts. Once complete, this world-class art museum will be a tremendous gift to Queen’s, Kingston, and art lovers everywhere.” 

Agnes Reimagined involves renovating the historic Etherington House and transforming it into a live-in artist residency and community-facing cultural hub. Construction of a new three-floor configuration to the art centre supports a 200 per cent increase in exhibition and alternative programming spaces for curatorial experimentation and public programming and engagement; the first-ever Indigenous self-determination spaces for the appropriate care, ceremony, and access by Indigenous communities of their ancestors and cultural belongings currently residing at Agnes; and new art study spaces, technical art history and art conservation labs — all of which reimagine the entangled civic, social and pedagogical role of a 21st century university museum. 

“Agnes Reimagined is slowly inching toward other museum temporalities, atmospheres, and attitudes to help us erode systems of categorization and separation, transform institutional limitations that hold onto the past and gatekeep the future, and take seriously what really is at stake to ensure the museums of the future are alive, nimble, and poised to inhabit the world as it is rightfully changing,” Chhangur says. “To change museum culture, we must first change its architectures. I believe it is only within the experimental milieu of the university museum that this kind of radical transformation can take hold.”

The new building will see advanced art teaching and research labs for the art conservation program and enhanced object-based learning for the Department of Art History & Art Conservation leading to greater collaboration between the department and museum. It will create new opportunities for groundbreaking technical art research and experiential art-based learning for art students, as well as a range of other academic disciplines, including engineering, business, health sciences, humanities, and physical sciences. This contributes to the university’s strategic goals by placing a greater emphasis on integrating research into the student experience, strengthening Queen’s presence globally and embedding Queen’s in the community.

Art History and Art Conservation Department Head Norman Vorano says the new Agnes will enhance education as students spend more time in the gallery doing hands-on learning, thanks to access to more study spaces and labs in close proximity to the art centre’s vast collections.

“The building is going to fundamentally change the way we study art and art conservation in this country,” Dr. Vorano says. “It gives our professors an opportunity to work with some of the best undergraduate and graduate students using the most advanced equipment in the most innovative teaching lab in North America — with the best university art collection within arm’s reach.”  

Agnes’s community-engaged design process continues through talking and sharing circles throughout 2023 as the team enters the design phase of the project. Construction is set to begin in spring 2024 and the new building to open in 2026.

Visit the Agnes Reimagined website for more information. 

The latest film by director Gina Prince-Bythewood, The Woman King, is about a legendary all-woman African army in the 1800s, the Amazons of Dahomey. It takes place in what is today the Republic of Benin in west Africa. It wasn’t filmed in Benin, but in South Africa, in the KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape provinces using locations that look like west Africa.

The film has had an overwhelmingly positive reception, but some critics have cautioned against ignoring history in favour of crowd-pleasing storytelling. I would like to draw attention to the film’s use of the African landscape, as Hollywood tells new stories while ignoring the struggles of the present.

I am a curator of African art in Kingston at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. I arrived in Canada from Cape Town around the time The Woman King was being filmed in the coastal town of Kleinmond in the Overstrand, where I’d lived with my family. I was struck by how the town was depicted.

The film uses Kleinmond as the site of great battles that glorify Africa’s history. But the town’s actual history is one of struggle and the oppression of black people that lives on to this day. The Woman King shows a pristine version of Kleinmond, digitally altering the landscape to erase black lives and settlements.

Cheating one film location for another is common practice. Film infrastructure exists in the Western Cape and there are financial incentives that attract international film makers. Not only is the natural diversity of South Africa appealing, it’s also marketable.

But film locations in Africa are often used as a generic Hollywood backdrop or African cities are easily traded. For example, Blood Diamond is set in Sierra Leone and was filmed in Cape Town. More recently Avengers: Age of Ultron’s battle scenes played out in downtown Johannesburg.

These distortions are part of the global film industry, but they can also lead to a distortion of a continent and its history. The Woman King’s use of Kleinmond’s setting may seem like just a technical gimmick, but it points to a bigger issue: even when telling African stories, Hollywood reimagines the true history and geography of the continent to serve western audiences.

Kleinmond

Kleinmond bears witness to apartheid town planning. During apartheid, white minority rulers implemented a policy of separate development, and allocated racial groups to different living areas.

The original town was settled from the 1850s by fisher families who made their living from the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1950s, when it became part of a “white group area”, Kleinmond was bulldozed by the apartheid government, its people forcibly removed to Protea Dorp on the mountainside near the town dump. A letter by a local fisher, Petrus Johannes Fredericks, attests to growing up in Kleinmond harbour and to his family’s forced removal. He writes about the ongoing struggles to secure scarce government fishing quotas.

Retelling Africa and cinematic erasure

It’s ironic that Kleinmond was the backdrop for The Woman King’s battle scenes, and appropriated into a story of a glorious, fictitious African past. Frequent violent protests in the area show that the real life struggle for the ocean and the land is still underway. During recent protests for better housing, burning tyres were positioned around an area called Perdekop and it became a true battleground for its inhabitants.

In a similar way, Kleinmond’s complexities and its embattled people are erased for the purposes of tourism. According to local authorities, the natural beauty and biodiversity are the “finest example of mountain fynbos in the Western Cape and (the Kleinmond biosphere is) a world-renowned World Heritage Site”. But this heritage has yet to yield enough sustainable jobs, and for many Kleinmond men, the illegal trade in endangered abalone is one of only a few forms of employment.

The white South African art world also has countless examples of black erasure and distorted storytelling. The apartheid state’s favoured painter JH Pierneef painted empty, detailed landscapes of South Africa that were hung in government buildings across the country. He never showed the conflicted human life inhabiting those landscapes, erasing black people, the original inhabitants. Irma Stern, favoured by white liberals, preferred painting scenes in the Bantustans or black reserves of South Africa to show an “authentic” African life. She ignored the everyday trauma of living under apartheid to capture what she considered the African ideal.

Pristine Africa

The Woman King continues this elided narrative by presenting Africa as largely uninhabited and pristine. But what does it mean when the real, battle-worn Perdekop is not acknowledged and becomes part of an elaborate computer graphic of a white settlement instead? Or a graphic of fictional houses is overlaid on the Overhills settlement?

As a curator, I think about which stories we tell in the present, which stories will endure, but most importantly what shape our collective responsibility takes. Kleinmond is close to my heart, which is perhaps why I’m especially troubled by this new kind of historical erasure, as the African landscape is digitally emptied and its people ignored so that its image can be used as the canvas for a redemptive story.

All this is not to say that The Woman King does not carefully counter harmful African stereotypes; it does. It presents African women as strong, healthy and independent, Africans as the inheritors of a rich cultural tradition and Africans as majestic purveyors of lost ideals. But at what cost does this fictional black redemption come?

In erasing the past, the film undermines Africa’s struggles, creating a false impression of the continent to please western viewers.

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Qanita Lilla, Associate Curator Arts of Africa, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen's University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Conversation is seeking new academic contributors. Researchers wishing to write articles should contact Melinda Knox, Director, Thought Leadership and Strategic Initiatives, at knoxm@queensu.ca.

Tricia Baldwin, Director of the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, will be stepping down from her role at Queen’s University to serve as the executive director of the Kwanlin Dun Cultural Centre in Whitehorse, Yukon, as of Sept. 19, 2022.

“Since joining Queen’s in 2014, Tricia has provided outstanding leadership to the Isabel, leading it through its formative years to become a world-class performing arts centre,” says Teri Shearer, Provost and Vice-Principal (Academic). “Her expertise and passion for her work have enabled the Isabel to attract many leading artists, benefitting the Queen’s and local Kingston community immeasurably over the past eight years. We wish her well as she embarks on this new opportunity.”

In addition to attracting world-class artists to the Isabel, Tricia established the centre for new, socially engaged works, such as those included in the Isabel’s Ka’tarohkwi Festival of Indigenous Arts with curator Dylan Robinson and the Isabel Human Rights Arts Festival. Her leadership has also helped to advance Queen’s academic programs through her work in co-creating Queen’s University’s new M.A. in Arts Leadership program with the Dan School of Drama and Music.

Under Baldwin’s guidance, the Isabel has become an arts hub for the Queen’s and the Kingston communities and a critical resource to support the next generation of Canadian artists and arts leaders, such a through the Bader and Overton Canadian music competition and the IMAGINE Isabel Arts Incubator, which supports numerous artistic creations by diverse local and national artists.

“I am especially honoured to have worked with such a talented staff team who are now bringing the Isabel to the world and the world to Queen’s,” Tricia Baldwin says. “This entrepreneurial and expert team of arts professionals worked together during these important formative years to create a strong foundation to fuel an exciting future for the Isabel.  We are all grateful to Isabel and Alfred Bader for the inspiration to create this marvellous arts centre, and to Bader Philanthropies, Joan Tobin and Ballytobin Foundation, the Bernstein family, and the estate of Alexander Murray Jeffery and many others, all of whom have believed in the power of the arts to transform the university and society at large.”

In her remaining time at Queen’s, Baldwin will work closely with Provost and Vice-Principal (Academic) Shearer and Nicholas Mosey, Deputy Provost (Academic Operations and Inclusion), to assist in leadership transition planning for the Isabel. Arrangements are being put in place for an interim director, and details regarding the search to attract a leading cultural leader as the next director of the Isabel will be communicated in the coming weeks.