Public Events for the 2026 Goldfarb Summer Institute at York University

Land Acknowledgements and Land Relations: Relational Validity and Meaningful Solidarity in Research/Research-Creation

The Department of Visual Art and Art History at York University presents the 2026 edition of the Goldfarb Summer Institute, an intensive two-week graduate course that invites scholars and artists to explore pressing and timely themes in contemporary art. This year’s institute, titled Land Acknowledgements and Land Relations: Relational Validity and Meaningful Solidarity in Research/Research-Creation, will focus on examining the importance of land acknowledgements and thinking through what engaging purposefully with the land acknowledgement teaches us.

We are pleased to announce that four events in the seminar series will be open to the public.

I ❤️ Lunaapahkiing: Vanessa Dion Fletcher Artist Talk
Thursday, May 7, 2026 | 2:30 – 3:30pm
The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery, York University (Accessible venue)
Full event information and RSVP here

Taking Milton Glaser’s 1976, I ❤️ NY logo as an example, Vanessa Dion Fletcher will discuss land, language, obscured histories, and ancestral reclamation in Lunaapahkiing and beyond.

Vanessa Dion Fletcher is a Lunáapew and Potawatomi nuro divers artist. Her family is from Eelūnaapèewii Lahkèewiitt (displaced from Lenapawking) and European settlers. Reflecting on an Indigenous and gendered body with a neurodiverse mind, Dion Fletcher looks for knowledge in materials and techniques. Since 2017, Dion Fletcher has used porcupine quills as a primary medium, creating two-dimensional quillwork pieces and expanding the medium through photography, sculpture and performance.

Inissaliortut (The People that Make Room) Performance & Throat Singing: Taqralik Partridge and Laakkuluk Williamson
Tuesday, May 12, 2026 | 4:00 – 6:00pm
McLean Performance Studio, 244 Accolade East Building
Full event information and RSVP here

Inissaliortut (The People that Make Room) is a performance by Taqralik Partridge and Laakkuluk Williamson in which they tell each other stories of internal mettle to withstand the exploitation of their homelands. The performance is as much about the stories as it is about bearing witness. Inissaliortut will be followed by Taqralik and Laakkuluk throat singing.

Taqralik Partridge is an artist, writer, spoken word poet, and curator from Kuujjuaq, Nunavik. Partridge’s performance work has been featured on CBC Radio One, and she has toured with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. She was one of the six shortlisted artists for the 2024 Sobey Art Award.

Laakkuluk Williamson is a multi-award winning multidisciplinary Inuk artist living in Iqaluit, Nunavut. Her artistic practice focuses on studying and experimenting with the conceptual aspects of uaajeerneq (Greenlandic mask dancing); a transcustomary performance passed on to her by her mother and other Greenlandic artists. Laakkuluk is the 2021 winner of the Sobey Art Prize.

Love Songs to End Colonization Performance: Peter Morin, Jimmie Kilpatrick and Tomas Jonsson
Friday, May 15, 2026 | 7:00 – 9:00pm
Blood Brothers Sound Garage, 165 Geary Avenue, Toronto
Full event information and RSVP here

Artists Peter Morin, Jimmie Kilpatrick and Tomas Jonsson are friends who share an abiding love for karaoke and present it through their ongoing artistic collaboration, Love Songs to End Colonization, a participatory karaoke project founded in kindness, joy, futurity, and engaging a collective voice through singing. Repurposing popular love songs, this project critiques, confronts, and dismantles the historical notions and the current presence of settler colonialism and utilizes karaoke as a methodology for social change. Listeners are invited to perform a song, sing-along, clap, dance, or simply witness and soak in love and music to dismantle colonialism, one love song at a time.

Jimmie Kilpatrick (b. 1979, Ontario; he/him) is a musician, educator, and interdisciplinary artist based in Brandon, Manitoba. He’s been touring regularly and releasing records on Toronto’s You’ve Changed Records since 2009. He has appeared on recordings by John K. Samson, Christine Fellows, Joel Plaskett and By Divine Right.

Peter Morin (b. 1977, Tahltan Nation/British Columbia; he/him) is a grandson of Tahltan ancestor artists. Morin’s work highlights cross-ancestral collaboration and deeply considers the impact zones that occur between Indigenous ways of knowing and Western Settler Colonialism. Morin’s practice has spanned twenty years so far, with exhibitions in London, Berlin, Singapore, New Zealand, and Greenland, as well as across Canada and the United States.

Tomas Jonsson is an artist, curator, and writer interested in issues of social agency in processes of urban growth and transformation. Jonsson has produced several projects in Calgary addressing the city’s urban transformation, including sites such as The East Village and Hillhurst Sunnyside.

Thinking with Black Ecologies: Creative interruptions and anticolonial refusals
Talk by Dr. Fikile Nxumalo
Tuesday, May 19, 2026, 2:30 – 3:30pm
The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery, York University (Accessible venue)
Full event information and RSVP here

Black ecologies are filled with possibilities for affirmative inquiry. This talk engages with potentials for creative engagements with situated Black ecologies that are anti-colonial, affirm Black childhoods, and unsettle neoliberal multiculturalism.

Dr. Fikile Nxumalo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching & Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, where they direct the Childhood Place Pedagogy Lab. Their scholarship focuses on reconceptualizing early childhood education such that it is situated within and responsive to children’s inheritances of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, environmental precarity and their entanglements. Their research and pedagogical interests are informed by my experiences growing up in Eswatini and working as an early childhood educator and pedagogical facilitator with children and educators in North American settler colonial contexts.

The Goldfarb Summer Institute is organized by the Department of Art History and Visual Culture, the School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design, and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Art and Technology at York University and is further supported by Curating Indigenous Circumpolar Cultural Sovereignty and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Contact Information
Helen Lee – Sensorium: Centre for Digital Art and Technology at York University Coordinator
helen2@yorku.ca

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