Notice Board

Art NOW speaker series presents: Sarah Smith
Framing Artists as Workers
12 pm | November 8, 2023
Open to students in Art NOW courses

This talk explores how visual artists in the territory now known as Canada understand cultural labour, including how artists have initiated and engaged with labour organizations. Focusing on developments in the late twentieth century, I assess the activities of the Independent Artists’ Union (IAU), a group of Ontario artists who set out in the 1980s to organize the province’s artists into a new collective agency. Drawing links between the IAU’s activities and the contemporary precarity of cultural labour, I assess the union’s impact on Canadian cultural policy and highlight the strategies they employed to organize artists to advocate for policy reforms in a period of substantial federal cultural policy development. 

Dr. Sarah Smith is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Art, Culture and Global Relations and leads the Practitioner Media Lab. Her research addresses cultural diplomacy, contemporary art, museums, and cultural labour. Recent publications include the co-edited collection Museum Diplomacy: How Cultural Institutions Shape Global Engagement (American Alliance of Museums/Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). Dr. Smith is a co‐founder of the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative and a member of the International Cultural Relations Research Alliance.