Prof. Joana Joachim
Prof. Joana Joachim, Assistant Professor of Black Studies in Art History and Social Justice, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1) What is your discipline of study and what are the specific fields and sub-fields to which you contribute?
I am an art historian, curator and museologist. I would describe my area of specialization as Black Diasporic Art History with a focus on Black Canada. I contribute to Canadian Slavery Studies as well as Canadian Art History with the aim of locating Canada within larger discourses about the Black Atlantic.
2) How did you come to study these specific domains?
I began working in the art milieu around 2010 and have since then been keen to consider the reasons for the general absence of Black Canadians within major museums and galleries. I became acutely aware of my lack of knowledge and, relatedly, the lack of education being provided within the discipline on this topic. So, I went to grad school and began teaching myself these histories in tandem with my degree requirements. It soon became clear to me that Canada’s ongoing and longstanding amnesia of its involvement with Transatlantic Slavery is a core aspect of this issue. I have since been developing my research corpus with the express purpose of drawing connections across time and space locating the colonial project that is Canada as a major player in the ongoing anti-Blackness which permeates the art milieu today.
3) Tell us something about your process of study, formal and informal education, and the nature of your degrees and training. When, where, and how did you become qualified to do what you do?
After completing my undergraduate degree in Fine Arts, I continued my studies to earn a Master’s degree in Museology, focusing on the absented presence of Black Canadians within these institutions. I then went on to earn my doctorate in Art History during which I examined the lives of enslaved Black women in sites of French colonial domination including what is now known as Québec, Haiti, and Louisiana. I undertook extensive archival research which has become a key component of my arsenal of tools in the larger project of Black liberation which is always at the centre of my focus. While I completed my PhD, I was also the exhibition coordinator at Artexte (Montreal) which gave me applied experience to develop my curatorial practice and further deepened my understanding and love of archives.
4) What were the greatest obstacles that you had to overcome to achieve the success that you now experience? What challenges have your experienced and how have you overcome them? What goals do you have left to accomplish?
Institutional racism aside, I would have to say that the greatest challenge I had to face at first was the immense difficulty of completing my PhD while working full time at an art institution, all with an undiagnosed, worsening, chronic illness (at the time). The inherent ableism of our society and particularly of academia is a colossal challenge to achieving my goals. Today, rather than seeing my illness as something to “overcome”, I see it as a source of embodied knowledge which I bring to both my research and my teaching. It informs the ways in which I seek to sensitively attend to the whole person, be they someone I encounter in the archive, an artist I’m working with, or a student in my classroom. I take profound solace in the work of folks like Audre Lorde and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha among so many others who place care and collectivity at the heart of their practices. I can only hope and strive to carry their lessons with me throughout my life and career.
5) Did you have any role models or mentors either in your domains of work, research, and creation or outside of them? Who were they and how were they instrumental in shaping you as a person and as a professional?
I have had the privilege of having several role models. I’m proud to count among them Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson. Working with her in the early years of my career was a true highlight. I’d say that many Black women in the visual art milieu in Canada also serve as key mentors for me. Among them Dr. Andrea Fatona, Pamela Edmonds, Dominique Fontaine, and Gaëtane Verna. Truly the list could go on and on. I continue to believe that the Black Canadian art milieu has been and continues to be driven by the work of women like them. I count among my peers several other Black women who are similarly leaving their indelible marks on this precious (art) history of ours.
6) What does your process of research look like? Where and what are your archives and what artworks, artifacts, documents, or specimens do you study or examine?
My research process often begins with a fundamental question that I bring into the archive or to an art period/topic. I tend to cast a wide net and consider as many angles and pathways as possible, searching for patterns and gaps. This means that I don’t have one particular corpus that I am examining. I’m more concerned with drawing cross-temporal lines connecting Black life across time and space. Beyond traditional archival documents and academic publications, I have looked at historical and contemporary artworks, colonial artifacts, documentary films, historical photographs, architecture, maps, popular culture, and ephemera.
7) What are your fundamental research questions and what defines your methodology or approach? How do you determine how you engage with your objects, individuals or communities of study?
I would say that my fundamental research question has remained largely the same over the last decade or so: what exactly is Black Canadian art, when and where did it “begin” and why do we know so little about it? Particularly before the contemporary moment. My secondary questions, which emerge from that initial curiosity, relate to my methods which are deeply rooted in Black Feminism and Black Studies. I’m concerned with thinking through and holding space for Black creative practices at different times in history. I turn to scholars like Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick, and Tina Campt among others to guide my inquiries and I focus on centring Black life in all its forms even in the most unlikely of places.
8) What are you working on now and when and how will it be shared?
I am working on my first book which emerges from my doctoral research. That project considers the lives of Black women and girls in sites of French colonial domination in the eighteenth century, examining their acts of self-preservation and self-care as part of the visual culture of slavery. The book goes on to look at this against the backdrop of contemporary artworks by Black women. In terms of curatorial work, I have an exhibition at the Owens Art Gallery in the fall of 2024. Estuaries features artworks by both contemporary and historical artists, archival documents and artifacts to contend with Black history in the Maritimes as well as the life and legacy of John Owens who was founder of the institution and a wealthy shipbuilder during the 19th century.
9) What are you proudest of in your career?
There is so much to be proud of in my career thus far. I’m proud to be a writer. I’m proud to be a teacher. I’m proud to work alongside incredible Black women continuing to make waves in the Canadian art scene. I am proud to leave my own trace in this beautiful story that is Black liberation. I’m proud that I am still here, doing this work!
10) What are you proudest of in your life?
The thing that brings me the most pride in my life is my family. I’m proud that I intentionally embrace and cultivate life beyond my work as a scholar; that I make time to read fantastical stories for pleasure, to garden, and to bake. And I’m incredibly proud of myself, for meeting my body where it is every single day and loving it as hard as I can, especially on the tougher ones.
11) What academic book should be essential reading?
It is nearly impossible for me to recommend only one essential read. So, I’m going to cheat and recommend one academic and one fiction!
Academic: Lorde, Audre. Your Silence Will Not Protect You. UK: Silver Press, 2017. https://concordiauniversity.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1006460992
This book is a collection of essays by Audre Lorde including some of her most impactful texts including “The Uses of the Erotic” and her “Open Letter to Mary Daly”. Besides her Cancer Journals, these essays are absolute crucial reads for me.
Fiction: Jemisin, N. K. The Broken Earth Trilogy. First edition. London: Orbit, 2016. https://nkjemisin.com/series/the-broken-earth/
Yes, I recommended an entire series. No, I care not for the rules! This trilogy is a sci-fi-fantasy story following a Black woman named Essun as she attempts to find her lost daughter amidst cataclysmic events at the end of the world.
12) What TV show or film should be essential viewing?
There are too many to name. I will say that a key film to understand the particular brand of Canadian racism is the NFB film Speakers for the Dead (2000). It does a great job of showing how white settlers on this land use willful ignorance to cover up centuries-long histories of anti-Black violence and use it to gaslight Black Canadians.
Speakers for the Dead. Dir. David Sutherland & Jennifer Holness (2000)
13) How do you relax and take care of yourself?
Self-care is my top priority every day. Part of my morning routine includes a checklist to consider the accommodations I need on that day to manage my chronic illness. Besides tending to my body, to relax I love to go on slow evening strolls and spend time with my family, sit with our plants, and read.
14) What’s next?
Who knows what’s next for me! I’m working on my book and developing a corpus of Black Studies courses in Art History.
Dr. Joana Joachim is Assistant professor of Black Studies in Art History and Social Justice at Concordia University. Her research and teaching interests include Black feminist art histories, Black diasporic art histories, critical museologies, Black Canadian studies, and Canadian slavery studies. Her curatorial projects include Estuaries presented at the Owens Art Gallery (2024) and Blackity presented at Artexte (2021). Her current book project examines practices of self-preservation and self-care among Black women in contexts of slavery under the French by considering both historical and contemporary artworks. She earned her PhD in the department of Art History and Communication Studies and at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill University. Dr. Joachim obtained her master’s degree in Museology from Université de Montréal and her BFA cum laude from University of Ottawa. In addition to the special issue of RACAR, “salt: For the preservation of Black diasporic visual histories” co-edited with Pamela Edmonds, Dr. Joachim’s writing has appeared in books, journals and magazines including History, art and Blackness in Canada, Manuel Mathieu: World Discovered Under Other Skies, Canadian Journal of History and C Magazine.
Learn More…
Curating
- Estuaries, Owens Art Gallery. Sackville, New Brunswick, 5 October – 15 December 2024
- Blackity, Artexte, Montreal, Quebec, Fall 2021 – Spring 2022
Writing
- “ ‘Not Necessarily Not There’: Dark Energy in Dionne Simpson and Denyse Thomasos’s Paintings” Routledge Companion to Art History and Feminisms Ed. Erin Silver (forthcoming)
- “Glitter and Grit: Michèle Pearson Clarke’s Black Queer Unreason” Routledge Companion to African Diaspora Art, ed. Eddie Chambers (forthcoming)
- “salt. For the preservation of Black diasporic visual histories” RACAR special issue co-edited with Pamela Edmonds, Fall 2022
Like Prof. Joana Joachim, self-care is our top priority! Check out Black Maple Magazine’s The Self-Care Circle.