Related Programs

Describing her scholarly and grassroots organizing practices in the Living with Concepts micropublication, Danielle Boissoneau shares a question perpetually asked and re-asked among collaborators: “What are your methods?” In this context and beyond it, a focus on methods underscores their importance to expansive, accountable, and equitable collaboration. How to work together amid difference and conflict? What strategies sustain groups and collectives in the short and long-term? How can methods reshape the means and ends of a project? What methods do we need now? Contributors across Blackwood programs and publications demonstrate the varied forms collaboration takes. In academic labs, artist collectives, activist organizations, and ad hoc groups, they highlight the diverse methodologies for working together, and the attendant impacts of methods on project outcomes. 

We reiterate this question posed by Constance Hockaday for Artists-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power amid eroding trust in governance built on colonial and capitalist grounds. We need change now, but who can we entrust with taking leadership to get us there? What relations of power are allied to practices of care and justice for the collective good, both human and non-humans alike? Individuals and organizations at the forefront of abolitionist, environmental, and disability rights movements are using tactics of protest, cessation, and collaboration to propel decolonial, accessibility-driven, and Earth-centered paths forward. If democratic systems are premised on participatory decision-making, how can raised pedestals and amplified voices be decentered to enact these principles? What messages would we hear, and how might actions support words? The speeches, projects, events, and texts outlined below underscore the possibilities of polyvocal leadership. 

If the personal is political—as the familiar claim popularized by feminists of the 1960 and 70s put it—how is this credo being reframed and reinterpreted in the social justice movements of today and beyond? The shaky distinction between personal and political spheres continues to be eroded through practices rooted in slowing down, re-assessing, taking time, and building relationships. Increasingly, we see that the way we treat each other in everyday interactions represents the world we want to build and live in. Informed by feminist organizing strategies, disability justice practices, Indigenous cosmologies, and new social movements, artists and organizers urge us to ask: How can a better world be rooted in reimagining everyday conventions and interactions? What can we ask of each other—and how can these requests be scaled up? How can we better foreground and honour our interdependencies? 

Beginning in summer 2025, The Blackwood poses a series of questions across the four UTM campus lightboxes. These inquiries come at an inflection point: derived from the past ten years of programming led by Director/Curator Christine Shaw, they re-enliven institutional history to carry questions from our past into the future. In doing so, many have been edited to reflect what we’ve learned, and what we hope a question can provoke. Posed alone and in groupings, these questions reflect the scope of open-ended inquiry across multi-year programming.  

Visit the Blackwood's Index to see an interactive graph which addresses these questions through The Blackwood’s programs.