Guest Speaker Summary

Guest Speaker Review 1 We had the privilege of hearing presentations by both Sheila Butler and Madeline Lennon. While their presentations had many differences they both covered the common thread of feminism and inequality in the world of art. The first of which was Sheila Butler, a visual artist, former professor, and a founding member of Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art, or MAWA, a feminist visual arts education centre. They were responding to the inequities that they perceived in the art community in Winnipeg, that stems from the general subordination of women by men in society. She observed that too few women were receiving grants, having their work exhibited, and having their work posted. She and the other founders saw MAWA as an extension of their world as teachers. The second presentation was that of Madeline Lennon, a former professor and former chair of visual arts at Western University. She was granted the YWCA …show more content…
She taught Shelley Niro, who was already an established Mohawk artist at this time. Lennon summarized a few of Niro’s most notable works, most of which took a stand against discrimination towards indigenous people. For example, ‘The Shirt’ (2003), a series of photos describing the evils done unto Aboriginal people via the subject’s T-shirts, ending with a shirt that reads “And alls I get is this Shirt”. In the next photo she appears without the shirt, and in the final picture, a white western women is wearing the shirt, insinuating she stole the shirt and claimed it as her own, as people took Indigenous people’s land years ago. The use of this intersectional feminism can be related to a quote from Heather Davis’s Desire Change that states “The dissolutions of women's power was and remains a primary force of colonialism”. This suggests that the inequities that Niro faces as a woman will only increase the issues of colonialism for her and her