Jaime Angelopoulos’ large-format drawing, �ճ󾱱��,��and Julieta Maria’s four-minute digital video, Soil, are now part of this outstanding collection of works created by then-emerging artists, reflecting  the evolution of artistic sensibility, technology and expression over the past 35 years.

Right: "Thief" by Jaime Angelopoulos

Toronto philanthropist Samuel Sarick established the Purchase Award in1976 – just two years after 91��ɫ's Graduate Program in Visual Arts was established. Each year since then, one or more works have been selected for acquisition from the thesis exhibitions of students graduating from the program. In addition to serving as a showcase of the leading edge of contemporary work, the collection is an important component of the historical record of the visual arts department and its alumni.

(MFA ‘10) identifies herself as a sculptor who also works in installation and large-scale drawing.

“My drawings often depict aspects of my sculptural forms, while also informing the sculpture-making process,” she said. “My current drawings combine graphic geometric fragments and bright color hues with organic shapes and textures evocative of animals. To reconcile oppositional elements within a drawing is to discover a balance between contradictory ideas.”

Angelopoulos has an upcoming solo show May 4 to 21 at Toronto’s , located at 401 Richmond St. W. The opening reception takes place Friday, May 4 from 8 to 10pm.

Angelopoulos has presented her work across Canada and beyond. Her solo exhibitions and performances include venues such as Parisian Laundry in Montreal, Stride Gallery in Calgary, Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, Meadows School of the Arts in Dallas, Texas, and at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

In contrast to Angelopoulos’ physical art-making, (BFA ‘04, MFA ‘10) is a new media artist working in a variety of media including video, interactive video installations and web. Soil is a prime example of her recent work, which centres on video documentation of staged actions.

Soil shows the artist’s face in profile, open-mouthed, lying horizontally against a white background. Soil starts pouring down from the upper side of the frame, gradually filling her mouth.

“Closeness to the earth implies being close to life and death, to the visceral,” said Maria.

Left: A scene from "Soil" by Julieta Maria

“In the video, I take the soil trying to engage in minimal movement or expression. The openness of the mouth, however, gives a sense of willingness to receive the dirt. It’s a situation that is not resolved, as the soil keeps falling and accumulating. The soil comes from above, as a kind of fate.”

Maria is a co-founder of in Toronto, where she currently serves as executive director. She has participated in several international screenings and exhibitions, including Scope Basel in Switzerland in 2010, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in Colombia in 2009, and the Interactiva Biennale in Mexico 2009, among others.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The conference will take place on Inclusion Day, Jan. 18, from 11:30am to 8pm, at 280N 91��ɫ Lanes, Keele campus. Everyone is welcome to attend the free event.

This is the third annual Inclusion Day at 91��ɫ. Guest speakers will provide participants with internal and external community perspectives “that will no doubt enhance our path of continued learning about the wealth that diversity brings,” says Noël Badiou, director of 91��ɫ’s CHR.

“Inclusion Day provides an occasion to highlight the diversity on our campus and the value and importance of ensuring that each and every member of our greater community, students, staff and faculty, is included in 91��ɫ's activities, whether in the classroom, during extracurricular events, or academic and administrative meetings,” says Badiou.

Left: Noël Badiou

This year's theme of "building allies for equity" is in keeping with CHR's goal of further enhancing the individual understanding of barriers faced by certain members of the 91��ɫ community with a view to exploring ways that we can help eliminate these barriers, he says.

“The key in creating a more equitable community is to further each of our individual understanding of the incredibly rich diversity of our community and be empowered with knowledge about how to value this diversity by being more inclusive, as well as appreciative and respectful of our differences. It is a tall order, but one that can be accomplished by having a growing number of partners and supporters within our community.”

Director of the City of Toronto’s Equity & Inclusion Office, Uzma Shakir will deliver the opening keynote address at noon, along with a panel comprised of 91��ɫ students. A host of talks will follow throughout the afternoon.

The first sessions will include 91��ɫ PhD psychology candidate Kaley Roosen (BSC Spec. Hons. ’07, MA ’09) and Access 91��ɫ discussing disability awareness: The Power of Language, and Professor Faisal Bhabha and second-year law student Adrienne Lipsey of Osgoode Hall Law School looking at the meaning of religious accommodation. The Aboriginal Student Association at 91��ɫ will host a workshop exploring notions of identity for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal youth and the impact of gender roles and access to cultural resources in urban Aboriginal communities. 91��ɫ student Sana Siddiqui, an MSW student, will explore the historical and political roots of Islamophobia and its current manifestations through a variety of hands-on activities, video clips, case studies and interactive discussion. She will also offer strategies for building networks of allies against Islamophobia.

During the second round of sessions at 2:30pm, Jennifer Dalton (LLM ’06, PhD ’10), a visiting scholar with 91��ɫ’s Centre for Refugee Studies, will present “From Kelowna to Attawapiskat: Forging Aboriginal-Canada Alliances to Build Aboriginal Equity”. She will discuss the continuing inequities that plague Aboriginal communities across the country despite the Kelowna Accord, which sought to bridge the inequity gap. This interactive workshop will emphasize the need to forge positive alliances between Aboriginal communities and the government. Bobby Siu from 91��ɫ’s Equity Studies Department will address “Building Allies for Equity in the Workplace: Some Considerations for Persons with Disabilities”.

A third group of sessions will begin at 4pm, covering topics that look at the purpose of “voice” if no one is listening and relationships for creating change and inclusion. Ragini Sharma, a doctoral student in the Faculty of Education, will hold an interactive workshop Broadening the Vision, Deepening the Roots, from 4 to 5:15pm, where participants can talk about their experiences of religious diversity on campus and will be challenged to broaden their vision beyond an identity based solely on religion.

An evening reception with keynote speaker Tim McCaskell, a social justice advocate and author, will follow the final sessions.

For a full lineup of sessions and speakers, visit the Inclusion Day web page on the Centre for Human Rights website. To register, .

For more information, contact Nythalah Baker, CHR senior adviser, education & communications, at nythalah@yorku.ca or ext. 55682.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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“I think Cabot was a bit of an operator,” says , a PhD Candidate in history at 91��ɫ, who’s just published The Race to the New World: Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, and a Lost History of Discovery.��

In his book, Hunter uses new research and new translations of critical documents to reveal “the surprisingly intertwined nature of Columbus’s and Cabot’s lives” and present “a fresh perspective on the critical first years of the European discovery of the New World,” states his American publisher Palgrave Macmillan.��

Released in September in the United States and Britain, the book will be published in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre in the spring.�� 

“This is a book of historical provocation,” says Hunter. In recent years, historians have uncovered much new information about Cabot. Studying Italian and German shipping and commercial documents translated for the Cabot Project, Hunter himself has found a web of coincidences and overlaps that shed new light on how Cabot, especially, emerged as an unlikely explorer of the New World. “In a book like this, you can push it all out at once and hope the historical record will hold up,” says Hunter.��

A freelance journalist and author of books on business, history and sports, Hunter has written since 1993. This is his third on New World explorers. His first, God’s Mercies: Rivalry, Betrayal & the Dream of Discovery (2007), about the voyages of Henry Hudson and Samuel de Champlain, was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize and the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. His second was Half Moon: Henry Hudson and the Voyage that Redrew the Map of the New World (2009).��

In The Race to the New World, Hunter veers from the traditional geographical approach to explorer tales – they sailed here, they stopped there. “I wanted to get away from explorer geography, and put it in context of economic and political history,” he says.��

     Right: Douglas Hunter

What was the state of Europe between 1492 and 1497? Why did these voyages happen at this time? What was the economic impetus, the political situation? If you don’t know that Henry VII was struggling to keep his throne or that pirates blocked the delivery of luxury goods to England from Venice for two years, then you won’t fully understand how Cabot could come out of nowhere and successfully pitch for funding to find a route to Asia, suggests Hunter.��

The big question is: “How did a failed bridge contractor resurrect himself as a Columbus doppelganger proposing exactly the same ideas Columbus did on his second voyage?” Based on his research of documents in the Cabot Project, translations of Venice, Milan and Spanish 19th-century records and papers, and a recent French translation of a 1494-95 Latin travelogue, Hunter reveals that Cabot may have encountered two Germans, envoy Jerome Munzer and wealthy Martin Behaim, in Seville and Lisbon. They knew of Columbus’s 1492 abortive voyage and Behaim had  proposed to Portugal a more northern route west to Cathay. Cabot ran to England to pitch the same idea to the king.

“Never mind that Cabot had no seafaring experience to speak of,” writes the Washington Post reviewer. “Why England sponsored him at all is a fascinating story of political desperation and artful salesmanship amid a European struggle for wealth and power.” 

“It’s hard to imagine that there is still uncharted territory in the history of the New World’s discovery,” writes Booklist in another review. “But Hunter indeed sails unsullied waters, offering an intriguing and surprising new twist on the old subject.”  

At 52, why has Hunter decided to do his PhD at 91��ɫ? Out of school for 30 years, this father of three grown children has a BA in art and art history from McMaster University. But when history professor Carolyn Podruchny, who’d read God’s Mercies, encouraged him to do doctoral studies, he decided to do it. His body of work could count as his prerequisite.�� 

Hunter’s dissertation is “Cryptohistory, Race and Nationalism: Exploring the Fringe of Discovery Narratives”. When researching his books on North American explorers, he came across theories that North America had been visited and colonized by a variety of Bronze Age and early medieval Europeans before Columbus. For evidence, theorists pointed to native petroglyphs.�� 

The prevailing assumption was indigenous peoples “were too stupid to have carved these things,” says Hunter. “The most extreme form of this,” he points out, “is the 'Chariots of the Gods' theory: historic peoples were so backward that the achievements they left behind in the archeological record must have been produced by visitors from outer space.” 

Hunter aims to show that such “arrival ideas advanced, however inadvertently, notions of Aryan supremacy while casting a white shadow over indigenous heritage.” He says such theories, however discredited, continue to be reiterated on TV, in books, over the Internet. “The result has been a fluorescence of cryptohistory, a shadowy, sometimes conspiracy-laden alternate version of mainstream history. It has flourished particularly in the historiography of North American exploration, with theories of pre-Columbian European arrivals that have been proliferating since the colonial period as foundation myths supported by immigrant populations.

"While such theorizing is usually dismissed by mainstream historians as “crank” amateurism, it should not go ignored,” he insists. Perpetuating such approaches to history “ultimately serves agendas of race, culture and nationalism” and “fuels ideas that indigenous peoples do not deserve their treaty rights.”

By Martha Tancock, YFile contributing writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The annual prize, inaugurated in 1994 by the Association of Friends of the National Museum of Roman Art (Museo Nacional de Arte Romano), recognizes the contributions of individuals, academics and researchers who have expanded the knowledge of the historical, cultural and archeological heritage of the Roman world, in particular of the city of Mérida in Spain. It was presented to Edmondson at the museum's 25th-anniversary celebrations in September.

Above: Holding the award – a copy of a Roman bust of the Genius (Protective Spirit) of Augusta Emerita – are, from left, winner Jonathan Edmondson; María Angeles Albert León, Spain's director general of fine arts and cultural property; Trinidad Nogales Basarrate,  education and culture minister for Extremadura region; and a representative for Extremadura president José Antonio Monago Terraza.

Edmondson received the award for his research on the colony of Augusta Emerita and Roman Spain over the years while at 91��ɫ and for the fundamental contributions he made toward the study of Emeritan society and the structure of the former colony. He was also recognized for his “work in disseminating knowledge about the archeological heritage of Emerita across the world.”

Left: The awards ceremony inside the National Museum of Roman Art

“It’s really international recognition for my scholarship,” says Edmondson. “I’m the first English-speaking scholar who has won it.”

Through his research on Roman Spain, Edmondson has been instrumental in bringing the history, culture and archeology of the colony of Augusta Emerita in the region of Extremadura, one of 17 autonomous regions in Spain, to a world audience. When Edmondson first started studying Roman Spain, he was one of the few international scholars to do so. There had been much research on Roman Italy, France and Britain among others, but not Roman Spain, and not written in English.

Right: Jonathan Edmondson delivering his acceptance speech for the international prize, Protective Spirit of the Colony of Augusta Emerita, at the National Museum of Roman Art

It was the Roman province of Lusitania, overlapping both Portugal and Spain of which Augusta Emerita (modern Mérida) was the capital, that really piqued Edmondson’s attention as it had been mostly overlooked until then. He continues to be interested in the social, economic and cultural history of Mérida, from the military veterans who settled there and the city’s military importance to the study of family structures, marriage patterns, slavery and immigration.

“It’s a very rich city in terms of surviving evidence,” he says. "There are Roman houses, burial grounds, aqueducts and Roman roads – all of which were found while digging the foundations of the museum."

One of the things in his research that surprised him is that Mérida was a major centre for medical training. This Edmondson learned through a series of inscriptions about doctors, one of which told of a slave from another city (Olisipo, modern Lisbon) being sent to Mérida to be medically trained and another which detailed the slave’s journey back to Lisbon and his later importance there as a doctor.

Left: Rafael Mesa Hurtado, president of the Friends of the National Museum of Roman Art (and the first cousin of Toronto Raptor José Calderón) presents Jonathan Edmondson with a commemorative plaque

Edmondson has often been the first to publish Roman inscriptions from Mérida, of which there are more than 1,000 and still more being discovered. He began interpreting the inscriptions on tombstones and moved to study the style of funerary monuments and how they changed over time. He is now researching indigenous religion in Lusitania and the extent to which the Roman authorities allowed indigenous divinities to be worshipped.

Edmondson is the editor of Augustus (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), co-editor of Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2008) and Flavius Jospephus and Flavian Rome (Oxford University Press, 2005), among others.��His monograph, Granite Funerary Stelae from Augusta Emerita, appeared in 2007. In 2002, he was elected a corresponding member of the Real Academia de la Historia of Spain and, in 2009, was made a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in London.

As winner of the Protective Spirit prize, Edmondson is in good company. Previous winners have included Walter Trillmich, former director of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin; José María Blázquez, former professor of Roman archaeology at the Complutense University of Madrid; Pierre Gros, former professor of Roman archaeology at the Université d'Aix-en-Provence; and Rafael Moneo Vallés, a world-renowned architect who designed the National Museum of Roman Art.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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