Participatory Arts & Engagement Specialists

The use of dialogue is critical in exploring diverse ways of knowing that offer innovate creative experiences as well as a means for community reflection, individual and societal transformation. Dialogue as part of the aesthetics of artmaking involves the public in a transformational process that explores participation, dialogue, and the construction of community. Dialogue and dialogue-based art practices examine how art institutions operate, what they exhibit and how the rituals of cultural authority discourage the participation of communities. At the same time, dialogical practices create possibilities to contest myths and challenge the perceptions of dominate institutions as monolithic, opening neo-liberal narratives to the concepts of critical art and the contending views of the public. Strategies of collaboration and participation to co-create artistic practice as a form of social inquiry and critique that challenges conventions, questions assumptions, unravels social and political structures and provokes viewers to rethink their understanding of culture, society and themselves. Cultural workers who make use of dialogue in their practices reveal diverse ways of seeing the world and put forward multiple versions of conflicted histories. The process of incorporation of dialogue into artistic practices means developing collaborative models, making links to community, supporting local and regional art practices, and situating the direction of the local community engagement. Questions of dominant contemporary narratives and how diverse forms of cultural expression are built on multiple, conflicting voices can reveal important social truths and contradictions because they reject a single and dominant narrative. Dialogical practice can help cultural institutions transform themselves into public spheres that allow disenfranchised voices to challenge dominant narratives and social structures, using creative forms of dialogue to instigate conscious change from below. Artists and curators who make use of dialogue in their practices reveal diverse ways of seeing the world and put forward multiple versions of conflicted histories. The use of dialogue in artistic practices invites community participation and develops new opportunities for communities to become engaged with contemporary visual art and reinvent the progressive mandates of cultural institutions.

Carole Condé (1940-2024) Carole Conde passed away on July 19th, 2024. I remember Carole as an artist, activist, mentor and guide who defined for me what it means to be a committed cultural activist/artist who dedicated her life to social justice and making a positive difference in our world. The best way for me to remember Carole is to describe what I think is her distinctive art practice in collaboration with her life-long partner, Karl Beveridge. Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge’s process-based artworks represented a complex investigation of contemporary issues and articulated the artists’ commitment to an art practice that incorporates ethical responsibility and an obligation to respond to the world through creative forms of collaboration and dialogue. Underlining Condé and Beveridge’s art works is a series of questions that critique concepts of ideology, power and control and offer alternative points of view that are open for dialogue. The foundation of Condé and Beveridge’s creative methodology is their commitment to collaboration and participation and the use of an “ethics of engagement”. (Downey, A, 2009) Condé and Beveridge developed an artistic process that involves direct collaboration in the production of art employing participatory, socially engaged methodology. Condé and Beveridge unique art practice provided a framework to expand and re-engage viewers through visual art strategies that analyze contemporary social, cultural and political issues. Condé and Beveridge’s use of dialogical aesthetics was a way of breaking down the conventional distinction between artist, artwork and audience — a relationship that allows the artists to empower their subjects by sharing creative authority through dialogue. At the heart of Condé and Beveridge’s art practice is the fundamental principle that artmaking is a social transaction that becomes a participatory and collaborative process that is not merely a means of self-expression but a way of articulating commonalities, giving voice to those who have been marginalized and suppressed by dominant social narratives. Condé and Beveridge have engaged in a type of dialogue through a creative orchestration of collaborative encounters and conversations that go beyond the walls of the art gallery. Community collaboration is critical to the making of their art practice — the process of dialogical aesthetics utilized by Condé and Beveridge is contextually grounded as a form of participatory action that engages in public criticism and is intended to facilitate critical reflection of multiple and diverse ways of understanding our complex and constantly changing contemporary world. Goodbye Carole and thank you for your unique contribution towards a progressive and just society.

Museums can function as sites for informal learning and community building through the incorporation of a participatory and collaborative process that helps to give voice to those who have been marginalized and/or suppressed by dominant social and cultural narratives. Museums can be spaces where dominant discourses can be critiqued by juxtaposing competing voices and diverse points of view. Museums can be public spaces where members of the community drive the direction of institutions, share their way of knowing the world, and explore the potential of becoming informal spaces of learning. Museums should be open spaces for everyone, encouraging many voices to interact with each other which provides informal learning opportunities. Exhibitions are creative form of knowledge that facilitate dialogue multiple and diverse ways of knowing as creative forms of critical inquiry that examine contemporary society. Exhibitions as forms of “knowledge creation” can help facilitate dialogue multiple and diverse ways of knowing that incorporate conflicting voices and meaning-making found in the “in-betweenness”- the artist’s voices and the viewers’ subjective and subconscious experience that  situate exhibitions as forms of inquiry and art galleries as public spaces for informal learning. Using dialogical learning like a methodology was intended to help viewers engage with the artworks in the exhibition. It also facilitated knowledge sharing between the artist and viewers. The concept of dialogical looking suggests that viewers can consciously articulate questions and utilizes a dialogical and collaborative approach and will help provoke the viewer into exploring other concepts such as theme and context. It is within these dialogical interactions that we can begin to think about new ways of learning through exhibitions that explore innovative ideas, alternative voices, and new narratives. By acknowledging the importance of multiple dialogues, dialogic looking creates rich learning experiences that do not solely rely on the mediating voice of the museum expert, didactic panels, or guided tours. The act of looking is dialogical and suggests how the perspectives of our consciousness can interact with art artifacts and objects. The use of dialogical looking assists viewers in organizing and balancing way of becoming more fully engaged with the meaning in creating and understanding of artworks. Dialogical practice can help museums transform themselves into public spheres that allow disenfranchised voices to challenge dominant narratives and social structures, using creative forms of dialogue to instigate conscious change from below.

Our strategy explores how the voices of others affects our conscious and unconscious way of seeing and understanding the world. This strategy explores the incorporation of the artist’s vision, participant voices and visitor’s subjective experiences and perspectives that are in a constant state of change. Further research needs to be done to incorporate dialogue into curatorial practices that explore multiple voices and community-centred ways of knowing. My curatorial strategy suggests numerous possibilities using concepts of dialogue and community engagement for the establishment of an evolving process of collaboration. This evolving strategy continues to explore and experiment with the following actions. • Further engagement with viewers by presenting alternative perspectives and innovative ways of knowing utilizing art galleries and museums as spaces for informal learning. • Making visible varied and opposing world views to allow for diverse voices to be heard at equally inside art galleries and museums. • Continued to transformation of art galleries and museums into dialogical public spaces. • Exploring how to disrupt the traditional concept art galleries and museum as sacred spaces for quiet contemplation and assert the concept that art galleries and museums are active spaces filled with diverse dialogues. • Situate the viewer as an active participant in meaning-making within the art gallery and museums grounded in informal learning processed that involves collaboration, participatory action and critical dialogue. • Explore how art galleries and museums can help situate the viewer as a central part of the meaning-making process and explore how this can lead to informal learning processes that encourage a change in consciousness and promote a greater capacity for compassion and openness to new ways of knowing.  • Explore and present alternate understandings of the world within art galleries and museums that can lead to a transformation of our understanding of contemporary issues. • Explore the potential impact art galleries and museums have on the process of informal learning and public engagement

Museums are contested public spaces where social hierarchies are questioned and subverted. Museums are sites where dominant discourses can be critiqued by presenting competing voices and exhibiting diverse points of view. The conflicting voices and assimilation of the “words of others,” and the idea of meaning-making found between the speaker’s and the listener’s voices, can situate art galleries and museums as public spaces for dialogue. In these spaces we can study how marginalized voices are able to challenge dominant narratives, allowing for numerous points of view and systems of belief to be articulated. Within many museums marginalized voices struggle with dominant narratives, such as the points of view of European white settler culture. We suggest that while authoritative discourse is in the past and is a prior discourse, it still demands that we acknowledge it, make it our own, and examine how it persuades us internally. These struggles are required to come to new understandings. Some forms of discourse may be designed to suppress the destabilizing aspects of language use by seeking to uphold a particular sanctioned point of view. This range of discourse supports social institutions and practices integral to both the maintenance and contestation of specific forms of history and social and cultural power. Social structures and processes are organized through institutions and practices, such as the cultural and educational systems, located discursive fields. The conflicting voices, assimilation of the words of others, as well as the meanings that dominate social institutions such as school, family, and culture, are ongoing ideological struggles within all of us. As public spaces, art galleries and museums can help facilitate the sharing of individual memories and stories as multiple versions of history offered in the public sphere with the intent of building community. It is within this cultural context that museums need to reconsider their roles and mandates and work towards becoming accountable and ethical to all the communities they serve. These issues have led to cultural inequalities and have kept members of disenfranchised communities out of cultural institutions. The role of the “words of others” is critical to the understanding of why we choose the words we use. How we struggle with the assimilation of different types of discourse will affect how we develop our view of the world and a system of ideas. Many museums continue to lie outside of most working people’s lived experiences and reflect the massive inequalities in society at large and issues have led to economic and cultural inequalities. Museums need to experiment with alternative arts programming that makes meaningful engagement with local cultural institutions and new engagement practices with all communities.

In these times of growing inequality, austerity and uncertainty, many mainstream cultural institutions continue to function beyond most working people’s experiences. One reason for this is that many cultural institutions are dominated by a privileged elite who have no interest in engaging with working-class communities. Despite the mandated attention to education, many Canadians are working class, and only half of Canadians have a post-secondary education. These people are not to be blamed if, despite easy enough access to galleries and museum is perceived to serve the interests of the other half of Canadian society. This means that the working class is strategically excluded from contemporary culture. Many cultural institutions tend to ignore the relationship between society and socio-economic class. This is due to the political and class bias of the professional class. Consequently, the structure and programming of mainstream cultural institutions work to reproduce the massive inequalities that exist in society. These socio-economic inequalities lead to cultural inequalities that keep members of working-class communities out of public some galleries and museums. As a partial remedy to this problem, dialogic and dialogue-based  art practices can help reveal the conflicting and contradictory perspectives that exist in society and in the dominant cultural narratives of neo-liberalism. Whereas ideology makes culture seem monolithic and monological, dialogue-based social art practices are uniquely able to disrupt dominant discourses because they encourage community engagement and disrupt curator-driven exhibition programming. Instead, dialogue gives galleries and museums a role to play within disenfranchised communities in struggle. Defining creative projects that are based in community-based dialogue reveal the conflicting and contradictory aspects of dominant cultural narratives. Through collaborative and participatory methods with progressive artists and participants to co-create creative project with working-class communities, creating alternatives to the traditional gallery system in which artists, audiences, and institutions are abstracted from the world around them. The use of dialogue in cultural projects introduces collaboration with communities at multiple levels, including the conception, production, and reception of the work. As a constructive principle, dialogue encourages the co-production of new meanings and perspectives. This means that galleries and museums need not be abandoned as bourgeois institutions but can be made into dialogical spaces of communicative interaction. Galleries and museum can better serve their mandates by providing opportunities for engagement with working-class communities that become conscious of culture as a public resource. Dialogue through cultural projects can help class constituencies become aware of the culture of the elite and look beyond their own, narrowly defined perspective.

In 2024, we have witnessed a disturbing trend of censorship, artistic freedom under assault, cancelled exhibitions, termination of curators and the overall failure of cultural institutions to defend the free expression of diverse forms artistic and curatorial representation.   Art galleries and museums have a public responsibility to offer platforms for the voices of artists to be heard and discussed as the ideas and perspectives of artists matter even more than ever in our polarized world. Art galleries and museums need to utilize the transformative potential of art to create discursive spaces for difficult conversations to take place, which would otherwise be challenging in other public spaces.   It is with this context that art galleries and museums need to encourage the exploration of multiple ways of knowing that empower disenfranchised voices, challenge dominant narratives, welcome community scholarly voices and explore diverse community ways of knowing and seeing. Art galleries and museum are spaces where the rich and diverse stories are preserved and told for people of today and for future generations. Art galleries and museum need to collaborate with their communities to encourage creativity, dialogue, and promoting new ways of thinking about our world.   The emergence of dialogue-based art practices marks a cultural engagement with the public and opens a space for a plurality of voices to enter art galleries and museums. Dialogue-based practices reveal an anti-ideological, anti-hierarchical politic which is linked to everyday language that can be understood as an expression of marginalized voices. Dialogue-based art practices simultaneously reveal conflicting and contradictory voices found within the dominant cultural narrative of neoliberalism and mainstream cultural institutions and the voices of those who have been excluded, marginalized, and who are outside of these dominant discourses.   Art galleries and museums can be contested public spaces where social hierarchies are questioned and subverted. Art galleries and museums are sites where dominant discourses can be critiqued by presenting competing voices and exhibiting diverse points of view. In these cultural spaces, we can investigate how disenfranchised voices can challenge dominant narratives, allowing for numerous points of view and ways of knowing to be articulated. Some forms of discourse may be designed to suppress the destabilizing aspects of language use by seeking to uphold a particular sanctioned point of view. This range of discourse supports social institutions and practices integral to both the maintenance and contestation of specific forms of history, social and cultural power.