AESTHETIC AMBITION | Creative Survival After Art School

A conversational workshop led by Hugo Dufour and Tricia Middleton

Collectively Hugo Dufour and Tricia Middleton have spent decades observing local and global art milieus within a wide range of contexts. Join them as they discuss recent economic-social-political-artistic trends, thinking through aesthetic ambition and creative survival for artists of all economic backgrounds, questioning unhelpful myths of “what it means to be an artist” along the way. There will be time for a substantial question and answer period in which Dufour and Middleton will offer their time-tested tips and tricks for cultivating a lasting creative practice after art school.

About the speakers

Hugo Dufour
b. 1988, Montréal, Canada.

Cultural worker. Lives and works in Montréal. Since 2016, he has been co-running the Céline Bureau art residency for emerging artists. In parallel, he is a cultural policy analyst and strategist for cities and institutions such as Montreal Nord, le Centre Céramique Bonsecours, the city of Sherbrooke, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Before all that, he was a curator in many arts festivals.

Tricia Middleton
b. 1972, Vancouver, Canada.

Artist. Lives and works in Montréal. Her solo exhibitions include presentations in Norway, France, the United States and Canada. Obsidian Situations is her first literary work, written over an extended period in Paris, published by Documents through the Centre for Expanded Poetics in Montréal (2023). She has worked part-time supporting student-led projects in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University since 2005.