QUEERS ON THE RUN A Nomadic Workshop in Queer Archives

This 2-day event will begin with hands-on research into holdings in Les Archives gaies du Québec, with files selected by members of the research team. While registration for the event at Les Archives is limited to ten (10) participants, all are welcome for our JI session. Our objective is to experiment in collaborative research, bearing in mind the following questions: 1) What is a queer archival methodology?; 2) How does mentorship function outside the heternormative order?; and 3) What are the ethics of and protocols for uncovering and circulating traces of queer worldmaking? 

For additional information, or to register for the hands-on research, please email Erin Silver at erin.silver@ubc.ca

Where do queer Canadian art histories reside? What gathers/dwells in these repositories, what has been omitted and/or excluded, and how do institutions shape what histories can be known and accessed? Rarely a solo endeavour, queer art historical scholarship is more often relational and collaborative in nature. However, despite the wealth of queer Canadian art practices, the untraditional forms that queer scholarship assume may account for why no comprehensive history of queer Canadian art exists. Efforts through the 1970s to the 1990 to secure queer presence and visibility in a variety of institutional contexts became de facto political acts. However, queerness has a troubled, even “backward” (Heather Love, 2007) approach to archives and histories (Ann Cvetkovich, 2003; José Esteban Muñoz, 1996). We ask: how might queer archives, and queer researchers, engage self-reflexively with regard to the challenges of preserving oft-ephemeral queer histories while continuing to promote and safeguard their right to exist?

We invite students and members of the public to participate in Queers on the Run: A Nomadic Workshop in Queer Archives in Canada, an ongoing research experiment led by Drs. August Klintberg and Erin Silver. Guided by the premise that museums, art institutions, collections, libraries, and archives are inextricable to art historical scholarship, we will examine the interrelation between institutions and the researching and writing of queer Canadian art histories.

On Thursday, December 11th from 10am-12:00pm, we will meet at Les Archives gaies du Québec (1000 Atateken) . Following a brief presentation by Klintberg and Silver and an overview of Les Archives gaies du Québec, the group will be invited to engage in collaborative archival research.

On Friday, December 12th from 3-4:30pm, please join us at the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art (EV 3.711) for Afternoons at the Institute, where Klintberg and Silver will be joined by graduate student researchers and members of the SSHRC-funded project Queer Operatives: Writing, Making, and Transmitting Queer Canadian Art Histories for a series of presentations on team members’ archival research and community dialogue.

✸      ✸      ✸      ✸      ✸      

Adrian Deveau is a PhD candidate in Art History at Concordia University and holds an MA in Art History and Theory from the University of British Columbia. Adrian has worked with arts-based organizations, including SSHRC-funded research projects “Parallel: The History and Archives of Artist-Run Centres in Canada” and “Queer Operatives: Writing, Making, and Transmitting Queer Canadian Art Histories,” Thinking Through the Museum: Museum Queeries, the Museum of Anthropology (Vancouver), Vancouver Biennale, and Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre. In their research, Adrian is interested in the intersection of queer art and political protest, Artist-Run Centre Culture, and the methodology of Telepathy within the archive.

August Klintberg (formerly Mark Clintberg) is an artist who works in the field of art history. He is an Associate Professor at the Alberta University of the Arts, and his art practice is represented by Pierre François Ouellette art contemporain in Montreal. He earned his PhD in Art History at Concordia University in 2013. His research has been published in The New Americanist, Printing History, Journal of Canadian Art History, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, and The Journal of Curatorial Studies.

Erin Silver is an Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at The University of British Columbia. She is the author of Taking Place: Building Histories of Queer and Feminist Art in North America (Manchester University Press, 2023) and Suzy Lake: Life & Work (Art Canada Institute, 2021), co-editor (with Amelia Jones) of Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2016), and editor of Art and Feminisms: Histories, Methods, and Legacies (Routledge, forthcoming January 2026). She is the Principal Investigator of the 5-year SSHRC Insight Grant project “Queer Operatives: Writing, Making, and Transmitting Queer Canadian Art Histories” (2023-2028) and co-lead (with Melanie O’Brian) of the Curatorial Research Excellence Cluster (UBC). A former President of the Universities Art Association of Canada (2022-2025), Silver is currently Editor-in-Chief of UAAC’s affiliate journal RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review.