Dr Joana Joachim, PhD

Dr. Joana Joachim is an Assistant professor of Black Studies in Art History and Social Justice at Concordia University. Her research and teaching interests include Black feminist art histories, Black diasporic art histories, critical museologies, Black Canadian studies, and Canadian slavery studies. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral work, There/Then, Here/Now: Black Women’s Hair and Dress in the French Empire, examined the visual culture of self-preservation and self-care through the lens of creolization as well as historical and contemporary art practices. She earned her PhD in the department of Art History and Communication Studies and at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill University working under the supervision of Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson. Dr. Joachim obtained her Master’s degree in Museology from Université de Montréal and her BFA cum laude from University of Ottawa. In 2025 she was appointed as Deputy-Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University.

Dr. Joachim’s scholarship has appeared in books, journals and magazines including History, art and Blackness in Canada, Manuel Mathieu: World Discovered Under Other Skies, RACAR, Canadian Journal of History and C Magazine.*

• “‘Not Necessarily Not There’: Dark Energy in Dionne Simpson and Denyse Thomasos’s Paintings” for Routledge Companion to Art History and Feminisms Ed. Erin Silver (forthcoming)
• “Glitter and Grit: Michèle Pearson Clarke’s Black Queer Unreason” for Routledge Companion to African Diaspora Art Ed. Eddie Chambers. UK: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, (October 2024).
• “A Complex Mapping of Power”: Deanna Bowen’s Investigative Installations” Golden Square Mile. Montreal: Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, 2024.
• “In The Silence of An Untimely Glitter Stache” exhibition essay, The Animal Seems To Be Moving, Le Centre d’art et de diffusion Clark, Montreal, 2022. (Read it online)
• “salt. For the preservation of Black diasporic visual histories” RACAR special issue co-edited with Pamela Edmonds. Fall 2022. (Read it online)
• “Créolité Continued: Manuel Mathieu’s A Tropical Onomatopoeia” Manuel Mathieu: World Discovered Under Other Skies (Toronto: The Power Plant, 2022).
• “Hoodies and Regimentals: Black Attire and Access in the Canadian Art Museum” History, art and Blackness in Canada Eds. Julie Crooks, Dominique Fontaine, Silvia Forni (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum) forthcoming.
• “‘blips in time’ a constellation of Black Canadian artistic tradition from 1970 on” curatorial essay, Blackity, Artexte, Montreal, 2021. (Read it online)
• “Black Gold: A Black Feminist Art History of 1920s Montreal” Canadian Journal of History /Annales Canadiennes d’Histoire special theme issue: “Black Creativity, Expressive Cultures, and Narratives of Space and Place,” (December 2021).
• “Curating, Criticism and Care, or, ‘Showing Up’ as Praxis” C Magazine 145: Criticism, Again (Spring 2020). (Read it online)
• “Syrus Marcus Ware, #BLACKLIVESMATTER, and ‘Artivism’ in Canada” Spaces and Places of Canadian Popular Culture, Ed. Victoria Kannen and Neil Shyminsky. Canadian Scholars Press (2019) 44-55.
• “Speculations”, curatorial essay, Artexte, Montreal, 2019.
• Exhibition Review “From Africa to the Americas : Picasso Face-to-Face, Past and Present and Here We Are Here : Black Canadian Contemporary Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts” RACAR: What Is Critical Curating? Vol. 43, no. 2 (2018). (Read it online)
• ” ‘Embodiment and Subjectivity’: Intersectional Black Feminist Curatorial Practices in Canada” RACAR: What Is Critical Curating? Vol. 43, no. 2 (2018). (Read it online)

Introduction to Canadian Art

In this course, we will endeavour to explore some gaps in Canadian art history. Looking past the contemporary moment, this course will be focusing on Black Canadian art before the 1950s. We will examine the cultural and historical contributions of Black people to this country and think critically about the disciplines of museology, curating and art history. We will develop an understanding of key moments in Black Canadian history and harness skills to discuss art from critical perspectives considering issues around identity, gender, race, sexuality, and class in those contexts.

Feminism and Art History

Canada’s Black visual art and exhibition milieu has largely been led by the work of Black women for several decades. Expanding on foundational feminist art histories, this course will consider some of the leading figures in art history as they relate to the topic of Black Women and Art in Canada and beyond. This course will examine the cultural and artistic contributions of Black diasporic women and think critically about the disciplines of museology, curating and art history as they relate to feminisms. Through readings, gallery visits, screenings, discussions, and case studies we will consider how Black women have developed a rich cultural milieu filling ongoing institutional gaps in art history and how this relates to feminism art histories more broadly. 

Art History and Black Studies: Dear Science and Other Stories

This course will consider some theories related to Black visual art in Canada and elsewhere. We will discuss and examine how they can be used to analyze Black visualities and aesthetics. We will consider how to engage critically and rigorously with the work of Black artists from across the globe. Centering Katherine McKittrick’s book Dear Science and Other Stories (2021) we will investigate her conception of Black creative texts and similar approaches to reading Black cultural production. Through discussions about notions such as critical fabulation, unpayable debts, Black gaze and Black livingness, for example, we will reflect on how theories pulled from larger Black studies can serve to complicate our understandings and analyses of Black visual art specifically. This course will also lead us to think critically about art history, curatorial practices and Black studies more broadly in Canada as opposed other parts of the Atlantic world. 

Special Topics in Genre Studies: Black Atlantic Art

In this course, we will focus on some of the key figures, moments and issues related to Black Atlantic art. This course will offer a critical survey of Black diasporic art and history focusing on fundamental concepts and practices such as Black Atlantic, creolization, and critical curating. We will examine cultural production by Black people across the Atlantic world at different times. In this course we will also think critically about the disciplines of museology, curating and art history in relation to global histories of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism. 

Issues in Black Canadian Art Histories

In this course, we consider some of the key issues pertaining to Black Canadian art as they relate torace and art history in Canada. We examine the cultural and historical contributions by Black peopleand think critically about the disciplines of museology, curating and art history in Canada. We develop an understanding of Black feminisms as well as harness skills to discuss art from criticalperspectives considering issues around identity, gender, race, sexuality and class.

Issues in Critical Museologies: Pedagogical and Art Historical Perspectives

In this course, we consider some of the key issues related to critical museology and art education inCanada. We examine the cultural and historical stakes of these institutions and think critically aboutthe disciplines of museology, curating and art history. We develop an understanding of museumpractises as well as harness skills to discuss art from critical perspectives considering issues aroundaccessibility, acquisition, documentation, education, curating and how this intersects gender, race,sexuality, disability and class. The goal of this course is to familiarize students with some basic principlesof critical museology, key aspects of Black Canadian history and how to take them up in art education.This course leads students to gain an understanding of key political and museological stakes of Blackart histories in Canada and beyond.