Kikachi Memeh Reflection

These last few months as Rungh’s Wikipedia Scholar have reawakened my appetite for research. As a writer, journalist, but recent graduate now fully plunged in the workforce, it is easy to be sidetracked by corporate responsibilities that create lulls in creative inspiration and drive.

I selected Chloe Onari as my research subject based on the elusiveness of her work and career. She was there, in the archives, front and clear, yet she wasn’t. Her name and artist biography are plastered on several websites, primarily in relation to her involvement in the recent touring exhibition Ritual As Practice/Practice As Ritual, or articles that reference her original thrust to the limelight, the 1989 touring exhibition Black Wimmin: When and Where We Enter. But her person, her career, took up little to no space in these archives and she’s only but one of the many Black women artists who aren’t fleshed out as three-dimensional. In the Wikipedia entry for Black Wimmin: When and Where We Enter, the last editor made sure to leave a trace of the evident gap in Wikipedia’s coverage of BIPOC women artists. Seven out of the 11 participating artists were marked red - they had no Wikipedia entries for these women.

Chloe’s work was wide-ranging, her contributions to the Canadian art landscape as expansive, but the details of her work were preserved in primary sources and found documents, many of which flouted Wikipedia’s citation policies. I wrestled deeply with Wikipedia’s restrictions; the journalist in me needed to dig deeper, hear from sources, living witnesses who could piece together Chloe’s life in a colourful, fulsome way. In a way journalists at her time didn’t, in a way documents, archives, and reportage of her work failed to. The gap between what was done and what was recorded widened as I uncovered other Black artists with decades worth of presence in the Canadian art industry. Artists whose trajectory missed the mark for notability in public archives, whose exhibitions never received reviews, whose practice remains in the moment, as is the work of many Black people.

Through this process, one is particularly reminded of the urgency of archiving, creating physical and digital archives of the people, organizations, and events happening at any given moment. As many pamphlets can fit my bookshelf, as many postcards my fridge, as many digital posters I can save; is a guiding mantra moving forward. The work I do, the work the community around me does, deserves a fulsome documentation for reference and citation. This research — to string together a cohesive, basic, accessible snapshot of Chloe’s life and work — was a labour of care and duty. Despite Wikipedia’s topsy-turvy relationship among academics and researchers, often disparaged as a source of citation, this research and entry page, at least, offers curious researchers, students, and early career artists points of entry into Onari’s work.