Mila Natasha Mendez Reflection

Nya Lewis. Oluseye Ogunlesi. Geneviève Wallen. Chason Yeboah Brown. To me, these are household names. These are the names of Black artists and culture workers, currently or formerly based in so-called Canada, whose creative practices and generosity of thought have directly and indirectly shaped my understanding of and relationship to culture as a potential site of care, reckoning, integrity and transformation. These are artists of the Black diaspora who have earned juried recognition — solo exhibitions, grants, interview features, nominations and awards — and more importantly, who are uplifted by their communities. These are artists with distinct aesthetics and articulations that transmit both a fervent love of Black life and a careful attunement to the conditions to which that love is also, though not only, a balm.

Yet, none of these artists is likely to be considered notable enough according to Wikipedia’s standards to warrant an entry in the most read reference source in the world.

In March 2024, I was selected by The Black Arts Centre to participate in the inaugural cohort of the Wikipedia Scholars program, an initiative led by Rungh Magazine in partnership with Vancouver-based arts and academic organisations. The program intends to work in and against the content gaps and biases in Wikipedia that have formed as a result of the fact that the population of Wikipedia contributors, called editors, skews predominantly towards white cisgender men. A 2021 “Community Insights Report” released by The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, revealed that in the United States, 89% of editors identified themselves as white (and globally) and 85% as men, and only .05% identified as Black; and while demographic data on Canadian Wikipedia editors has not been formally collected, the persistence of white cisgender men dominating knowledge production and valuation is a historical and contemporary trend that crosses and constitutes both disciplinary and national borders. Even if Wikipedia’s aim is to “is to collect and freely share the sum of all human knowledge”, Black and Caribbean feminist theorist Sylvia Wynter has shown us that the modern category and order of the human is founded on the relegation of Black and Indigenous people to position of non-being, and the overrepresentation of the white middle-class man as the default or definitive form of human life. ‘Human’ knowledge, as such, is an explicitly racialized project, and this shows up as a problem in Wikipedia’s records and processes.

Upon accepting the invitation from BLAC and Rungh to join the Wikipedia Scholars program, I was confident and looking forward to generating 500 words on one of the many Black artists I’ve had the pleasure to learn about, meet or even work with over the last four years. The proposition seemed an easy task: to choose an artist for whom a Wikipedia page did not yet exist, to research that artist, and to write about them according to Wikipedia’s style guide. I was already thinking about Nya Lewis. Lewis is the current Director/Curator at Artspeak Gallery on unceded Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, or Tsleil-Waututh Nations (colonially known as Vancouver) and an independent curator. I first heard them speak on a panel in 2022 titled “Commit us to Memory: Black Women Curators Interrupting the Canon”, a virtual event that accompanied Where do we go from here?, an exhibition guest curated by Lewis at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Yet, as I read through the available sources on Lewis and assessed this research against Wikipedia’s “notability” criteria, I had strong doubts about whether an entry on Lewis would stand review. I cycled through this process again when I looked at available sources for Oluseye Ogunlesi, and again for Geneviève Wallen, and again for Chason Yeboah Brown.

Wikipedia’s standards for notability require that Wikipedia entries should only be written, and will only remain published, on topics that have earned notable status. This status, they determine, is marked by the availability of verifiable information on said topic and the form and reputability of the sources in which that info is found. Simply, notable topics have to have already been written about in secondary sources in reputable publications. Reliance on primary sources — such as an artist’s website, artist statements, autobiographical texts, press releases, interviews, which in this case made up the majority of available source material — is discouraged and will be challenged.

What is notability then for people, artists or otherwise, who are required to write or speak themselves into the cultural record from which they have been ignored, neglected or erased for reasons of racism, cissexism, ableism or otherwise? What of people you have been enclosed by “orthography of the wake” and who seek to language themselves into presence and dignity on their own terms? The “orthography of the wake” is what Christina Sharpe has termed that which has become conventional for writing about Black bodies in the afterlife of slavery. From the Greek orthos, meaning ‘correct,’ and -graphia, ‘writing,’ it describes is the conventional way of spelling, that is solidifying, the climate of anti-Blackness that persists in the wake of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

Within this convention, the phenomenon of white people writing about Black people that commonly in a way that serves the upholding of white dominance, what emerges is a field of art criticism that also refuses to take Black art seriously on aesthetic and theoretical terms. That results is a mainstream context in which Black artists are being mentioned, acknowledged and sometimes interviewed, their voices included, but their work is not studied or upheld to the same rigour of perception as art and artists unmarked by race. The discursive construction occurring here is that their work is of lesser quality than non-Black art, or that the labour of its production is more so the work of a craftsperson or artisan than a serious artist. What this means then is a dearth of expectation to read and produce work on Black art that addresses histories, politics, aesthetics, techniques, and lineages.

This isn’t to suggest that the interview isn’t or can’t be a substantive form of relational engagement with culture, nor that there isn’t fantastic writing about Black art and aesthetics —there is, though it and its subjects continue largely to be constituted as culturally specific (read: adding diversity), rather than socially significant (read: Black culture has and can change the world). From the vantage point of Black feminist epistemologies, one can argue that the methodology of the interview can hold a caring and socially accountable ethic of community building and knowledge transfer within existing power relations that the seemingly omniscient and objective narrator of classic scholarship mostly elides. And, there is still a problem if interviews are the primary record of contemporary Black art and that record is deemed insufficient for entry into the bank of the “sum of all human knowledge.”

In Making History, Rinaldo Walcott argues that the outcome of a preoccupation with Blackness as an identity that has been historically excluded from the institutions of the art gallery and the museum, is that its inclusion becomes the marker of change and social repair, but the status within the art and the artist is held does not change: “Black Canadian art holds a functional place at the institutional level as an example of particular institutions meeting their diversity and inclusion metrics and appearing to redress past exclusions thereby giving the impression of solving” (226). Inclusion comes to stand in for an investigation of the ways that exclusion is the tip of the systemic iceberg of oppression in the context of cultural politics. Beneath the surface, our much larger concern might be that anti-Blackness and white dominance can shape the very parameters of possibility for what we can think, perceive and express. That there is still a problem of knowledge production and valuation if we include people, but only in such a way that sustains their placement in the “register of abandonment” (Sharpe 115).

To this, inclusion in Wikipedia is a form of conventional writing to which we should bring a generative scepticism. A Wikipedia entry serves certain purposes and benefits, but perhaps more meaningfully so when it engenders a shift in the common practices of how we write about each other. Genevieve Wallen, independent curator based in Tiohtià:ke (colonially known as Montreal), whom I also first encountered on the panel mentioned above reminded us on that day, that while we (Black cultural workers) might be invisible to the arts sector or mainstream population of art goers, we are not invisible to each other. Rather, we can continue to set the terms of our engagement outside of and beyond the conditions set upon us.

These reflections have led me to particular commitments I want to uphold in my own practice as a cultural worker and doctoral candidate. Namely, to write and curate insistently about emerging and mid-career Black artists. To language their existence and cultural contributions into the archives of art writing from a place that doesn’t prioritise inclusion, but rather commitment. A rigorous commitment to engage with the substance of Black thought and creativity. And while such writing may one day provide some of the proof that Wikipedia needs to approve an article about an artist, I am grateful for and inspired by, I hope that will be the least of its achievements.

References

1. https://archive.ph/20210107163155/https://www.economist.com/international/2021/01/09/wikipedia-is-20-and-its-reputation-has-never-been-higher

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2021-08-29/News_from_Wiki_Education#:~:text=89%25%20of%20U.S.%20Wikipedia%20editors,population%20percentage%20of%205.7%25)

3. Ibid.

4. And as Wynter further reminds us, “The correlated hypothesis here is that all our present strug respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggl environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources […] these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle” (261) Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument