Notice Board

Art NOW presents Elizabeth Cavaliere
Historical Research and Contemporary Art Practices – Artists are art historians too!
12 pm MT | November 16, 2022
University Recital Hall
Free admission, everyone welcome

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Starting her undergraduate degree with a large-format camera in her hands and a curiosity about what makes land and place special, Elizabeth Cavaliere’s career as an artist was quickly abandoned when she discovered the joys of historical and archival research. But, what brought her to the photograph in the first place – ideas of identity and place – lingered in her mind and underpinned her research questions. This lecture moves through some of Cavaliere’s historical research interests and looks to examples of the ways that contemporary artists turn to similar historical research in their art practices.

Elizabeth Cavaliere is a settler residing in Toronto/Tkaronto. Her research focuses on historical photographs of Canadian land and the many ways they are shaped into landscape, document, and commodity.As a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow she researched a collection of photographs produced during Treaty 9 negotiations in 1905 and 1906, and as the Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art she pursued research on pedagogical approaches to Canadian art histories, which she continues now in her involvement with the teaching collective Open Art Histories. She is currently an instructor at Queen’s University, OCAD University, and the University of Lethbridge. She has writing published in Environmental History, Journal of Canadian Studies, Histoire Sociale/Social History, Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, RACAR, and Journal of Canadian Art History. She is the recipient of a Lisette Model/Joseph G. Blum Fellowship in the History of Photography from the National Gallery of Canada and the Michel de la Chenelière Prize from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. 

Image: William McFarlane Notman, Royal Tour: Royal Party coming down timber slide, Ottawa, ON, 1901. Silver salts on film, gelatin silver process. 12 x 17 cm. VIEW-6754, McCord Museum. Courtesy of the speaker.