Books by Erin Morton
Unsettling Canadian Art History, 2022
Bringing together fifteen scholars of art and culture, Unsettling Canadian Art History addresses ... more Bringing together fifteen scholars of art and culture, Unsettling Canadian Art History addresses the visual and material culture of settler colonialism, enslavement, and racialized diasporas in the contested white settler state of Canada.
This collection offers new avenues for scholarship on art, archives, and creative practice by rethinking histories of Canadian colonialisms from Black, Indigenous, racialized, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit perspectives. Writing across many positionalities, contributors offer chapters that disrupt colonial archives of art and culture, excavating and reconstructing radical Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic creation and experience. Exploring the racist frameworks that continue to erase histories of violence and resistance, this book imagines the expansive possibilities of a decolonial future.
Unsettling Canadian Art History affirms the importance of collaborative conversations and work in the effort to unsettle scholarship in Canadian art and culture.
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016
A radical re-examination of art in Nova Scotia and the place of folk art in the cultural hierarch... more A radical re-examination of art in Nova Scotia and the place of folk art in the cultural hierarchy of the twentieth century.
Folk art emerged in twentieth-century Nova Scotia not as an accident of history, but in tandem with cultural policy developments that shaped art institutions across the province between 1967 and 1997. For Folk’s Sake charts how woodcarvings and paintings by well-known and obscure self-taught makers - and their connection to handwork, local history, and place - fed the public’s nostalgia for a simpler past.
The folk artists examined here range from the well-known self-taught painter Maud Lewis to the relatively anonymous woodcarvers Charles Atkinson, Ralph Boutilier, Collins Eisenhauer, and Clarence Mooers. These artists are connected by the ways in which their work fascinated those active in the contemporary Canadian art world at a time when modernism - and the art market that once sustained it - had reached a crisis. As folk art entered the public collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the private collections of professors at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, it evolved under the direction of collectors and curators who sought it out according to a particular modernist aesthetic language. Morton engages national and transnational developments that helped to shape ideas about folk art to show how a conceptual category took material form.
Generously illustrated, For Folk’s Sake interrogates the emotive pull of folk art and reconstructs the relationships that emerged between relatively impoverished self-taught artists, a new brand of middle-class collector, and academically trained professors and curators in Nova Scotia’s most important art institutions.
Opening discussions about the possible futures of Canadian art history in a time of global analys... more Opening discussions about the possible futures of Canadian art history in a time of global analyses.
At a moment when the discipline of Canadian art history seems to be in flux and the study of Canadian visual culture is gaining traction outside of art history departments, the authors of Negotiations in a Vacant Lot were asked: is "Canada" - or any other nation - still relevant as a category of inquiry? Is our country simply one of many "vacant lots" where class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation interact? What happens to the project of Canadian visual history if we imagine that Canada, as essence, place, nation, or ideal, does not exist?
The argument that culture is increasingly used as an economic and socio-political resource resonates strongly with the popular strategies of "urban gurus" such as Richard Florida, and increasingly with government policy. Such strategies both contrast with, but also speak to traditions of Canadian state support for culture that have shaped the national(ist) discipline of Canadian art history. The authors of this collection stand at the multiple points where national culture and globalization collide, however, suggesting that academic investigation of the visual in Canada is contested in ways that cannot be contained by arbitrary borders.
Bringing together the work of scholars from diverse backgrounds and illustrated with dozens of works of Canadian art, Negotiations in a Vacant Lot unsettles the way we have used "nation" to examine art and culture and looks ahead to a global future.
Contributors include Susan Cahill (Nipissing University), Mark A. Cheetham (University of Toronto), Peter Conlin (Academia Sinica, Taipei), Annie Gérin (Université du Québec à Montréal), Richard William Hill (York University), Kristy A. Holmes (Lakehead University), Heather Igloliorte (Concordia University), Barbara Jenkins (Wilfrid Laurier University), Alice Ming Wai Jim (Concordia University), Lynda Jessup (Queen’s University), Erin Morton (University of New Brunswick), Kirsty Robertson (Western University), Rob Shields (University of Alberta), Sarah E.K. Smith (Queen’s University), Imre Szeman (University of Alberta), and Jennifer VanderBurgh (Saint Mary’s University).
Journal Articles by Erin Morton
Public: Art, Culture, Ideas, 2021
This article uses white Canadian settler artist Mary Pratt’s photorealistic paintings of salmon t... more This article uses white Canadian settler artist Mary Pratt’s photorealistic paintings of salmon to grapple with the ways in which settler colonialism necessitates anti-relationality between humans and the non-human world. I trace Indigenous (Beothuk and Mi’kmaq) histories of salmon in Ktaqmkuk|Newfoundland to grapple with what Pratt’s seemingly placid visions of everyday domestic settler life violently erase, concluding by with representations of salmon by Beothuk artist Shanawdithit.
TOPIA, 2017
“Killjoys, Academic Citizenship, and the Politics of Getting Along” was a panel organized by Susa... more “Killjoys, Academic Citizenship, and the Politics of Getting Along” was a panel organized by Susan Cahill, Kristy A. Holmes and Erin Morton with seven invited speakers—Heather Igloliorte, Alice Ming Wai Jim, Erin Morton, Charmaine A. Nelson, Cheli Nighttraveller, AJ Ripley, Carla Taunton and Tamara Vukov—that was held on October 27, 2016 for the annual meeting of the Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC) at the Université de Québec à Montréal, as part of the organization’s professional development series. The audience was comprised of students, contract academic faculty, and pre-tenure and tenured professors.
Cultural Studies, 2019
This article analyzes histories of white settler colonial violence in Treaty 6 territory by argui... more This article analyzes histories of white settler colonial violence in Treaty 6 territory by arguing that the 1870 Hudson’s Bay Company charter and transfer of Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to the Dominion of Canada helped to make past imperial violence an ongoing settler colonial terror structure into the present. It argues that this transition from imperial to settler colonial control of territory is best understood by using a multiple colonialisms framework, to examine the ways in which heteropatriarchal family structures transitioned from Indigenous-European to white settler kin networks that crystallized whiteness as a racialized means to control land as private property. Following Kanien’kehá:ka feminist scholar Audra Simpson’s work, I suggest that this territory’s multiple and overlapping colonial histories (French, English/British, and Canadian) are a crucial lens through which to understand the historical and ongoing formation of Canada as a white settler state, and that these histories still relationally drive anti-Indigenous violence and the settler killing of Indigenous peoples today. The essay concludes by arguing that the seeming daily placidity of white settler violence against Plains Indigenous peoples under Treaty 6 ultimately supports a relational violence that supports a killing state and its armed citizens in the name of protecting private property for white settlers.
Settler Colonial Studies, 2019
This article introduces the concept of the white settler tautology – something that seems true by... more This article introduces the concept of the white settler tautology – something that seems true by the very nature of its repetition and logical irrefutability in white settler histories, stories, and laws – to analyze the naturalization of settler colonial topographies and ecologies of Mi’kma’ki (Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag territory in Atlantic Canada). Settler tautologies such as written Biblical and visual art historical references to oxen and plough clearing lands and Acadian coastal dyke irrigation systems each advance the figure of a pacified, willing Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag subject. This erases the histories of wilful, resistant, and complex Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag whose ongoing presence evokes an ongoing settler violence that settlers do not want to see. We argue that white settler tautologies not only provide cyclical rationales to justify white settler nativism to claim originary European ownership of colonized Indigenous lands, but also violently declared evidence of white settler nativism in the name of white settler futurity through the re- interpretation of treaty and kin. We further suggest that the importance of understanding the violence of white settler tautologies, past and present, is that they still help to justify historical and continuous genocidal occupation in Mi’kma’ki since European invasion began in 1604. To reject such tautological logic is to make visible the unbroken presence of resilient and resistant Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag that white settlers have dispossessed and tried to eliminate for 400 years.
Culture Unbound, 2014
This article will examine the development of a state-sponsored therapeutic craft regime in Nova S... more This article will examine the development of a state-sponsored therapeutic craft regime in Nova Scotia in the early to mid-twentieth century. Built on the notion that postwar residents needed " work therapy – not a vacation, but a hardening process " (Black n.d. a: 3) – therapeutic craft emerged in Nova Scotia through a complex combination of the individualization of work habits, the desire to construct an antimodern regional identity around handwork, and the notion that both infirm patients and the province as a whole could be healed from economic stagnation through craft. Key to the success of Nova Scotia's therapeutic craft regime was occupational therapist Mary E. Black's career as director of the provincial government's Handicrafts and Home Industries Division from 1943 to 1955. Black's healthcare training led her to seek out therapeutic possibilities in everyday work activities, not to mention a therapeutic solution to what she called " the attitude of most Nova Scotians…[:] defeatism " (Black 1949: 46). Her ability to turn seemingly disparate things – such as Scandinavian design, the ordered work of occupational rehabilitation, and a phenomenological focus on what she called " in-dividualistic existence " (Black n.d. b: 2) – into a unified therapeutic solution demonstrates that the contemporary rise of therapeutic culture under the increased individualism of the neoliberal era has an established historical root in the postwar period that remains important to understand.
Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region, 2014
This article examines the contested commemoration of the self-taught Digby County painter Maud Le... more This article examines the contested commemoration of the self-taught Digby County painter Maud Lewis (1903-1970) by focusing specifically on the fate of her Marshalltown home. Following Lewis's death in 1970, the " painted house " became a site of contest between the local community, government stakeholders, and corporate interests. The eventual installation of the house at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax demonstrates that the corporate influence on the AGNS and the history of neoliberal development in Nova Scotia filled the gap in federal and provincial arts funding that would have once provided assistance for such community-level initiatives as the Marshalltown conservation of the painted house.
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Cet article examine la commémoration disputée de la peintre autodidacte Maud Lewis (1903-1970), du comté de Digby, en s'intéressant spécifiquement au sort de sa maison de Marshalltown. Après la mort de Lewis en 1970, la « maison peinte » fit l'objet d'un différend entre la population locale, les intervenants gouvernementaux et des entreprises privées. L'installation subséquente de la maison au Musée des beaux-arts de la Nouvelle-Écosse à Halifax démontre que l'influence des entreprises sur le Musée et l'histoire de l'essor du néolibéralisme en Nouvelle-Écosse ont comblé les lacunes du financement provincial et fédéral des arts qui, autrefois, aurait procuré une aide financière à des initiatives communautaires telles que la préservation de la maison peinte de Marshalltown.
This article will examine the career of weaver and occupational therapist Mary E. Black (1885–198... more This article will examine the career of weaver and occupational therapist Mary E. Black (1885–1988) by using her life as a lens through which to explore the intersection of arts and crafts revivalism with occupational therapy in early twentieth-century northeastern North America. Born in Massachusetts, Black grew up in and was educated in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. She trained as ward’s aide in Montreal in 1919 and worked in a string of hospitals and sanitariums throughout the United States and Nova Scotia. Indeed, Black understood her work as an occupational therapist and what she described as “the therapeutics of weaving” to be intertwined. Like many arts and crafts revivalists of her period, Black saw the teaching of skilled craftmaking as a means to generate self-sufficiency, since it provided a way for displaced and injured people to make salable goods in the face of industrialization, war, and inadequate medical care. In Black’s case, the utopian social mission of the new professional field of occupational therapy provided just the institutional means to disseminate the remunerative qualities of craftwork on a broad scale.
Book Chapters by Erin Morton
Morton and Smith examine the questions surrounding how informal community settlements are mediate... more Morton and Smith examine the questions surrounding how informal community settlements are mediated as social spaces under the conditions of globalization. They explore the mired acceptability of claiming territory through presence and human strength alone. They argue that the precariousness of life in contested social spaces pushes the boundaries of mobility and movement within the discourse of globalization theory. The chapter focuses on two recent examples of contemporary art that pushed the boundaries of “safe” social space: Robert Jelinek’s “State of Sabotage” and Vessna Perunovich and Boja Vasic’s “Parallel Worlds: The Architecture of Survival.” Through interviews with Jelinek, Perunovich, and Vasic, the chapter probes their representations of informally settled communities and questions the ability of artistic intervention to foster critique without reproducing dominant frameworks. The insights gleaned from these artistic works are easily translatable to the global implications of using community, architecture, and movement as sites of resistance and survival.
Talks by Erin Morton
This session addresses some of the challenges that come with "moving the goal post," from finishi... more This session addresses some of the challenges that come with "moving the goal post," from finishing your doctorate to having an active and happy professional life in a new job.
From Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Career Corner, 2011.
This session addresses some of the challenges that come with "moving the goal post," from finishi... more This session addresses some of the challenges that come with "moving the goal post," from finishing your doctorate to having an active and happy professional life in a new job.
From Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Career Corner, 2011.
This session addresses some of the challenges that come with "moving the goal post," from finish... more This session addresses some of the challenges that come with "moving the goal post," from finishing your doctorate to having an active and happy professional life in a new job.
From Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Career Corner, 2011.
Reviews by Erin Morton
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Books by Erin Morton
This collection offers new avenues for scholarship on art, archives, and creative practice by rethinking histories of Canadian colonialisms from Black, Indigenous, racialized, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit perspectives. Writing across many positionalities, contributors offer chapters that disrupt colonial archives of art and culture, excavating and reconstructing radical Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic creation and experience. Exploring the racist frameworks that continue to erase histories of violence and resistance, this book imagines the expansive possibilities of a decolonial future.
Unsettling Canadian Art History affirms the importance of collaborative conversations and work in the effort to unsettle scholarship in Canadian art and culture.
Folk art emerged in twentieth-century Nova Scotia not as an accident of history, but in tandem with cultural policy developments that shaped art institutions across the province between 1967 and 1997. For Folk’s Sake charts how woodcarvings and paintings by well-known and obscure self-taught makers - and their connection to handwork, local history, and place - fed the public’s nostalgia for a simpler past.
The folk artists examined here range from the well-known self-taught painter Maud Lewis to the relatively anonymous woodcarvers Charles Atkinson, Ralph Boutilier, Collins Eisenhauer, and Clarence Mooers. These artists are connected by the ways in which their work fascinated those active in the contemporary Canadian art world at a time when modernism - and the art market that once sustained it - had reached a crisis. As folk art entered the public collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the private collections of professors at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, it evolved under the direction of collectors and curators who sought it out according to a particular modernist aesthetic language. Morton engages national and transnational developments that helped to shape ideas about folk art to show how a conceptual category took material form.
Generously illustrated, For Folk’s Sake interrogates the emotive pull of folk art and reconstructs the relationships that emerged between relatively impoverished self-taught artists, a new brand of middle-class collector, and academically trained professors and curators in Nova Scotia’s most important art institutions.
At a moment when the discipline of Canadian art history seems to be in flux and the study of Canadian visual culture is gaining traction outside of art history departments, the authors of Negotiations in a Vacant Lot were asked: is "Canada" - or any other nation - still relevant as a category of inquiry? Is our country simply one of many "vacant lots" where class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation interact? What happens to the project of Canadian visual history if we imagine that Canada, as essence, place, nation, or ideal, does not exist?
The argument that culture is increasingly used as an economic and socio-political resource resonates strongly with the popular strategies of "urban gurus" such as Richard Florida, and increasingly with government policy. Such strategies both contrast with, but also speak to traditions of Canadian state support for culture that have shaped the national(ist) discipline of Canadian art history. The authors of this collection stand at the multiple points where national culture and globalization collide, however, suggesting that academic investigation of the visual in Canada is contested in ways that cannot be contained by arbitrary borders.
Bringing together the work of scholars from diverse backgrounds and illustrated with dozens of works of Canadian art, Negotiations in a Vacant Lot unsettles the way we have used "nation" to examine art and culture and looks ahead to a global future.
Contributors include Susan Cahill (Nipissing University), Mark A. Cheetham (University of Toronto), Peter Conlin (Academia Sinica, Taipei), Annie Gérin (Université du Québec à Montréal), Richard William Hill (York University), Kristy A. Holmes (Lakehead University), Heather Igloliorte (Concordia University), Barbara Jenkins (Wilfrid Laurier University), Alice Ming Wai Jim (Concordia University), Lynda Jessup (Queen’s University), Erin Morton (University of New Brunswick), Kirsty Robertson (Western University), Rob Shields (University of Alberta), Sarah E.K. Smith (Queen’s University), Imre Szeman (University of Alberta), and Jennifer VanderBurgh (Saint Mary’s University).
Journal Articles by Erin Morton
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Cet article examine la commémoration disputée de la peintre autodidacte Maud Lewis (1903-1970), du comté de Digby, en s'intéressant spécifiquement au sort de sa maison de Marshalltown. Après la mort de Lewis en 1970, la « maison peinte » fit l'objet d'un différend entre la population locale, les intervenants gouvernementaux et des entreprises privées. L'installation subséquente de la maison au Musée des beaux-arts de la Nouvelle-Écosse à Halifax démontre que l'influence des entreprises sur le Musée et l'histoire de l'essor du néolibéralisme en Nouvelle-Écosse ont comblé les lacunes du financement provincial et fédéral des arts qui, autrefois, aurait procuré une aide financière à des initiatives communautaires telles que la préservation de la maison peinte de Marshalltown.
Book Chapters by Erin Morton
Talks by Erin Morton
From Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Career Corner, 2011.
From Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Career Corner, 2011.
From Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Career Corner, 2011.
Reviews by Erin Morton
This collection offers new avenues for scholarship on art, archives, and creative practice by rethinking histories of Canadian colonialisms from Black, Indigenous, racialized, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit perspectives. Writing across many positionalities, contributors offer chapters that disrupt colonial archives of art and culture, excavating and reconstructing radical Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic creation and experience. Exploring the racist frameworks that continue to erase histories of violence and resistance, this book imagines the expansive possibilities of a decolonial future.
Unsettling Canadian Art History affirms the importance of collaborative conversations and work in the effort to unsettle scholarship in Canadian art and culture.
Folk art emerged in twentieth-century Nova Scotia not as an accident of history, but in tandem with cultural policy developments that shaped art institutions across the province between 1967 and 1997. For Folk’s Sake charts how woodcarvings and paintings by well-known and obscure self-taught makers - and their connection to handwork, local history, and place - fed the public’s nostalgia for a simpler past.
The folk artists examined here range from the well-known self-taught painter Maud Lewis to the relatively anonymous woodcarvers Charles Atkinson, Ralph Boutilier, Collins Eisenhauer, and Clarence Mooers. These artists are connected by the ways in which their work fascinated those active in the contemporary Canadian art world at a time when modernism - and the art market that once sustained it - had reached a crisis. As folk art entered the public collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the private collections of professors at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, it evolved under the direction of collectors and curators who sought it out according to a particular modernist aesthetic language. Morton engages national and transnational developments that helped to shape ideas about folk art to show how a conceptual category took material form.
Generously illustrated, For Folk’s Sake interrogates the emotive pull of folk art and reconstructs the relationships that emerged between relatively impoverished self-taught artists, a new brand of middle-class collector, and academically trained professors and curators in Nova Scotia’s most important art institutions.
At a moment when the discipline of Canadian art history seems to be in flux and the study of Canadian visual culture is gaining traction outside of art history departments, the authors of Negotiations in a Vacant Lot were asked: is "Canada" - or any other nation - still relevant as a category of inquiry? Is our country simply one of many "vacant lots" where class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation interact? What happens to the project of Canadian visual history if we imagine that Canada, as essence, place, nation, or ideal, does not exist?
The argument that culture is increasingly used as an economic and socio-political resource resonates strongly with the popular strategies of "urban gurus" such as Richard Florida, and increasingly with government policy. Such strategies both contrast with, but also speak to traditions of Canadian state support for culture that have shaped the national(ist) discipline of Canadian art history. The authors of this collection stand at the multiple points where national culture and globalization collide, however, suggesting that academic investigation of the visual in Canada is contested in ways that cannot be contained by arbitrary borders.
Bringing together the work of scholars from diverse backgrounds and illustrated with dozens of works of Canadian art, Negotiations in a Vacant Lot unsettles the way we have used "nation" to examine art and culture and looks ahead to a global future.
Contributors include Susan Cahill (Nipissing University), Mark A. Cheetham (University of Toronto), Peter Conlin (Academia Sinica, Taipei), Annie Gérin (Université du Québec à Montréal), Richard William Hill (York University), Kristy A. Holmes (Lakehead University), Heather Igloliorte (Concordia University), Barbara Jenkins (Wilfrid Laurier University), Alice Ming Wai Jim (Concordia University), Lynda Jessup (Queen’s University), Erin Morton (University of New Brunswick), Kirsty Robertson (Western University), Rob Shields (University of Alberta), Sarah E.K. Smith (Queen’s University), Imre Szeman (University of Alberta), and Jennifer VanderBurgh (Saint Mary’s University).
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Cet article examine la commémoration disputée de la peintre autodidacte Maud Lewis (1903-1970), du comté de Digby, en s'intéressant spécifiquement au sort de sa maison de Marshalltown. Après la mort de Lewis en 1970, la « maison peinte » fit l'objet d'un différend entre la population locale, les intervenants gouvernementaux et des entreprises privées. L'installation subséquente de la maison au Musée des beaux-arts de la Nouvelle-Écosse à Halifax démontre que l'influence des entreprises sur le Musée et l'histoire de l'essor du néolibéralisme en Nouvelle-Écosse ont comblé les lacunes du financement provincial et fédéral des arts qui, autrefois, aurait procuré une aide financière à des initiatives communautaires telles que la préservation de la maison peinte de Marshalltown.
From Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Career Corner, 2011.
From Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Career Corner, 2011.
From Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Career Corner, 2011.