Conversation with Curator Tarah Hogue

Broken Boxes Podcast is proud to present this episode featuring curator Tarah Hogue as the tenth installation in a series of interviews featuring participants and their respondents from the socially engaged project #callresponse.  

In this episode Tarah Hogue speaks about her experience as co-organizer of #callresponse with Maria Hupfield and Tania Willard. She shares with us her path to the world of curation, her experiences working with grunt gallery, her views on reconciliation and the challenges and highlights of co-organizing the #callresponse project. Tarah also offers insight for those interested in curating, providing contemporary resource and sharing her favorite publications.

Music featured on this episode by Miss Christie Lee, Mob Bounce, JB the First Lady & Cris Derksen

More about the curator:

Tarah Hogue is the 2016 Audain Aboriginal Curatorial Fellow with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and Curator at grunt gallery in Vancouver. Her work with Indigenous People in Canada aims to decenter institutional space and history. Using collaborative methodologies and a careful attentiveness to place, she prioritizes responsible research methodologies of Indigenous knowledge that are grounded in the intersectional practices of Indigenous feminisms, re/conciliation, and cultural resurgence.

Tarah Hogue is Métis/French Canadian and of Dutch Canadian ancestry, she grew up in Red Deer Alberta, on the border between Treaty 6 and 7 along the original trading route of the Métis. She identifies as an uninvited guest on the unceded Coast Salish territories of Vancouver BC where she has lived since 2008.

Recent curatorial projects include #callresponse, a series of local art commissions centering Indigenous women and artists accompanied by a touring exhibition with guest respondents at grunt gallery, co-organized with Maria Hupfield and Tania Willard;Unsettled Sites, a group show on haunting settler colonialism at SFU Gallery; and Cutting Copper: Indigenous Resurgent Practice, a collaboration between grunt gallery and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery UBC, co-organizer Shelly Rosenblum. The symposium brought together live performance art with a panel of Indigenous theorists and curators around the exhibition Lalakenis/All Directions: A Journey of Truth and Unity by Kwakwaka’wakw artist Beau Dick. Previous exhibits featured the work of residential school survivors in Canada and their descendants, including NET-ETH: Going Out of the Darkness, co-curated with Rose M. Spahan, Malaspina Printmakers; and Witnesses: Art and Canada's Indian Residential Schools, at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, co-curated by Geoffrey Carr, Dana Claxton, Tarah Hogue, Shelly Rosenblum, Charlotte Townsend-Gault and Keith Wallace. She also curated No Windows, Satellite Gallery;Facing the Animal, Or Gallery; and is co-founder and curator of Gam Gallery with Julia Kreutz, an exhibition space and artist studio located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Hogue is writer-in-residence for thirstDays with VIVO Media Arts, and has written forBlackFlash Magazine (forthcoming) Canadian Art, Decoy Magazine, Inuit Art Quarterly, and MICE Magazine. She holds an MA in Art History, Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia and a BA(H) in Art History from Queen’s University.

#callresponse Project Details:

Strategically centering Indigenous women as vital presences across multiple platforms, #callresponse is a multifaceted project which includes a website, social media platform, touring exhibition and catalogue. The project brings together five local art commissions by Indigenous women artists from across Canada, including Christi Belcourt, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Tania Willard and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory. Each artist has invited a guest to respond to their work, including Isaac Murdoch, IV Castellanos and Esther Neff, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Marcia Crosby and Tanya Tagaq.

#callresponse is co-organized by Tarah Hogue, Maria Hupfield and Tania Willard, and produced in partnership with grunt gallery and generously supported by the {Re}conciliation initiative of the Canada Council for the Arts, the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation and The Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada. Additional presentation partners include BUSH Gallery, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, FADO Performance Art Centre, Kamloops Art Gallery, OFFTA live art festival, the National Arts Centre, and the Native Education College.

Stay connected with the #callresponse project: