Painter Pamela Masik sits in front of portraits of murder victims Julie Young (L) and Michelle Gurney (R) in her studio in Vancouver Thursday April 30, 2009.
Photograph by: Arlen Redekop, PNG
A high-profile B.C. museum has caved in to pressure from women’s and First Nations groups and censored one of Canada’s most prominent artists.
The University of B.C.’s Museum of Anthropology (MOA) had scheduled for next month a controversial exhibit depicting women murdered and missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Robert Pickton has been convicted of slaughtering six of them, and admitted to an undercover policeman that he killed dozens more.
‘The Forgotten” series of 69 eight-by-10-foot oil paintings is a project of acclaimed Vancouver artist Pamela Masik. Museum director Anthony Shelton and Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson last year announced the show, each lauding Masik’s contribution to public understanding about the issue of gender-based violence, and the tragic fate of Vancouver’s murdered and missing women.
“This is a part of our city that we cannot close our eyes to, that we will not cover up,” Robertson said at the event.
Shelton told the crowd he’d been “completely destroyed” when he first saw Masik’s “extraordinary” paintings. He said the university community fully supported the show, which would “mark a new juncture in the history of the museum and a level of social commitment that I hope we will be able to preserve.”
Although the university created several lectures and courses around the exhibit, MOA announced Wednesday that the show was a no-go.
“I saw my role as an artist to bear witness to the 69 women who were marginalized, went missing and many, ultimately, who were murdered, not just by the hands of a serial killer but by our society viewing these women as inconsequential,” Masik said.
“There are still missing and murdered women all over Canada and it’s going to continue to happen until we acknowledge our role in making this happen. How do we create change if we can’t even talk about it? [MOA is] kind of manifesting exactly what happened in the Downtown Eastside: We don’t see it, we don’t talk about it.”
Estimates on the proportion of First Nations women among the murdered and missing range from 30 to 50 per cent. Shelton would not answer directly when asked if the museum ran up against resistance from aboriginal and women’s groups. He said feedback about the planned show was “neither opposition nor support, it was kind of a committed way of trying to figure out how we could make this work.”
But MOA was indeed facing vociferous opposition.
“’The Forgotten’ does nothing to stop the violence against women in this community. It exoticizes them and turns them into commodities to promote the ‘Masik brand,’” Corinthia Kelly, an organizer of the annual Women’s Memorial March in the Downtown Eastide, wrote in an email to Shelton after learning about plans for the exhibit.
Memorial March committee member Gloria Larocque said Wednesday the show would have made Masik the “spokesperson” for aboriginal women’s issues, denying the efforts and voice of aboriginal and Downtown Eastside women, as well as causing pain to family members of the murdered and disappeared.
Larocque said she and Kelly had been meeting with MOA and university faculty to get the exhibit cancelled, with no success. But when it became clear to museum officials that aboriginal women in the Downtown Eastside were unwaveringly opposed to the show, the museum agreed to cancel it, Larocque said.
Shelton, however, said MOA lacked enough time for “developing the appropriate methodology” for ensuring the success of the show by bringing on-side groups who would collaborate by such means as showing films.
“We wanted it to be a catalyst for all kinds of other events around it,” Shelton said. Also, the exhibit “would kind of create greater suffering among the families” of missing and murdered women, Shelton said.
Masik plans to find a venue for the show, preferably in Ottawa. “I want to show it where decisions are made, and then later take it international.”
MOA’s decision to bow to pressure from particular sectors of the community — no matter if their grievances are valid or not — represents a failure of the very responsibility Shelton avowed when announcing the exhibit. The show would have given the groups opposed to it an opportunity to protest, to picket, to air their objections as loudly as they wished. Discussion would have ensued about who has the right to speak for the voiceless; whether artists have a right to use images — in this case of the victimized women, whose mugshots were also used by media across the country during the Pickton trial — to make any statements they desire; and whether artistic expression should be limited by the potential effects on members of the public.
Most important, the show would have forced us to confront social problems and public apathy that continue to destroy lives here in Vancouver, across B.C. and throughout Canada.
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