520 Hargrave St.
Winnipeg, Manitoba
by appointment: Sat. & Sun. 12-6
Originally posted June 24 2020
Blinkers stands in solidarity with Black and Indigenous individuals, communities and organizations on the frontlines of the uprisings against anti-Black racism, colonial oppression, and police brutality here in Winnipeg, across so-called Canada and around the world.
We are examining ways to address and dismantle how Blinkers as an organization contributes to and benefits from white supremacy. Here’s what we are doing to address this:
Working with curators, organizers, and artists who are Black, Indigenous and People of Colour to program exhibitions featuring local, national and international artists. We look forward to sharing details soon as we receive results of grant applications for curatorial and artist fees, travel expenses, and production costs.
Meaningfully restructuring our all-white organizational team by prioritizing the inclusion of artists who are Black, Indigenous and People of Colour as leaders within Blinkers. We will be announcing a more detailed plan in the next 30 days. This will include transparent information around Blinkers plans moving forward and outlining the steps we are taking to restructure the organization, specifically focusing on how these changes will be done to ensure all new members’ autonomy within the organization.
Creating a document that defines how we create and maintain positive and reciprocal relationships with our collaborators including artists, writers, curators and volunteers. The purpose being to ensure positive, anti-oppressive, and mutually accountable relationships with everyone we work with.
Making Blinkers, located at 520 Hargrave, available as a space for creation and organization by BIPOC artists and initiatives for July and August.
If you or your group are seeking a meeting place/ a space to organize/ a collective work space/ studio space/ another vision, please contact us: info@blinkers.website. A list of the available resources at Blinkers will be added to our website soon.
Blinkers will continue to be available as a project space for the community on an ongoing basis. These opportunities for expanded use of the space will shift as we work around compatibility with installed exhibitions.
We would like to thank everyone who has provided valuable feedback, knowledge and accountability as we plan the above, specifically our conversations with Hassaan Ashraf and ongoing feedback from the artists and curators we have plans to work with.
We are open to feedback about the actions listed above and we encourage any comments, questions or suggestions.
We opened Blinkers in a spirit of collaboration and friendship, but underestimated how the whiteness of our organizational voice fails to fully reflect, understand, and act upon the oppression we seek to dismantle. It is important to address the inadequacies of the myth of independent, DIY and artist-run spaces as inherently accessible and inclusive. Although we are not paid for our labour as organizers of Blinkers, our influence within the community must be identified as a tool for exclusionary gate-keeping and, consequently, white supremacy. We recognize our place in Canadian art history, as we’ve followed in the footsteps of artist-run culture. These organizations were founded with radical and anti-institutional intentions but in many cases have crystalized into institutions themselves, through their structure and history upholding white supremacist systems. We founded Blinkers in reaction to these institutions, however our whiteness and the systems of bureaucracy we attempt to navigate within replicate these same trajectories. Blinkers is a young gallery and we believe in its potential to reimagine these structures to work better for artists, organizers and the community.
We encourage everyone to follow @justice4blackliveswpg and @wpgpoliceharm on instagram.
in solidarity,
Kristina Banera, Rachael Thorleifson,
Hannah Doucet and John Patterson