Speaker Series III

Recorded Saturday, March 20, 2021

Join artist Carrie Allison as she hosts our third session of our Speakers Series. Carrie will be talking with three Indigenous women about their work and how it has shaped their academia.

Sherry Farrell Racette

Sherry Farrell Racette (Algonquin/Metis/Irish) is an interdisciplinary scholar with an active arts and curatorial practice. She was born in Manitoba and is a member of Timiskaming First Nation in Quebec. Her work as a cultural historian is grounded in extensive work in archives and museum collections. Beadwork and stitch-based work is increasingly important to her artistic practice, creative research and pedagogy. She is currently teaching in the Department of Visual Arts, Faculty of Media, Art and Performance at the University of Regina.

Cathy Mattes

Cathy Mattes is a Michif curator, writer, and art history professor at Brandon University, based in Sprucewoods Manitoba. Her curation, research and writing centers on dialogic and Indigenous knowledge-centered curatorial practice as strategies for care. Mattes has contributed writings to the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, The Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the National Museum of the American Indian, to name a few. Mattes is an Associate Professor teaching art history at Brandon University in the Department of Visual and Aboriginal Arts, and recently completed her PhD in Native Studies from the University of Manitoba. She has been beading since she was 20 years old, and considers it the heart of her curatorial pedagogy and praxis.

Franchesca Hebert-Spence, BFA MA

Franchesca Hebert-Spence’s first engagements with art were as a maker, creating an emphasis on process and material within her curatorial praxis. She is Anishinaabe and her grandmother Marion Ida Spence was from Sagkeeng First Nation, on Lake Winnipeg, Manitoba. She has begun as a PhD student in Cultural Mediations (Visual Culture) at Carleton University, as a Fellow on the Morrisseau Project under Dr. Carmen Robertson. She is an Independent Curator and previously served as an Adjunct Curator, Indigenous art at the Art Gallery of Alberta, and a Curatorial Assistant within the Indigenous Art Department at the National Gallery of Canada.