Kuumba Creative Feature: Shelley Falconer
Harbourfront Centre’s Kuumba festival is spotlighting a different Black artist each day of February. Today we’re sharing the story of Shelley Falconer.
Shelley Falconer was born into a family where knowledge was treasured. Her father was a scientist and her mother is a scholar. Growing up, there was no shortage of books in her eclectic home, where rigorous debates were frequently ablaze. History was welcome in her house, as was ballet, music, literature and the sciences, too. With seven children running around, life was always buzzing. Not only did her parents’ marriage unite two different ways of seeing the world, it also brought together two different cultural heritages. Her father was Jamaican and her mother is Jewish European. Shelley’s cultural background was, like the rest of her home, a testament to the joys of bringing different worlds together, of seeing the world with open-hearted curiosity.
When she entered academia, Shelley explored art history, French literature and museology. She started working in the art world in her early 20s, with one of her first jobs being an artist-run centre called A Space in Toronto. Those years were formative for her, embedding a deep respect for the grassroots artists’ communities that form the backbone of our cultural ecosystems. Similarly formative were her years at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, which, under the leadership of its Director, Barbara Tyler, was one of the few Ontario galleries at the time that had an emphatic Indigenous mandate. Despite all she’d learned in school, this practical experience imprinted an understanding of the importance of Indigenous art, and its intersections with Canadian history.
Shelley then went to the UK and France, where, in contrast to Canada, the arts are more integrated into general education and everyday life. Seeing art woven into society this way inspired her, and when she returned to Canada, she knew she had to be a staunch advocate for the arts. Early in her career, she led a multi-year, national project to democratize the arts. She helped digitize cultural and archival assets, integrating them into broader educational curricula. It was in the early years of the internet, around 2000, and there was a fair amount of anxiety about digital culture. Archivists, museums and broadcasters were reluctant to put their content online — how could they control and restrict access? Since then, she’s seen a fundamental shift in attitudes, with a focus on openness and accessibility. For example, libraries, once quiet sanctuaries for books, have become people-centred forums for knowledge sharing. “We in museums need to make the same leap — to shift from being precious ivory towers, insular and collection-focussed, to being people and community centred,” she says.
Shelley continues, “It’s been wonderful to see our institutions blossom from those more insular years of rigid art world taxonomies, insecurities, parochialism, and risk averse programming — there was a time when you could fly across this country and literally see the same artists recycled and profiled from east to west.” She adds that recent reckonings on social justice, whether through Black Lives Matter or Truth and Reconciliation,
“is truly forcing our institutions to better understand their roles as essential social assets for everyone, embedded in a broader framework of community values and cultural sustainability — and it’s about time!”
Shelley Falconer is the President and CEO of the Art Gallery of Hamilton. You can listen to her insights through Kuumba’s video interview, Awakenings at the Toronto History Museums, available on Harbourfront.live until February 28. You can follow Shelley’s career on her Twitter (@Shelley_AGH).
