History made as five Black tenure-track staff join OCAD U Faculty of Design
June 5, 2020
An Ontario College of Art & Design University (OCAD U) band section in next year’s Toronto Caribbean Carnival is a possibility.
That’s one of the goals of Canadian-born Trinidadian resident Michael Lee Poy who is among five new permanent faculty hires in recognition of the International Decade for Peoples of African Descent.
“I am always ready to start a band,” he said. “At OCAD U, I intend to get directly involved in the carnival at the lowest level like making costumes and also planning a band if we can. The nice thing about carnival, which you don’t see in the Diaspora, is the social commentary that is part of the basis of carnival in the Caribbean where you get to see the placards like what we are seeing in the protests. That aspect gives you the opportunity to speak about things like Black Lives Matter and so on in a festival setting.”
Since 2015, Lee Poy has been incubating Moko Jumbie Mas Camp workshops for children.
“The Moko Jumbie and cultural characters of other Caribbean islands are some of the things I would like to bring to Toronto,” said the artist-activist who utilizes interdisciplinarity to augment the innovative, creative and collaborative process of design. “I want to show people it’s not just about the breast, bumsee, feathers and beads. That is not what I am interested in.”
Moko Jumbies on stilts
A University of the West Indies (UWI) Department of Creative & Festival Arts part-time lecturer, Lee Poy said the OCAD U job description spoke directly to his Black experience.
“My parents went to Montreal in 1959 and I grew up as one of the few persons in my environment,” noted the 2018 Cleveland Museum of Art Parade the Circle international guest artist. “I didn’t see any Black teacher through high school besides being the only one of colour in my classes and there wasn’t a Black Architectural group at Pratt until I was leaving. That sort of mentorship from old to young is important just to facilitate your schooling and getting through. The White students have that support.”
Lee Poy’s first 18 years were spent in Montreal before heading to New York to study Architecture at the Pratt Institute and then Connecticut to complete a graduate degree in Environmental Design at Yale before moving to Trinidad 16 years ago.
The last time he was in Toronto was in 1994 for an uncle’s funeral.
Lee Poy joins Kathy Moscou, Marton Robinson, Angela Bains and Kestin Cornwall as the first cohort of full -time Black Faculty members in OCAD U’s Faculty of Design 144-year history.
The hiring is part of the university’s dedication to the implementation of its academic plan that articulates a commitment to decolonization, diversity and equity.
Dr. Elizabeth ‘Dori’ Tunstall pledged last year that Canada’s oldest and largest art & design educational institution would have full-time Black faculty members before she leaves.
Dr. Elizabeth ‘Dori’ Tunstall
The Design Anthropologist and advocate joined the university in August 2016 as the world’s first and only Black Dean of a Faculty of Design that last May launched the Black Sparks Movement that’s a special donor group seeking to recruit 100 Black leaders who will commit to contributing a minimum $100 monthly to support OCAD U’s Black students, staff and community partners.
A portion of the $7 million goal was used to do a Black cluster hire.
“This is transformational, not just for OCAD U, but already other institutions are contacting me asking, ‘How do we do this’? ” Tunstall said. “The intention around this is to address the ways in which I feel our university has historically failed to engage the Black communities in a significant way. By transforming OCAD U, we also provide the possibilities to transform every other art and design institution in the world.”
Under her astute leadership, OCAD U Faculty of Design was seeking candidates who could demonstrate how their lived experiences as Black people informed a deep commitment through their work to intersectional Black communities and whose theoretical, technical and making/design expertise fulfilled one or more of the current areas of need within the faculty.
There were over 100 applicants from around the world.
Being part of a trailblazing movement to build a hub of Black and creative thinkers and artists excites Moscou.
“This is what inclusive education actually means and, by doing so, it helps to dismantle institutional racism by committing to addressing under-representation of racialized and Indigenous faculty at the university,” she said. “It’s extraordinarily important. It was also the first time in my life that I have actually seen a position advertised that said we recognize the importance, respect and value of the lived experience of Blacks and we are purposefully seeking out people who can enrich our institution because you embody that Black lived experience and the arts. I have never seen that in my life.”
Considering becoming an artist since age seven, Moscou pursued that pathway until she received financial aid to pursue Health Studies in university.
Graduating from the University of Washington with a Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy and a Master of Public Health, and the University of Toronto with a PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences & Global Health, she was an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences at Brock University for 18 months before joining OCAD U.
“I have always done both and this position enables me to merge both parts of who I am,” Moscou said. “I think that having this sort of unique background enables me to be able to see the world with multiple lenses. I am very much looking at healthy communities and what is the role of the arts and aesthetics as well as informing social justice and empowerment and therefore creating a healthy community.”
The representative stories in her art, deeply rooted in Black cultural traditions, explore contemporary issues of racism and identity by challenging viewers to see and think beyond contemporary stereotypes, the framing they put on the world and which the world places on them.
Kathy Moscou
Moscou uses design, colour, form and symbols to communicate concepts of self-determination, Black cultural pride, resilience, agency and empowerment.
“I have always been creative, I am always energized when I am around other artists and I am impassioned by the role of the arts and having been impactful in people’s lives,” the former Manitoba Arts Council Director said.”
Born in New York, Moscou went to university in Seattle before going to Capetown, South Africa for a year as a Visiting Professor. Moving to Canada 15 years ago, she’s the partner of Dr. Gervan Fearon who is Brock University’s President & Vice-Chancellor.
Moscou’s son, Chi Moscou-Jackson, completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2012 and is a Visual Artist.
With an interdisciplinary background informed by Physical Education, Art and Visual Communication studies, 41-year-old Robinson’s art challenges the conventional representations of Black identities in Art History, mainstream culture and the official national narratives, including those of Costa Rica where he was born and resides.
Marton Robinson
His work exposes the nuances in the Afro-Latino experience, enriching the critical discourse of the African Diaspora contemporary works.
“To be among the group of five Black faculty members in the OCAD U Faculty of Design means a lot,” the University of Southern California Master of Fine Arts graduate said. “I try to put myself in kind of like a vulnerable position where we can talk about our differences and that is where I think OCAD U is going with these new hires.”
Robinson is thrilled to land his first academia position in Toronto.
In 2017, he was a panellist on the Media Arts Network of Ontario symposium, ‘Renewal’, that analyzed the state and possible futures of the media arts sector in Ontario and beyond.
He was also a guest facilitator last December at an event organized by the Nia Centre for the Arts.
“I have been in Toronto in the last three years engaging with the arts and Latino community,” Robinson said. “I have a sense of the conversations that are going on there which sort of makes it easier for my transition to the Canadian city to work with OCAD U.”
Becoming an artist or a doctor were the only two careers that were on his radar growing up.
“My interest was in plastic surgery, but I am very creative and I figured if I was going to be a surgeon in that field, I would take the license to be creative with whatever I was doing with my patients,” he pointed out. “That was not going to work, so I thought that art would be the best option for me in that sense.”
Bains is a co-founder and strategic director of TransformExp that’s an award-winning design firm and part-time Strategic Design lecturer at the British Columbia Institute of Technology.
She said the hiring sends an extremely powerful message.
Angela Bains
“It’s expressing that there is a transformation going on and it’s not just a policy or paying lip service,” said Bains. “This is actually happening to address under-representation in the creative industry and, for me, it’s going to transform the entire design education at OCAD U. One of my biggest hopes is that we actually start to graduate students with a greater understanding of inclusion and accessibility.”
Growing up with parents who were part of the Windrush generation influenced her decision to pursue the arts.
“Music and dancing were part of my upbringing,” said Bains. “My dad was actually a really good Illustrator and, as kids, we were just fascinated that he could do that. He was natural, but I had to practice my craft and I think that is really where it came from.”
She graduated from the University of the Arts London in 1979 with a Graphic Design degree and started her own business five years later in London before migrating with her family to British Columbia in 1993.
“There was a huge recession in the UK at the time and my husband and I had built a business from scratch to a really successful venture” added Bains. “We worked on social change and commercial projects and, with the recession, there was literally no work. When you are in the design industry, the first thing to go in any recession is the marketing budget which means there’s no design budget. When you work for yourself, it is difficult to find a job because people feel threatened in that you might come in and steal clients and things like that. The other thing is that we faced racism that was so ingrained and entrenched to the point where we didn’t want out kids to experience that. That not to say racism doesn’t exist here in Vancouver, but I think that people are more open to change.”
Bains and her husband of 32 years have three children.
For Cornwall, the hire presents myriad opportunities that he’s drooling over.
“It’s an opportunity to work at a top notch university, it’s an opportunity to give back to upcoming talented artists, it’s an opportunity to grow and also work with Dori and the other new faculty members,” said the Sheridan College Art Fundamentals & Illustration programs graduate. “I am just thrilled for the opportunity to work with OCAD U.”
Black Hip Hop or other Black cultural aesthetics and critical making in contemporary design for business and social justice was one of the job requirements that appealed to Cornwall who was born in Detroit and raised in Windsor before relocating to Oakville 19 years ago to attend college.
Kestin Cornwall
“Hip Hop is a big part for me because that genre of music really impacted me,” the 2006 Canadian Association of Professional Image Creators (CAPIC) Best in Show Award recipient said. “The core part of Hip Hop is great and it comes from a good place.”
In the last decade, Cornwall’s focus has been on creating relevant progressive art using images to explore the notion that culture ad entertainment, including film and other media shape the mass public perception of Blacks and other people of colour in North American culture.
He critically charts current political, social and economic landscapes with compositions brimming with references to media, popular culture, music and art history, In addition, he relishes challenging what’s considered ‘common’ and feels it’s the artist’s duty to add beauty to the world while invoking social responsibility to capture thought.
With the new hires in the Faculty of Design that is the largest of the university’s three faculties, OCAD U has doubled the number of self-identified Black teaching staff to 10.
Lillian Allen, Camille Isaacs, Alia Weston and Alexis Morris are in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences while Andrea Fatona is in the Faculty of Art.
