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Kirsty Robertson

 

Dr. Kirsty Robertson, Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Museums, Art, and Sustainability,
Professor and Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies. Dr. Robertson also directs the Centre for Sustainable Curating.

SSHRC Postdoc, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2007
Ph.D., Queen’s University, Visual and Material Culture, 2006
M.A., Queen’s University, 2001
B.A., Honours, Bishop’s University, 1998

 

Interests

Kirsty Robertson is Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Arts. Her pedagogy involves curating large-scale speculative and experimental exhibitions with students, work that she has extended into curatorial projects such as meromictic (artLAB, 2024); From Remote Stars: Buckminster Fuller, London, Speculative Futures (with Sarah E.K. Smith, Museum London, 2022); Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through (with the Synthetic Collective, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, 2021 and Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, 2022) and Collection of Dreams (Agnes Etherington, 2022). Her research focuses on museums, visual culture, contemporary art, environment, and activism, clustered in several connected projects.

 

Current Projects

The Centre for Sustainable Curating

Launched in the Department of Visual Arts in 2021, the SSHRC and CFI-funded CSC supports research, exhibitions, visual/digital production, and pedagogy focused on environmental and social justice. The focus of Dr. Robertson’s Canada Research Chair, the CSC encourages research into waste, pollution, and climate crisis, and the development of exhibitions and artworks with low carbon footprints. The CSC’s widely distributed Using the Resources at Hand guide for sustainable curating is an example of ongoing work.

A Museum for Future Fossils is a SSHRC-funded collaborative project between Dr. Robertson and Dr. Eugenia Kisin (NYU Gallatin). It asks how to engage with human impact on the environment from a curatorial perspective. Thus far it has included undergraduate classes, a graduate summer school, a workshop, two student exhibitions, an exhibition featuring international contemporary artists, and a peer-reviewed article. The project is ongoing and will have further outcomes.

Synthetic Collective is a SSHRC-funded interdisciplinary international collaboration among visual artists, cultural workers and scientists (Western University, Concordia University, New School, University of Wisconsin). The collective works together to sample, map, understand, and visualize the complexities of plastics and micro-plastics pollution in the Great Lakes Region. The collaboration is ongoing and has resulted in numerous publications, a guidebook, and a major exhibition (Toronto 2021, Paris 2022).

Textiles

Since the early 2000s, Dr. Robertson has written extensively about textiles, with a focus on contemporary art, trade, and labour. Since 2017, she has turned her focus to synthetic textiles, expanding her research on plastics, plastics pollution, and environmental crisis. Publications in the works include research into fatbergs, the use of microfiber cloths in museum spaces, mylar, and space textiles.

Activism in the Museum

Building on research undertaken for her award-winning 2019 book Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Culture, Museums (MQUP), Dr. Robertson continues to work on activism at the thresholds and inside of museums. Articles are in preparation on actions that took place mainly in the late 1960s and 1970s at Canadian institutions, including an anti-racist picket at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1974 and environmental and anti-corporate actions outside of galleries and museums in Toronto from 1972-76.

Countering the Museum

This SSHRC-funded project examines “museums” and collections that are open to the public, but that fall well outside of the ICOM definition of a traditional museum. Dr. Robertson is specifically interested in the critical potential of such institutions. How can those who feel blocked or hindered by establishment museums use the form of the museum against itself to create oppositional or critical spaces? The project has resulted in publications and public presentations. A book manuscript is in preparation.

 

Selected publications

Books

Kirsty Robertson. Tear-Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Museums, Culture, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Spring 2019, 432 pages (winner of the Melva Dwyer award). 

Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, Kirsty Robertson, eds. Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. 312 pages.

Laura Murray, Tina Piper, Kirsty Robertson (tri-authors). Putting Intellectual Property in its Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 224 pages.

Kirsty Robertson and Keri Cronin, eds. Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011. 294 pages.

Articles and Chapters

Kirsty Robertson. “Caroline Monnet: Uneasy Objects,” MOMUS (April 2024): https://momus.ca/caroline-monnets-uneasy-objects/.

Kirsty Robertson and Eugenia Kisin. “Museum for Future Fossils: On Curating Ecological Crisis in a Vernacular Museum.” Journal of Curatorial Studies 12.2 (October 2023), pp. 232-256.

Kirsty Robertson, Heather Davis, Kelly Wood, Tegan Moore, Kelly Jazvac/Synthetic Collective. “Plastic Heart, Surface All the Way Through.” Open Library of the Humanities Journal, Art/Switch editorial team, 9.2 (2023): https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/9210/

Kirsty Robertson. “Les climats intérieurs et extérieurs: faire face à l’urgence climatique dans les musées,” Vie des Arts 268 (Automne 2022), pp. 50-53.  

Kirsty Robertson. “The Disappearance of Arthur Nestor: Parafiction, Cryptozoology, Curation.” Museum and Society 18.2, 2020: https://tinyurl.com/yawh3nlm.

Kirsty Robertson. “Secret Stash: Textiles, Hoarding, Collecting, Accumulation and Craft.” In The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design. Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch, eds. Bloombury Press, 2020, pp. 181-98.

Sara Belontz, Patricia Corcoran, Heather Davis, Kathleen Hill, Kelly Jazvac, Kirsty Robertson, Kelly Wood (the Synthetic Collective). “Embracing an Interdisciplinary Approach to Plastics Pollution Awareness and Action.” Ambio (November), currently online: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30448996.

Kirsty Robertson with Helen Gregory. “No Small Matter? Micromuseums as Critical Institutions,” RACAR (special issue: Critical Curating) 43.2 (2018).

Lianne McTavish with Susan Ashley, Heather Igloliorte, Kirsty Robertson, and Andrea Terry. “Critical Museum Theory/Museum Studies in Canada: A Dialogue,” Acadiensis 46.2 (2017), pp. 223-41.

Kirsty Robertson. “Oil Futures/Petrotextiles” In Petrocultures. Sheena Wilson and Imre Szeman, eds. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017, pp. 242-63.

Kirsty Robertson. “Textiles.” In Fueling Culture: Politics, History, Energy. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel and Patricia Yaeger, eds. Fordham University Press, 2016, pp. 353-56.

Kirsty Robertson. “Plastiglomerate,” e-flux journal 78 (December 2016): http://www.e-flux.com/journal/78/82878/plastiglomerate/ 

 

Teaching