Table Of ContentUrban EncoU ntErs
The Culture of Cities
Series editors: Kieran Bonner and Will Straw
Cities have long been a key focus of innovative work in the humanities and social sciences.
In recent years, the city has assumed new importance for scholars working on cultural
issues across a wide range of disciplines. Sociologists, anthropologists, media specialists, and
scholars of literature, art, and cinema have come to emphasize the distinctly urban character
of many of their objects of study. Those who study processes of globalization are drawn to
analyzing cities as the places in which these processes are most deeply felt or where they are
most strongly resisted.
The Culture of Cities series has its roots in an international research project of the same name,
funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada during the period
2000–05. The series includes books based in the work of that project as well as other volumes
that reflect the project’s spirit of interdisciplinary inquiry. Case studies, comparative analyses,
and theoretical accounts of city life offer tools and insights for understanding urban cultures
as they confront the forces acting upon them in the contemporary world.
The Culture of Cities series is aimed at scholars and interested readers from a wide variety
of backgrounds.
The Imaginative Structure of the City
Alan Blum
Urban Enigmas
Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities
Edited by Johanne Sloan
Circulation and the City
Essays on Urban Culture
Edited by Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw
Cartographies of Place
Navigating the Urban
Edited by Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault
Speaking Memory
How Translation Shapes City Life
Edited by Sherry Simon
Urban Encounters
Art and the Public
Edited by Martha Radice and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier
Urban EncoU ntErs
Art And the Public
Edited by Martha Radice and
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier
McGill-Queen’s University Press
Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago
© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017
ISBN 978-0-7735-5005-6 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-7735-5006-3 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-7735-5007-0 (ePDF)
ISBN 978-0-7735-5008-7 (ePUB)
Legal deposit second quarter 2017
Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the
Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using
funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of
Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Urban encounters : art and the public / edited by Martha Radice
and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier.
(The culture of cities)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-7735-5005-6 (cloth).–ISBN 978-0-7735-5006-3 (paper).–
ISBN 978-0-7735-5007-0 (ePDF).–ISBN 978-0-7735-5008-7 (ePUB)
1. Public art–Canada. I. Radice, Martha, author, editor
II. Boudreault-Fournier, Alexandrine, 1978–, author, editor
III. Series: Culture of cities
N8846.C2U73 2017 701’.030971 C2016-908270-9 C2016-908271-7
contEnts
Colour plates follow page 248
vii Acknowledgments
3 Introduction: Encounters with Art in the Urban Public
Martha Radice and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier
16 PArt OnE: PErfOrMIng Art PUbLICs
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier and Martha Radice
25 Chapter 1
Artworks as strangers? Encounters with two Monumental
Artworks in Montreal
Laurent Vernet
51 Chapter 2
Urban Pranks as Activist Performance
Susanne Shawyer
74 Chapter 3
Dance Encounters: Performing Arts as an Experimental
Platform for Urban Publics
Sebastian Matthias
100 Chapter 4
narratives in space+time society (nis+ts):
the Hippodrome Project
Robert Bean, Léola Le Blanc, Brian Lilley, Barbara Lounder,
and Mary Elizabeth Luka
126 PArt twO: MAKIng Art, MAKIng tHE CIty
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier and Martha Radice
134 Chapter 5
Crawling with Art: Public Art Installations on James street
north in Hamilton, Ontario
Alison L. Bain and Nicole Rallis
161 Chapter 6
brief Encounter
Lawrence Bird and Solomon Nagler
182 Chapter 7
body rhythms in Urban space: field Evidence
Ellen Moffat and Kim Morgan
192 Chapter 8
Creative Engagement with Interstitial Urban spaces:
the Case of Vancouver’s back Alleys
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier and Nick Wees
212 PArt tHrEE: MEEtIng Art In PUbLIC
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier and Martha Radice
219 Chapter 9
Door to Door to Door
Christof Migone
249 Chapter 10
technological regionalisms: the fieldwork residency Project
Wes Johnston
269 Chapter 11
Pop-Up Ethnography at the situated Cinema: Confronting Art with
social science at the winnipeg festival of Moving Image
Martha Radice, Brenden Harvey, and Shannon Turner
295 Illustrations
299 bibliography
325 Contributors
329 Index
acknowlEdgmEnts
Such an interdisciplinary book could only have come out of the kind
of project where people say, in the tradition of improvisational theatre,
“yes, and!” Urban Encounters: Art and the Public was, first, the name of
an innovative international colloquium held in Halifax in 2013, which
brought together artists, academics, and members of the public for three
days of conversation and collaboration stimulated by academic papers,
roundtables, artists’ talks, exhibitions, installations, and art performances.
Many more people participated than are represented in this book, but
we would especially like to acknowledge here the commentators in a
roundtable on public art, whose discussion contributed to the arguments
and structure of the introduction: Alison Bain, Peter Dykhuis, Eleanor
King, and Jamie MacLellan, who were skilfully interviewed by CBC radio
journalist Stephanie Domet. The colloquium would not have been possible
without the hard work of Tonya Canning, who coordinated the conference
side of things, and Michael McCormack and Annie Onyi Cheung who
coordinated the art exhibitions and performances. We would also like to
thank the student assistants at the colloquium, especially Brenden Harvey
and Brenna Sobanski, for taking notes on the roundtable and research-
creation workshop. NSCAD University and the Khyber Centre for the Arts
graciously hosted the event’s urban encounters.
The colloquium itself was a crucial part of a broader research-creation
project, Tracing the City: Interventions of Art in Public Space, funded by
a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada that also supported this publication (award no. 848-2010-0019,
2011–15). Principal investigators Solomon Nagler, Kim Morgan, and Martha
Radice started delving deep into interdisciplinary research-creation when
they met in 2009, later inviting collaborators Christopher Kaltenbach,
Ellen Moffat, and Erin Wunker to join in too. The colloquium, this book
as a whole, and in particular the chapters by Bird and Nagler, Moffat and
Morgan, and Radice, Harvey, and Turner, are the fruits of a collaboration
that was as exciting and productive as it was challenging. The Tracing the
City team would like to thank NSCAD University colleague Bruce Barber for
his unflagging support for the project, as well as Nethra Samarawickrema
for her early research assistance in gathering in its intellectual strands.
Working together on this book has been a real pleasure for us. We
would like to thank all the contributors for their patience, diligence,
and rapid response times but most of all for their stimulating, creative
ideas. Will Straw, coeditor of the Culture of Cities series, and Jonathan
Crago, editor-in-chief at McGill-Queen’s University Press, have been
champions of the book since its beginnings and offered wise counsel at all
stages. We also thank the anonymous reviewers whose astute comments
strengthened many parts of the book. Emily Fraser provided invaluable
research assistance and eagle-eyed skills in manuscript preparation. We
are grateful for the McGill-Queen’s production team’s help during the
final steps toward publication. Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Arts and
Social Sciences granted Martha Radice a Burgess Award, which gave her
precious extra research time in winter 2015 for editorial work. We both
appreciate the general support of our departments and colleagues at
Dalhousie University and the University of Victoria, as well as the fertile
field of anthropology in Canada, which keeps both of us inspired.
viii Acknowledgments
Urban EncoU ntErs
