ARTCAN (2013-2016)
Supported by a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (Mark Cheetham PI, Erin Morton Co-Investigator), ArtCan is a digital commons partnership for academic and museum-based researchers, curators, educators, and students working in Canadian art. At a theoretical level, the model of the digital commons allows us to ask, “what do we have in common?” and “how can we share it with each other and with a wider audience?” Practically, the digital commons allows us to create a critical third space between the authoritative generation of knowledge on Canadian art in universities and museums and the researchers, students, and visitors who both seek out that knowledge and contribute to it.
This project is a joint partnership between the University of New Brunswick and University College at the University of Toronto, and directed by Morton and Cheetham. ArtCan’s additional partners are the Art Canada Institute/Institut de l’art du Canada (ACI-IAC), the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Gail and Stephen Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University.
ArtCan completed three large-scale art digitization projects with the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the University of New Brunswick Arts Centre, and the University of Toronto Art Centre, which created high-resolution digital images of these collections of art and visual and material culture.
Collection: Beaverbrook Art Gallery Permanent Collection
Accession Number: 2009.170
Collection: University of New Brunswick Permanent Collection
Accession Number: 2005.01.09
Accession Number: 64.28
Bordering the Vernacular: Canada, Folk Art, and the Search for the Settled Past (2010-2013)
Funded by a SSHRC Standard Research Grant (Erin Morton, PI), a McCain Young Scholar Award, and UNB’s University Research Fund, this project examines the colonial historical instability of the folk art category in Canada’s two largest federal museums of art and culture, the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of History. In doing so, it explores how museums have employed the shifting definition of “folk art” in the ongoing negotiation of land, settler colonialism, and nation-building narratives up to the contemporary moment, paying particular attention to the regional dimensions of these processes.
Published work:
Erin Morton, “Commemorative Expectations: The Mixed Economy of the Maud Lewis Painted House Preservation,” Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region 43, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2014): 3-34. https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/acad43_1art01
Erin Morton, “Ordinary Affects: Maud Lewis and the Social Aesthetics of the Everyday,” Journal of Canadian Art History 34, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 80-107. https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/acad43_1art01
Erin Morton, “Bordering the Vernacular: J. Russell Harper and the Pursuit of a ‘People’s Art,’” Journal of Canadian Art History 34, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 86-125. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42616606
(Photo: courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery)
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The Social Fabric of Healing in 20th-Century Northeastern North America (2010-2012)
Funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (Sasha Mullally, PI; Susan Cahill, co-applicant), this project examines the ways in which early 20th-century social reform movements emerged and intersected in northeastern North American around two spheres of activity: occupational therapy (OT) and arts and crafts revivalism. This project illuminates the ways in which gendered medical professionals used weaving to accomplish social, physical, and mental healing in rural communities across a transnational boundary through which ideas and personnel flowed freely.
Our research brings together two fields of academic research, the social history of medicine and material culture studies, which have seldom seen critical scholarly intersection – this despite their shared history of utilizing material culture objects for the purposes of social welfare.
Published work:
Erin Morton, “Not a Vacation, But a Hardening Process: The Self-Empowerment Work of Therapeutic Craft in Nova Scotia,” Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research 6 (2014): 773-789. https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.146773.
Erin Morton, “The Object of Therapy: Mary E. Black and the Progressive Possibilities of Weaving,” Utopian Studies 22, no. 2 (2011): 321-340. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/451898.
SELECT RESEARCH GRANTS
2016-2017
Principal Investigator, “Unsettling the Settler Artist: Reframing the Canadian Visual Arts, 1867 to the Present,” SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) Insight Grant, ($94,618).
Royal Society of Canada Open Academy – RSC Atlantic ($3,000). Co-applicant with Stefanie Kennedy.
2014-2015
“Unsettling Canadian Art History,” Harrison McCain Foundation Young Scholars Awards, University of New Brunswick ($12,500).
“Unsettling Canadian Art History,” University Research Fund, University of New Brunswick ($7,000).
“For Folk’s Sake,” Canada Council Book Publishing Award ($6,000)
2013-2014
“Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada,” SSHRC Awards to Scholarly Publishing Program ($8,000).
Co-Investigator, “ArtCan: The Canadian Art Commons for History of Art Education and Training,” SSHRC Partnership Development Grant ($199,965), with Mark A. Cheetham (Principal Investigator).
2012-2013
“Bordering the Vernacular: Canada, Folk Art, and the Institutional Search for the Settled Past,” SSHRC Insight Grant, 4A) ranking. ($2,000 internal funding from UNB.)
Co-investigator, “The Social Fabric of Healing in Twentieth-Century Northeastern North America,” SSHRC Insight Development Grant, 1A) ranking ($25,086), with co-applicants Susan Cahill and Sasha Mullally (Principal Investigator).
2011-2012
Principal Investigator, “Bordering the Vernacular: Canada, Folk Art, and the Age of Global Mass Culture,” SSHRC Standard Research Grant, ($12,643).
“The Social Fabric of Healing in Twentieth-Century Northeastern North America,” University Research Fund, University of New Brunswick ($7,000). Co-applicant with Sasha Mullally.
2010-2011
Principal Investigator, “Bordering the Vernacular: Canada, Folk Art, and the ‘New’ North America.” SSHRC Standard Research Grant, ($13,731).
“Bordering the Vernacular: Canada, Folk Art, and the ‘New’ North America,” McCain Young Scholar Award, University of New Brunswick ($8,000).
“Bordering the Vernacular: Canada, Folk Art, and the ‘New’ North America,” University Research Fund, University of New Brunswick ($5,770).
“The Social Fabric of Healing in Atlantic Canada and the Northeastern United States,” SSHRC Insight Development Grant, 4A) ranking, with co-applicants Susan Cahill and Sasha Mullally (Principal Investigator) ($5,000 internal SSHRC funding).
2009-2010
Co-investigator, “Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada,” SSHRC Aid to Workshops and Conferences in Canada, with co-applicants Lynda Jessup (Principal Investigator) and Kirsty Robertson ($23,298.00).