McMaster Alumni | Talking Earth with Santee Smith ’94, ’05 @McMasterUTV | Uploaded 1 year ago | Updated 3 hours ago
In advance of National Indigenous Peoples Day, please join the McMaster community as we welcome award-winning artist, dancer, choreographer, McMaster graduate, and McMaster Chancellor Santee Smith who will give a talk about her family’s work with pottery, her artistic practice, and its connection to cultural and ecological knowledge.
Santee will discuss how her artistic work/life and creative process take inspiration from her Rotinohnsyónni family legacy, and how her vision to create and move in alignment with Onkwehónwe'néha (our way of life, language) and to Ka’satsténhsera’kówa Sa’oyé:ra is shaped.
Don’t miss this opportunity as Santee Smith shares images and stories about her ceramic sculpture, Talking Earth, and how she is inspired as a multidisciplinary artist to create works that have a cultural and ecological connection.
Talking Earth is a permanent public artwork that was commissioned by the Gardiner Museum in Toronto and is installed at its entrance. This piece by Santee was the product of the collaborative work done at McMaster’s Studio Arts and debuted in June 2022 at the International Ceramic Art Fair. The etched ceramic sculpture is inspired by a Rotinohnsyonni four-cornered earthen pottery vessel. It is fractured and partially reconstructed, with light shining through the cracks between the broken shards. The vessel symbolizes the disruption and trauma caused by colonization, including the legacy of the residential school system, assimilative policies imposed on womxn, and the crisis of Missing & Murdered Indigenous Womxn and Girls. Moving toward intactness, the vessel evokes the process of re-assembling culture, memory, and ancestral knowledge.
On June 20 and June 21, Santee Smith and Semiah Smith will be giving a free public performance in the outdoor plaza of the Gardiner Museum highlighting the sculpture, Talking Earth. For more information, please visit gardinermuseum.on.ca/event/talking-earth-june-20-2023
In advance of National Indigenous Peoples Day, please join the McMaster community as we welcome award-winning artist, dancer, choreographer, McMaster graduate, and McMaster Chancellor Santee Smith who will give a talk about her family’s work with pottery, her artistic practice, and its connection to cultural and ecological knowledge.
Santee will discuss how her artistic work/life and creative process take inspiration from her Rotinohnsyónni family legacy, and how her vision to create and move in alignment with Onkwehónwe'néha (our way of life, language) and to Ka’satsténhsera’kówa Sa’oyé:ra is shaped.
Don’t miss this opportunity as Santee Smith shares images and stories about her ceramic sculpture, Talking Earth, and how she is inspired as a multidisciplinary artist to create works that have a cultural and ecological connection.
Talking Earth is a permanent public artwork that was commissioned by the Gardiner Museum in Toronto and is installed at its entrance. This piece by Santee was the product of the collaborative work done at McMaster’s Studio Arts and debuted in June 2022 at the International Ceramic Art Fair. The etched ceramic sculpture is inspired by a Rotinohnsyonni four-cornered earthen pottery vessel. It is fractured and partially reconstructed, with light shining through the cracks between the broken shards. The vessel symbolizes the disruption and trauma caused by colonization, including the legacy of the residential school system, assimilative policies imposed on womxn, and the crisis of Missing & Murdered Indigenous Womxn and Girls. Moving toward intactness, the vessel evokes the process of re-assembling culture, memory, and ancestral knowledge.
On June 20 and June 21, Santee Smith and Semiah Smith will be giving a free public performance in the outdoor plaza of the Gardiner Museum highlighting the sculpture, Talking Earth. For more information, please visit gardinermuseum.on.ca/event/talking-earth-june-20-2023
![[Archives Alive] The Earthly Paradise: Recent Botanical Acquisitions at McMaster University Library](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mTWQumQLKk0/hqdefault.jpg "[Archives Alive] The Earthly Paradise: Recent Botanical Acquisitions at McMaster University Library
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a dizzying proliferation of new European books on botany. Driven by interrelated sociopolitical, aesthetic, intellectual, and technological developments, the era was a golden age for sumptuous and lavishly illustrated tomes addressing every conceivable plant-related subject — pharmacology, taxonomy, horticulture, and sylviculture among them. In a heady environment rife with innovation, political and religious controversy, and outright plagiarism, creators and collectors collaborated and competed to take the study and appreciation of plants to new heights — and new audiences.
In recent years, McMaster University Library has acquired several significant works in this tradition, including early editions of Gerard’s Herball, John Parkinson’s Theatrum Botanicum and Paradisi in Sole, Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Natural History, Castore Durante’s Herbario Nuovo, John Evelyn’s Sylva, and a scarce English translation of the Amsterdam Pharmacopoeia.
Join Myron Groover, McMaster’s Archives and Rare Books Librarian, for an intimate look at these stunning artefacts and the contexts in which they were created.
About the speaker:
Myron Groover is McMaster University’s Archives and Rare Books Librarian. He read History at the University of Aberdeen and Library-Archival Studies at the University of British Columbia. His work focuses on collection development, curation, and teaching with archives and rare books. His academic interests include book history, the material culture of text, and the history of ideas.")
