Meet VMF Winter Arts Artist: Syrus Marcus Ware
Syrus Marcus Ware is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Arts, McMaster University. He is a Vanier scholar, visual artist, activist, curator and educator. Syrus uses drawing, installation and performance to explore social justice frameworks and black activist culture, and he’s shown widely in galleries and festivals across Canada. He is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter-Canada and a core-team member of Black Lives Matter–Toronto, a part of the Performance Disability Art Collective, and an ABD PhD candidate at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. His on-going curatorial work includes That’s So Gay (Gladstone Hotel, 2016-2019) and BlacknessYes!/Blockorama. He is the co-editor or the best-selling Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada (URP, 2020).
For his VMF Winter Arts installation,”Activist Wallpaper Series: Vancouver”, Syrus was inspired by his activist portrait series, where he created “large-scale portraits of activists/revolutionaries/community mobilizers as a way of celebrating activists culture” and “began exploring portraiture and painting also as a way of painting [his] community into art history, and as a way to document [his] reality.”
When visiting “Activist Wallpaper Series: Vancouver” a beautifully designed wallpaper (based on his exhibit “Black August") comes to life with photos and descriptions of seven local Vancouver activists: Thandi Young, Melisse Watson, !Kona, QueenTite Opaleke, Dainty Smith, Kyisha Williams, and Josh Vettivelu. In his artist statement, Syrus describes his process for developing this piece when he “began creating wallpaper with the portraits to imagine a different landscape wherein activists were honoured and cared for- centered in our day.” As the portraits appear, you can feel their strength, displayed as “an act of reverence, a celebration of life and of choice and of action(s).”
Walk around the other side and you’ll find a powerful poem written by Syrus where he speaks of himself as an activist today. The poem was written with the intention to “[reflect] on this year of activism, the pandemic and our collective wonder: is this it? is this when everything changes?” This piece is powerful, influential, and incredibly important as we continue to acknowledge Black History Month.
Make sure to catch Syrus Marcus Ware’s Irresistible Revolutions exhibit at Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver, available until Feb 27th, 2021.
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