Susan Blight (Anishinaabe, Couchiching First Nation) will be giving a public talk, discussing her work as a visual artist and co-founder of the Ogimaa Mikana artist collective, co-founded with Hayden King (Anishinaabe, Gchi’mnissing).

Susan Blight is an interdisciplinary artist and UWindsor aluma (MFA, 2007). Her solo and collaborative practices incorporate public art, site- specific intervention, photography, film, and social practice to question personal and cultural identity and its ongoing relationship to space.Through public and site- specific art, as well as social intervention, Ogimaa Mikana reclaims and renames the roads and landmarks present within Anishinaabeg territory with Anishinaabemowin. The collective seeks to continuously assert the self determination of Anishinaabe both on the land and within the public sphere.

Susan Blight is Delaney Chair in Indigenous Visual Culture and Assistant Professor in the faculty of Arts and Sciences at OCAD University. She has received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography, and in Film Studies, from the University of Manitoba, and a Masters in Fine Art from the University of Windsor. She is currently a PhD candidate in Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation continues themes explored in her work as a visual artist, examining visual and spatial formations of Anishinaabeg geographies of resistance.

This talk is funded by University of Windsor’s Centre for Teaching and Learning and the Nanadagikenim (seek to know) program which aims towards reconsidering and reframing Indigenous knowledge and reconciliation within teaching and learning environments. Susan will meet with SoCA and FAHSS arts students on Friday, November 25th.

The University of Windsor’s School of Creative Arts sits on the traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, which includes the Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi. We respect the longstanding relationships with First Nations people in this place in the 100- mile Windsor-Essex peninsula and the straits – les détroits – of Detroit.