Kirsty Robertson
Dr. Kirsty Robertson, Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Museums, Art, and Sustainability,
Professor and Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies. Dr. Robertson also directs the Centre for Sustainable Curating.
SSHRC Postdoc, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2007
Ph.D., Queen’s University, Visual and Material Culture, 2006
M.A., Queen’s University, 2001
B.A., Honours, Bishop’s University, 1998
Interests
Kirsty Robertson is Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Arts. Her pedagogy involves curating large-scale speculative and experimental exhibitions with students, work that she has extended into curatorial projects such as meromictic (artLAB, 2024); From Remote Stars: Buckminster Fuller, London, Speculative Futures (with Sarah E.K. Smith, Museum London, 2022); Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through (with the Synthetic Collective, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, 2021 and Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, 2022) and Collection of Dreams (Agnes Etherington, 2022). Her research focuses on museums, visual culture, contemporary art, environment, and activism, clustered in several connected projects.
Current Projects
The Centre for Sustainable Curating
Launched in the Department of Visual Arts in 2021, the SSHRC and CFI-funded CSC supports research, exhibitions, visual/digital production, and pedagogy focused on environmental and social justice. The focus of Dr. Robertson’s Canada Research Chair, the CSC encourages research into waste, pollution, and climate crisis, and the development of exhibitions and artworks with low carbon footprints. The CSC’s widely distributed Using the Resources at Hand guide for sustainable curating is an example of ongoing work.
A Museum for Future Fossils is a SSHRC-funded collaborative project between Dr. Robertson and Dr. Eugenia Kisin (NYU Gallatin). It asks how to engage with human impact on the environment from a curatorial perspective. Thus far it has included undergraduate classes, a graduate summer school, a workshop, two student exhibitions, an exhibition featuring international contemporary artists, and a peer-reviewed article. The project is ongoing and will have further outcomes.
Synthetic Collective is a SSHRC-funded interdisciplinary international collaboration among visual artists, cultural workers and scientists (Western University, Concordia University, New School, University of Wisconsin). The collective works together to sample, map, understand, and visualize the complexities of plastics and micro-plastics pollution in the Great Lakes Region. The collaboration is ongoing and has resulted in numerous publications, a guidebook, and a major exhibition (Toronto 2021, Paris 2022).
Textiles
Since the early 2000s, Dr. Robertson has written extensively about textiles, with a focus on contemporary art, trade, and labour. Since 2017, she has turned her focus to synthetic textiles, expanding her research on plastics, plastics pollution, and environmental crisis. Publications in the works include research into fatbergs, the use of microfiber cloths in museum spaces, mylar, and space textiles.
Activism in the Museum
Building on research undertaken for her award-winning 2019 book Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Culture, Museums (MQUP), Dr. Robertson continues to work on activism at the thresholds and inside of museums. Articles are in preparation on actions that took place mainly in the late 1960s and 1970s at Canadian institutions, including an anti-racist picket at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1974 and environmental and anti-corporate actions outside of galleries and museums in Toronto from 1972-76.
Countering the Museum
This SSHRC-funded project examines “museums” and collections that are open to the public, but that fall well outside of the ICOM definition of a traditional museum. Dr. Robertson is specifically interested in the critical potential of such institutions. How can those who feel blocked or hindered by establishment museums use the form of the museum against itself to create oppositional or critical spaces? The project has resulted in publications and public presentations. A book manuscript is in preparation.
Selected publications
Books
Kirsty Robertson. Tear-Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Museums, Culture, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Spring 2019, 432 pages (winner of the Melva Dwyer award).
Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, Kirsty Robertson, eds. Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. 312 pages.
Laura Murray, Tina Piper, Kirsty Robertson (tri-authors). Putting Intellectual Property in its Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 224 pages.
Kirsty Robertson and Keri Cronin, eds. Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011. 294 pages.
Articles and Chapters
Kirsty Robertson. “Caroline Monnet: Uneasy Objects,” MOMUS (April 2024): https://momus.ca/caroline-monnets-uneasy-objects/.
Kirsty Robertson and Eugenia Kisin. “Museum for Future Fossils: On Curating Ecological Crisis in a Vernacular Museum.” Journal of Curatorial Studies 12.2 (October 2023), pp. 232-256.
Kirsty Robertson, Heather Davis, Kelly Wood, Tegan Moore, Kelly Jazvac/Synthetic Collective. “Plastic Heart, Surface All the Way Through.” Open Library of the Humanities Journal, Art/Switch editorial team, 9.2 (2023): https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/9210/
Kirsty Robertson. “Les climats intérieurs et extérieurs: faire face à l’urgence climatique dans les musées,” Vie des Arts 268 (Automne 2022), pp. 50-53.
Kirsty Robertson. “The Disappearance of Arthur Nestor: Parafiction, Cryptozoology, Curation.” Museum and Society 18.2, 2020: https://tinyurl.com/yawh3nlm.
Kirsty Robertson. “Secret Stash: Textiles, Hoarding, Collecting, Accumulation and Craft.” In The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design. Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch, eds. Bloombury Press, 2020, pp. 181-98.
Sara Belontz, Patricia Corcoran, Heather Davis, Kathleen Hill, Kelly Jazvac, Kirsty Robertson, Kelly Wood (the Synthetic Collective). “Embracing an Interdisciplinary Approach to Plastics Pollution Awareness and Action.” Ambio (November), currently online: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30448996.
Kirsty Robertson with Helen Gregory. “No Small Matter? Micromuseums as Critical Institutions,” RACAR (special issue: Critical Curating) 43.2 (2018).
Lianne McTavish with Susan Ashley, Heather Igloliorte, Kirsty Robertson, and Andrea Terry. “Critical Museum Theory/Museum Studies in Canada: A Dialogue,” Acadiensis 46.2 (2017), pp. 223-41.
Kirsty Robertson. “Oil Futures/Petrotextiles” In Petrocultures. Sheena Wilson and Imre Szeman, eds. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017, pp. 242-63.
Kirsty Robertson. “Textiles.” In Fueling Culture: Politics, History, Energy. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel and Patricia Yaeger, eds. Fordham University Press, 2016, pp. 353-56.
Kirsty Robertson. “Plastiglomerate,” e-flux journal 78 (December 2016): http://www.e-flux.com/journal/78/82878/plastiglomerate/
Teaching
Graduate Supervision
Robertson supervises in the area(s) of museum and curatorial studies, art and activism, contemporary art, and environmental and social justice.
Postdoctoral Supervision
Dr. Camille Mary Sharp, Department of Visual Arts, UWO, Centre for Sustainable Curating, 2024-2026
Project: Preserving Oil: Petroleum Heritage and Critical Practice in Oil Museums
Dr. Amanda White, Department of Visual Arts, UWO, Centre for Sustainable Curating, 2021-2024
Project: Entangled Roots: Imagining Human-Plant Futures Differently in an Age of Crisis
Dr. Zoë Heyn-Jones, Department of Visual Arts, UWO, Centre for Sustainable Curating, 2021-2023
Project: Curating Food Security, Justice, and Sovereignty in Canada and Mexico
Doctoral Supervision (recently completed dissertations)
Sonya de Lazzer, PhD Co-Supervision (with Keri Cronin, Brock University), completed 2023
Dissertation: It’s All in Your Eye: A Visual Exploration of Niagara Falls’ Spectacles, Simulacra, Mementoes and Memories
Stephanie Anderson, Department of Visual Arts, UWO, completed 2020
Dissertation: (End)Zones and (Out)Fields of Production: Contemporary Conditions of Labor and Artistic Critique (Gold medal nominee)
Julia Krueger Department of Visual Arts, PhD, UWO, completed 2020.
Dissertation: Indisciplined Ceramic Outhouses and Blob-like Glass Bunnies: Four Case Studies on Canadian Prairie Ceramics and Glass
Master’s Supervision (recently completed theses and mrps)
Hannah Verster, Art History and Curatorial Studies, mrp/exhibition, “A Heap of Broken Images: Revisiting The Waste Land Through Art in a Time of Climate Crisis, completed August 2023.
Elena Solomon, Art History and Curatorial Studies, thesis, “The Embroidered Tablecloth: How Locale Influences Eastern European Jewish Textile Production,” completed September 2021.
Ioana Dragomir, Art History and Curatorial Studies, thesis, “no, not forgot - were unable to reach: literary readings of desire in land art,” completed August, 2021.
Meghan O’Neill, Art History, mrp, “A Staircase of Citizen Participation: Preservation of The Old Towns in Tbilisi, Tallinn, and Edinburgh,” completed August, 2019.
Jessica Sealey, Art History, mrp, “Looters or Liberators? The Subjugation of the Egyptian Body Through Western Intervention, Looting, and Collecting,” completed August, 2018.
Kelsey Perreault, Art History, thesis, “Remembrance as Presence: Promoting Learning from Difficult Knowledge at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights,” completed August, 2017.
Ellen Groh, Art History, Art History, mrp, “Exhibiting Prostitution: An Analysis of Sex Work and Today’s Museums,” completed May, 2017.
Genevieve Flavelle, Art History, mrp, “The Night Before Utopia: Queer Feminist Art Praxis at the Feminist Art Gallery,” completed July, 2016.
Keely McCavitt, Art History, mrp, “3D Technologies and the Future of Repatriation in Canada,” completed July, 2016.
Carling Spinney, Art History, mrp, “No Vacancy: Alternative Spaces for Exhibition,” completed July, 2016.
Claude Bock, Art History, mrp, “The Effects of Truth and Reconciliation on Contemporary Indigenous Art within Canada,” completed April, 2016.
Recent Courses
Undergraduate
2023-24 MCS4605E Museum Studies Practicum: meromictic
2023 MCS 2620F Introduction to Gallery, Museum, and Curatorial Studies
2022 MCS4691F Waste Stream/Waste Dream: Addressing the Environmental Impact of Curatorial Practice
2021 MCS2620G Introduction to Gallery, Museum, and Curatorial Studies
2020 AH3692F Art, Money, Crime
2020 MCS2610F Greatest Shows on Earth
2019 MCS3610F Controversies and Contestations in the Museum
2019 AH1648B Collecting and Culture
2019 MCS4605E Museum and Curatorial Practicum: Together We Average as Zero
2019 ARTH2220E A Museum for Future Fossils
2019 VAH2292G Introduction to Gallery, Museum, and Curatorial Studies
2018 VAH3396F Greatest Shows on Earth: Exhibitions that have Changed Art History
2017-18 VAH4485E Museum and Curatorial Practicum: 95% Invisible: The Art of Storage
2017 VAH3383A Introduction to Exhibition Design and Museum Management
2018 VAH1045B Collecting and Culture
2016-17 VAH4485E Museum and Curatorial Practicum: Protectorate 1: A Darker Side of the Moon
2016 VAH2292F Introduction to Museum and Curatorial Studies
2015-16 VAH4485E Museum and Curatorial Practicum: Cabinet of Shadows: The Reliquary
For Lost Animals
Graduate2021 VAH9571B Museum/Decay
2019 VAH95/685G A Museum for Future Fossils
2017 VAH95/685G Radical Museum II
2016 VAH9585G Radical Museum