Art Metropole

Anthea Black is a Canadian artist, writer, and cultural worker based in San Francisco and Toronto. Her studio work addresses feminist and queer history, collaboration, materiality, and labour and has been exhibited in Canada, the US, France, Germany, The Netherlands, and Norway. Black is co-editor of Handbook: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education with Shamina Chherawala and Craft on Demand: The New Politics of the Handmade with Nicole Burisch. She is an Assistant Professor in Printmedia and Graduate Fine Arts at California College of the Arts.

Andrew Zealley is a Toronto-based artist whose work expands beyond audio and music methods to inform mixed disciplines and media. His practice has been situated at the shifting nexus of HIV/AIDS, queer identity, and the body since 1990. Zealley s audio installation, Nature: This Is A Recording, is in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada. He has recordings published by labels Art Metropole, Fine & Dandy, How To Explain Silence To A Dead Hare, Old Europa Cafe, Public Record/Ultra-red, Tourette Records, and Vague Terrain. Zealley holds an MFA in interdisciplinary studies from OCAD University. He is currently pursuing doctoral research through the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University; Program of Study: Safe and Sound: Art, Queer Listening, and Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS.

Jessica Whitbread is a graduate of the York University Masters of Environmental Studies program, she has a degree in Building Communities to Ignite Social Change. She is a queer activist and artist that has been working in the HIV movement since shortly after her diagnosis in 2002. Her work includes LOVE POSITIVE WOMEN, Tea Time, No Pants No Problem and she is a co-curator of POSTERVirus. Jessica published Tea Time: Mapping Informal Networks of Women Living with HIV in 2015. She was the Wesley Mancini Artist in Residence at the McColl Center for Art and Innovation, and a recipient of the Premier’s Award from the Government of Ontario, and the Visual AIDS Vanguard Award. In 2016, she birthed twins and advocated to openly breastfeed them in a Canadian context.

Charles Ryan Long is a Chicago based multimedia artist who uses papermaking, print production and various other forms of visual media to communicate narratives of remembrance
and legacy to highlight opportunities for critical cultural shifts. His deep concern with material lineage is used to answer questions of what happens when individuals, places and spaces are taken away from our reality and stand unacknowledged or on the periphery. His practice isdedicated to the ways in which art can be used to advance liberative practices and envision other existences. The work move from gallery to street and back again in a conversation that constantly re-analyzes the role art plays in shaping and undoing worlds.

Notorious SlopQueen, Mikiki, is a performance and video artist and queer community health activist of Acadian/Mi’kmaq and Irish descent from Newfoundland, Canada. Their work has been shown in Artist-Run Centres, Public Galleries, Performance Festivals and self-produced interventions throughout and outside Canada. Mikiki’s creative themes often focus on negotiations on safer sex (lol); identity construction, attitudes around drug use, HIV disclosure, and community building through sharing skills, testimonials and storytelling. Mikiki has worked across the country as a Sexuality Educator in public schools, a Bathhouse Attendant, a Drag Queen Karaoke Hostess, a Gay Men’s Health & Wellness Outreach Worker, a Harm Reduction Street Outreach Worker and an HIV tester. Mikiki currently works as an artist full-time and lives in Toronto where they also host a Golden Girls screening series called Rose Beef.