Renaming of Emily Carr painting spurs debate about reconciliation in art
TORONTO — The painting depicts a colonial structure in an Indigenous setting, but it’s the name of the work that’s spurred a debate about how the art world should address reconciliation.
The Art Gallery of Ontario has renamed a painting by Canadian artist Emily Carr as part of a broader effort to eliminate culturally insensitive language from titles in its collection, a curator says.
But others in the artistic community contend that displacing a work from its historical context does far more cultural damage than a name.
In the 1929 painting, a pallid white church stands out amid the verdant forest in an Indigenous village on Vancouver Island, with dense foliage encroaching on a thin steeple from above and a scattering of cross-marked graves from below.