Doing Our Very Best Always: Tennis Club

During the summer of 2016, I spent a lot of time running through the streets of prairie towns dressed to match my team of five, all in tennis whites. As a member of Tennis Club, an Edmonton artist collective active from 2015 – 2017, I spent that summer carrying around palm-sized stacks of hand-folded poetry zines or mockups of sports trading cards that depicted members of Tennis Club as though we were celebrated athletes. Crouching along the sides of municipal parade routes, I pressed these prizes into the open palms of parade-goers who were expecting who knows what—coupons maybe, business cards with discounts, invitations. Sometimes I carried buckets of bubble gum instead of my cards. Swinging the gallon in one hand, I could reach in and, like a prom queen or princess, dispense the treats in broad tosses over the crowds gathered on either side of the road. Neon-pink rectangles arced high and rained down to bonk children and their guardians on the head.

Tennis Club consisted of Morgan Melenka, Alyson Davies, Renée Perrott, and me.¹ We formed in 2015 following our graduation, in the same cohort, from the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at the University of Alberta. Faced with the fog of the post-BFA landscape, we started an art collective: a collaborative body that could serve our every need, offering friendship, community, and a creative engine without the propulsion of an institution to inform our every move. In our time together, we performed, printed, painted, and wrote, supported by grants, residences, and positive press, united as a single body split five ways, under one bright and brilliant, multivalent mind. We needed each other. We worked together as Tennis Club until the collective form could no longer serve us. After two furious, vibrant years, we returned to our individual lives, beginning the work of getting reacquainted with the world outside of the club. It has now been nearly six years since that point. The former members of Tennis Club are spread out across cities and provinces; in preparation for this piece, I called Morgan, Alyson, and Renée to interview them about the collective. Together, we retraced our memories, forming for the first time a narrative of Tennis Club, returning all the way back to 2014, when the story began.

It was the final year of my BFA and there was a call for submissions forwarded from the department to my inbox. A simple application: groups of up to five were invited to submit proposals for an outdoor light installation to be shown in a new winter festival. I first brought the call to Morgan, whose studio abutted mine, and from there we sought out the other members of what would become Tennis Club. We believed our friends to objectively be the best, and so we picked our friends. We got lucky—within our cohort of nineteen graduates, we found artists who not only wanted to work together, but who were also capable of expressing deep respect for each other’s burgeoning practices. Our bond was formed in the effortless closeness of art school, where friendships developed through midnights and early mornings, through the inevitability of being witness to each other’s most creative, intimate, and sleepless selves.

The winter festival that catalyzed our formation ended up being delayed by a year. When we had applied, graduation was approaching, and students were tacitly encouraged to begin looking outside the university’s cradle for exhibition opportunities. By the time the project was finally due to come to fruition, we were, all of us, out of school and working, struggling to figure out what making art might look like outside of university. As with the changes in our individual lives, our shared ideas and collective interests had changed too, and so it was unanimously decided that we would scrap our original submission and start over. We had learned that we enjoyed working together. In the process of submitting, rejecting our own submission, reworking, building, and eventually exhibiting, we recreated the soothing rhythm of art school with its structured projects, opportunities, and rewards. Working together felt like a landing pad, extended underneath the fall from that institutional base.

The club formed officially in the basement of Morgan’s mother’s condo building, which had a free conference room. We sat around the broad, wooden table and talked it out. One way to tell the story would be to say that we became an art collective because we were lucky, but we also came together because we needed to. Without the support of an academic institution, we were play-dough people masquerading as artists—soft, moldable, and undetermined. Our common experiences grounded us more than any sense of ourselves as distinct and separate individuals. Figuring out our paths alone felt impossible; together, at least we had the guarantee that four other people would see that we were still trying to make “it”—that is art—work.

In many ways, Tennis Club formed in response to where we were at the time and where we had just come from. The BFA program at the University of Alberta was relentlessly modernist. Although we prioritized different media in our degrees, we still came away with similarly-particular understandings of what would and would not constitute “good art.” Across the department, expectations of aggressive introspection were paired with a program that was determinedly un-theoretical. Our education emphasized craft, tools, and the modernist surface. With the exception of a couple of new (at the time) art history offerings that opened up theory as a mode of creative inquiry, we had little to make art about except ourselves. Yet we were encouraged to maintain modern pursuits, producing abstracted blobs of colour, steel and wooden blocks, pours, shapes, and forms. Our conceptual training was largely self-directed. We could turn inward, mining what personal experience might be deemed acceptable as a loose subject, or outward, toward the materiality of the art work itself. Alone, redefining the grounds for goodness in art making would present a daunting prospect. As Tennis Club, we could opt out of the criteria for “good art” that we had inherited from modernism and from the University, assured in the knowledge that, regardless of what we were losing or gaining, we were doing it together.

As we worked to re-examine our education, we came to a change in perspective: Between the five of us, we had gained an incredible array of skills. Collectively, we could print, draw, paint, construct, sew, photograph, write, devise, and perform. And we could justify it all in the vernacular of an artist statement. We could do anything, so we did. Like a sampler pack of potential practices, our work as Tennis Club shuffled us together—the work of five made into one. Our shared education gave us a common language, not only in terms of what we could do, but in what we no longer had to.

In Tennis Club, we discovered a way in which the self could be explored at a distance. Within a shared identity, our unique selves were immersed in a whole. The safety net of the club allowed us to be brave in deviating from what we had learned to do. We were simultaneously anonymous and public, free to be funny, conceptual, arch, direct, personal, and sexual. The pressure to emerge from the institution with a ready-formed artistic brand (referred to as a cohesive practice) was sublimated into a play on everything we knew to be true to that point. We were, together, an already-famous, successful, beautiful, branded body, thriving on its own estimation. As far as literal tennis credentials went, I was the only member who had actually played tennis before (on the cracked courts of my neighbourhood’s untended park), but no matter: we were all medal winning athletes within the club. Under the weight of our collective trust in each other, personal doubts, hurts, and insecurities were pressed gossamer thin, alleviating the requirement to hold out an absurd and enduring faith in our own individual artistic endeavours. We had faith in each other instead. Tennis Club could be somewhere we belonged.

In my final years of art school, I was heavily inspired by the few Canadian art collectives and collaborative projects that I knew of at the time. In terms of Tennis Club, two in particular influenced our early conceptions of what we were: Royal Art Lodge, formed in Manitoba in 1996 with absurdist collages and quirky characters; and Lesbian National Parks and Services, 1977, the duo of Shawna Dempsey and Lori Millan who performed as park rangers, injecting a dose a lesbianism into the heterosexual zones of tourism and settler-colonial parks management. Both offered examples of character play, taking on costumes and amplifying aspects of the artists’ identities to create strange and critical artworks, and both carried with them an element of responding to the specificity of place in so-called Canada.

The name Tennis Club emerged from an ironic observation: the only way to really succeed in Alberta is to be a local sports team. Like many of the statements that would follow as we further defined ourselves and our mission, we held this to be both true and not. The space between those poles was open and liberating, a space where we could laugh at ourselves. Being a young artist in the oil industry-saturated, hockey-hungry, corporate-cowboy province meant making work within a culture that focussed more on winning gold than on funding the arts. Instead of being discouraged by the slim prospects for mainstream appeal in such an environment, we took from this a sense of freedom. Tennis Club was born of our estimation that the majority of people wouldn’t care either way what we were doing, so we might as well have fun.

Once we determined the key to success was sports, Tennis, with its exaggerated signifiers of class and particular mode of femininity, was brought up and embraced as the obvious choice. We were all working class, and weren’t destined for membership in any actual exclusive club, so we made our own. We would become a Tennis Club, complete with white mini skirts, white socks, and high ponytails on whoever’s hair remained long enough to hold one.

Our very first performance featured our new looks, sourced at the thrift store. “Re-hydration Station” (2016) took place alongside a running route in Edmonton’s River Valley–a popular location for daily joggers. Dressed in all white, we set up a folding table and mixed orange drink crystals in a massive dispenser. Every time a runner went by in either direction on the path, we cheered, clapped, jumped up and down, and handed them a plastic cup of juice. Congratulations! Whatever you are doing, you are winning! Our action was met with bemusement, but we had a largely positive response, which was what we had expected. Young women, and especially white women (which described all the other Tennis Club members apart from me), are afforded the cultural and social position of being seen as neither threatening nor especially serious. Cultish adherence to the equivalency between youth and beauty lent us a line of credit that felt predatory in its very availability. The choice to deploy sexuality was theoretically that–a choice–but short of hiding out under a rug for the next decade, there was no real escape from being evaluated in terms of our sexual appeal and availability. Inevitably, sex and sexuality would be a part of Tennis Club. We were aware of the compulsions to which we were subject, while still operating within them. Writing on 1970s feminist performance art, Nancy Princenthal described these compulsions as “the stubborn desire to please, and the overdetermined, seeming ineradicable wish to be considered sexy.”² Our gendered selves were going to be appraised regardless of personal desires, so we got in on the joke and created a feminine veneer that bordered on abrasive and in your face, saying: We know you are looking for the hot, new thing—so here we are.

In Tennis Club, we discovered a way in which the self could be explored at a distance. Within a shared identity, our selves were immersed in a whole. The safety net of the club allowed us to be brave in deviating from what we had learned to do. We were simultaneously anonymous and public, free to be funny, conceptual, arch, direct, personal, and sexual.

We took to our roles as tennis stars with varying degrees of comfortability. While some felt empowered in claiming their sexuality for themselves, others were awkward and never really warmed to the particular performativity of the club, feeling instead an additional pressure to look desirable, only now with the call coming from inside the house. My own relationship to our performed identity shifted when, after about six months of working together, I came out to the girls of Tennis Club, haltingly and uncertain, as queer. Our closeness was so precious, so particular: we knew everything about each other before anyone else. Prior to this realization of self, my short skirt felt powerfully forward, a dare which would be met with joyful hostility were anyone to take it. After, it felt like a role I no longer needed to play. I cut my hair and changed my uniform to white shorts instead of the skirt. Overtime, we all made alterations to the original, strictly-matching uniforms. A year into our work as Tennis Club, we had all strayed from the peak femininity of our early days, but the image we presented in applications remained more or less the same, trafficking in the performance of a necessarily-unattainable form of classed femininity. Through the spring of 2016, we applied to a string of small town parades as the Edmonton Tennis Club: young women in short skirts who promised candy and hand made memorabilia to spectators. In our collective imagination, these applications were read by middle-aged committee members, gathered together in windowless rooms or seated with a view of a parking lot in the growing heat of May and June. Who could say no to a fleet of matching girls armed with gifts?

Our largest project by far was a four-town tour across Alberta called “For God’s Sake Kate, Where’s the Camera?” It was titled after Show Title #266 by Stephen Bruggeman, a list-as-art, offering over 700 titles, readymade for reuse by anyone with access to the website. Throughout the four parades we participated in, we rotated roles: one would drive the truck, others alternatively running ahead and walking along side with our wares, while one of us would recline on the nineties-era, plastic lawn furniture that we’d arranged on our float, waving languidly in repose. The float itself was modular, reassembled each time on the back of a newly rented U-Haul flatbed hitched to Alyson’s dad’s truck. Paper flowers, gold glitter lettering affixed to a dollar store net, and astroturf that could be rolled, repaired easily, and refigured to match the different flatbeds available from town to town. In my memory, I was always moving. At the time, I had only recently learned to drive and, fearful of the spectre of trailer-hitch steering, I never drove. Small differences between us, diminished by our matching whites.

There was an element of exclusivity to the club of course; It was unavoidable. In becoming a collective, we formed a deep vulnerability—a private network of interpersonal bonds. This rich, shared interiority became the subject of our work. Morgan screen-printed track jackets that we bought at Value Village with our last names in gold over the Tennis Club logo on the back. Along with pinning the jackets up as parts of installations and displays, we also wore them out to parties, events, and other people’s openings: the self-made celebrity laughing at itself. Invited to submit a piece to a local arts fundraiser, we created “Crybaby,” a giant teardrop-shaped piñata covered in shimmering-blue slivers of hand-cut foil. The winning bidder got to bash it apart. (To their disappointment, the tear contained thrifted family photographs, one member’s STI test results, and a zine in which I had listed every place in Edmonton I had ever cried.) In 2017, we were invited to participate in a show hosted by DC3 Gallery, curated by graduate students from the UofA. For the exhibition, we created “[redacted],” a performance about privacy and our contradictory efforts to protect it while promoting the collective. The performance featured an old, dot-matrix printer at one end of the gallery with a shredder at the other. They were separated by a white, metal, folding drying rack. Throughout the performance, a PDF download of our Tennis Club group chat was printed off on a continuous stream of perforated sheets of paper, allowing years of Facebook messages with everything from our creative plans to personal secrets to come spilling out over the floor. Armed with a timer and whistles to mark the time, we rotated positions along the track following the paper from printer to shredder. Our objective was to first highlight everything from the chat we wanted to keep private, and then, racing against the dot matrix’s pace, to redact in black sharpie everything anyone had highlighted. Referencing masculinist performances of endurance à la Matthew Barney, we altered the parameters of the endeavour by making the stakes our words, our private bond, our very selves.

Tennis Club meetings took place in our homes, public parks, and in the two studios we shared, first at Ficus Studios and then at McLuhan House in the Highlands neighbourhood. Our meetings were long and rich with laughter, breaking off from discussions of logistics and conceptual visioning to talk about our personal lives, as they overlapped and involved each other enormously. During the course of the club, we experienced together each other’s breakups, hookups, shames, and successes. Tennis Club was a closed membership, but the friendship we cultivated between us was so powerful and so vibrant that we wanted to share it with everyone we could. As Tennis Club, we hosted parties, including a screening of Clueless in the McLuhan House garage with snacks, drinks, and discussion questions to follow. We went as the Spice Girls for Halloween (I was Sporty). We made holiday postcards and sent them to our “mailing list”: a list of our friends, families, and every major gallery, artist-run centre, and publisher in Canada with a publicly searchable address. Tennis Club would make people laugh, we hoped; it would get them excited, would pose questions, would invite the world to take us in and keep us in some semblance of our wished-for artistic community.

One of the last projects that we completed as the club was a collaborative book for Publication Studio’s Edmonton branch. The book was made up of three sections, composed of the homonyms “Idle, Idol, Idyll,” and named for a fourth nonsensical iteration, Eyedoll. The sections held separate but related pieces from each of the five of us, compiling photos, cyanotypes, and textual explorations of what each section might mean: idols, idling, living idyllically, and being a doll at the centre of attention. I wrote poetry for the book, a practice which began with Tennis Club where my role became the writer. (Without the club, I don’t know that I would have ever started.) We collated our pages physically, laying every piece of paper out on the floor in the UofA’s HUB Mall. The book is square, with a white cover and a goldenrod inset page behind it. As a collective, we were most individuated in Eyedoll. Thoughts, impulses, and images came together like puzzle pieces instead of melting into the whole.

Our visual critique of compulsory femininity and of girlish affect as a mode of access netted us an invite to be interviewed on the radio for a CJSR show about feminism. In the interview we were asked if we identified as feminists. I have since I was eight years old, an inheritance from my mother for which I have always been grateful. In our answers, though, we were all over the map. Some had only recently come to identify with feminist ideals and practices, and our definitions, if amalgamated, would have produced an incoherent, contradictory feminist inquiry. In the correct context, contradiction can be the fruit of greater understanding—it allows the subject to witness from multiple angles, to hold many truths at once instead of bowing to didactic truisms or untested beliefs. Within the club, though, our politics were felt and visualized, not theorized. While our diverging positions on feminism were not a source of conflict, we were not an entirely cohesive mind. Eventually, it would become clear that there were points on which we diverged, and that our method of collectivity was rigid, unable to bend to encompass individual deviations from the whole.

Since our first performance in the river valley, the fact of anyone else’s interest in our work took us by surprise. We courted it in our conceptual framing as Tennis Club, but in the beginning our pantomime of fame, success, and historical relevance was formed as an in-joke. We were making jokes and running a self-promotional Instagram page as art. We gossiped, laughed, and cried on each other’s blankets more than anything else, and over our two years of intense production, we still spent more time loving each other than making anything that could be proffered up as art. Over the course of Tennis Club, we applied for grants, exhibitions, and residencies, and were, like everyone else, largely rejected. A residency at McLuhan House and a successful Alberta Foundation for the Arts grant, which supported the parade project, gave us space and time to meet and develop further work. In 2016, we received an email requesting to profile us for a survey on contemporary collaborations in Canadian Art. We were featured alongside a photo of our jackets: gold on navy, dark green, and black tracksuit material against a white wall. As soon as anyone wanted us, we upped the ante. Within a year, we were naming potential projects things like “The Retrospective” and “Hall of Fame.” When asked to create a piece for the Art Gallery of Alberta’s fundraising Nocturne art party, we came up with “Stand-in,” a life-sized wooden cutout with a hand-painted portrait of the club in our tennis whites. In place of our faces, we cut out holes so that guests could step in and join the club. We were the hot, young thing, the sideshow attraction of the week. We made that explicit. The brevity implied by referencing the carnival sideshow—popping up and disappearing once the thrill has been had—is purposeful. To my memory, we never applied to show outside of Alberta, and I have no record of any attempt at long-term planning. Every action was immediate and present; we worked until we couldn’t anymore.

There is an unparalleled intimacy possible in collective art making—a little of the inexplicable drive that romance thrives on. A spark. The closeness and vulnerability of the work itself necessitates care, formulating a seedbed for deep, rich friendship. As Tennis Club, we excelled at this. And then, at some point, we became overachievers. Our minuted meetings stretched out over evenings with hours allocated to business preceded by hours devoted to the work of staying embedded in each other’s lives, of attending to the density of material ripe for unpacking what the post-undergrad landscape presented. Between us, there were no boundaries. We were best friends, but we were also coworkers, and our intrinsic value to each other could not break off from the labour value we contributed to the collective. Every move required full control from every member. The concept of any one of us taking time off from the club was as unthinkable as dissolving altogether—until the end happened. 

Based on conversations with graduates from other Canadian institutions at the time, it is not so unusual that our undergrad offered no official resources in terms of professionalism, no real guidance on the question of how one actually does become a “working artist” (especially considering the need to work in order to live and therefore to maintain, at minimum, a career and a half to make things work). All five of us worked consistently, often at multiple jobs at once, while we were collaborating as Tennis Club, and for every paid opportunity we took, we devoted hours of time to projects that were not. The fees we received were the same value as those offered to individual artists, but split five ways.³ With every exhibition, we made a fifth of what an artist could make on their own. During the summer of the parades across Alberta, we dedicated our time off from our paying jobs to the club, spending the meager allotment of vacation hours that we received as intro-level employees on driving a U-Haul from town to town. It’s not a bad way to spend one’s vacation. I remember falling asleep entirely at peace in the back of the truck, clambering through a muddy stream and scaling its dusty bank like animals, joyful in our dirt the day after the Drumheller parade. Art is work, though, and expensive work at that. Our website eventually closed because the hosting fees went to an individual member’s credit card, and she could no longer afford to wait for us all to repay her for the charge. Our structure required us to be working all the time, and the fact that it was unpaid work was a major factor in the eventual sense of overwhelm and un-sustainability that we all eventually came to express to each other. As Tennis Club we received incredible support, mentorship, and care from so many in the Edmonton artist community. But I do wish there had been some way to pay our bills. It is far easier to be generous with your time and forgiving of failure when your livelihood isn’t on the line.

There is an unparalleled intimacy possible in collective art making—a little of the inexplicable drive that romance thrives on. A spark. The closeness and vulnerability of the work itself necessitates care, formulating a seedbed for deep, rich friendship. As Tennis Club, we excelled at this. And then, at some point, we became overachievers.

By the time we ended Tennis Club, its conclusion felt inevitable. We were all leaving town and embarking on new endeavours for the first time as separate people. The fine balance of managing a five-way body had gone off tilt, and we lacked the skills then to get it back into working order—working being the key word. In ways that are only apparent through the grace that distance provides, it is clear now that our friendships hinged on our production. We had no practice in saying no, or in accepting anyone else’s refusal of overwork. Tennis Club had become our own all-consuming myth, shored up on work and friendship; to want anything more or less presented a counter mythology, one the collective could not accommodate. 

What makes an effective collaboration? In Ellen Mara de Wachter’s Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration, she interviews dozens of collectives, compiling a book length archive of various answers to the question, “how do you work together?” and then what does it mean to do so. Early on in the book, she presents her criteria for how she selected the collectives: They had to have been working together for a significant amount of time and still be actively collaborating. No divorces, no break-ups, no estranged and former friends. In the cases where a collective did fracture, the member or members who are no longer actively in the group were not interviewed. There are sisters, married couples, life-long friends, professional collaborators, and multi-form, family-like social groups of working artists who insist on continuing to serve the collective. The implication is: When it comes to art collectives, impermanence is failure. In reading the book, I was looking for something in particular, some key element that would answer what I’ve wondered all these years of missing the most active bond of collective art making I’ve ever had: What allowed them to stay together? In interviewing only still-standing collectives, de Wachter limits herself to a particular strata of professionalism. The majority of the interviewees are professors, the rest work full time as artists, dividing their labour so broadly that whole ecosystems form in the name of a small group of decision-making members. What options are there for collectives who are not part of an institution, who want their lives to support their art, but who must remain a part of the world that includes more than artists?

For years after Tennis Club was active, its ending shadowed me. Before our break from each other was even properly adjudicated, I was aiming for a shot at recreating the magic I had felt so clearly as a member of the club. I formed new collectives in curation, writing, and performance. Some resulted in exhibitions and critical texts, others in half-written grants and abandoned plans. Most collaborations that I have been a part of eventually came to an end. Their conclusions have felt natural, following shifts in friendships, changes in access to space and time, or the seductive pull of a new idea that renders the old one dusty and undesirable, and it is only with Tennis Club that I was left with a pervasive feeling that in allowing the club to end, I had somehow failed.

In our scope and our youth, the formation of Tennis Club was primed for life-changing impact on all of us. Its end set us free, returning us each individually to the broader world of possibilities and influences that lay beyond the bounds of the collective. In the years since, we have all done things that would have been impossible while together as Tennis Club, and yet our bonds have never been entirely tied off. In the spring of 2018, when Morgan graduated from NSCAD, Renée, Alyson, and I flew out to help her install her final exhibition, sleeping in a pile of air mattresses on her apartment floor. Morgan has been teaching and working as a printmaker and sculptor, producing critical re-figurings of architectural forms that thrill me the way our conversations about art always have. For the last three years, she and I have been working on a co-curated exhibition based on an experiment we dreamed up as an offshoot of our Tennis Club collaboration; this past fall we finally had the pleasure of opening it at Critical Distance Centre for Curators in 2022. When the show opened, Renée drove up from Kingston, Ontario where she has been pursuing a degree in Occupational Therapy. It is a path none of us, including her, would have predicted back in the garage at McLuhan House, but it matches the care and skill I have always known her to have. Last spring, while on a trip home, Alyson and I cried in her painting studio upon being reunited after years of separation by pandemic travel limitations and mismatched timing of visits. After rejecting so much of what we had learned in school for the sake of Tennis Club, Alyson started over again after its end and picked up painting anew, developing what is now her thriving studio practice, composing a world of the sweetest of colours.

After all this time, I’ve come to believe that a collective is only as permanent as the desire and ability to keep it going remains collectively held, but there is no inherent failure when the terms of that collectivity change. It was only in interviewing Morgan, Alyson, and Renée for this piece that it became clear that in our years since Tennis Club we have managed to reach a consensus, each alone coming to the conclusion that it is what we built together as the club that has made our present lives and practices possible. I interviewed each of them separately—hours of phone time recorded in notes that grew shorter with each successive interview in order to avoid repetition, words and phrases doubling and then tripling across the conversations. Our thoughts still aligned with ease.

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M. Gnanasihamany is an artist and writer whose work explores the political world of pictures. Within their work in painting, poetry, critical arts writing, and curation, they examine the capacity for visual media to at once mirror and enforce the conditions of its own production through processes of dissemination, collection, and reproduction. Most recently, they co-curated The Equivalence of Alloyed Gold, a year-long experimental commissioning process hosted by Critical Distance Centre for Curators, and they are presently curating an online exhibition in collaboration with Free Lands Free Peoples, an Indigenous-led prison prison abolition group, and hosted by Latitude 53 Gallery, which will exhibit artworks and writing by current and formerly incarcerated people. M.’s written work can be found in Leste, Peripheral Review, Mood Magazine, SNAPline, and elsewhere; their mini-chapbook, Unconscious Method, was published by Ghost City Press in 2021. They are currently focused on a new research project critically examining the material implications of highly networked and reproduced images beginning with an exploration of visual media depicting sunsets. M. lives in Tio’tia:ke.

1. Tennis Club was a collective of five, including one member who would prefer not to be named here. In order to maintain the member’s privacy, this text refers to the collective as five but only four names are included.
2. Princenthal, Nancy. Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s. Thames & Hudson Inc. 2019. page 112
3. CARFAC, Canadian Artists’ Representation/Le Front des artistes canadiens, publishes an annual fee schedule that sets out minimum payment guidelines for payments to artists. The guidelines state (A.1.5.3) that artist Collectives who present work outside of exhibitions should each receive the same rate as an individual artist, but the same principle does not apply to exhibitions.