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Prairie Collectives

BlackFlash Expanded is excited to launch our series focusing on collectives with an archive of Prairie Collectives that have and continue to shape the region.

Considering Owkui Enzwor’s reminder that “collectives tend to emerge during periods of crisis, in moments of social upheaval and political uncertainty within society,” it’s easy to see how collective models have gained both interest and influence in recent years. This moment of renewed interest, along with the recent push towards the online, has helped to foster connections and alignments across geographies as artists seek out like minded practitioners and audiences. In a recent issue of ESSE magazine, Collectifs/Collectives, Sylvette Babin notes that as contemporary artists “[seek] alternative forms of ‘being together,’ these new collectives are reviving the concerns of several decades of shared creation.”1 BlackFlash Expanded aims to investigate the impacts collectives have made across the prairie region as a way to help shed light on the shared concerns that both Enzwor and Babin point toward.

Organized by founding year, the archive holds at its centre the insistence that collectives form in direct response to the urgent conditions they are embedded in. This organizational strategy pulls further from Blake Stimson & Gregory Sholette’s argument that a focus on collectivism should be periodized,2 and considers that in order to map the role that each collective played, we need to have a better sense of the circumstances they were responding to. Context matters; collectives in particular take shape as a strategy of response.

Our focus aims to consider the ways in which these artists have come together to organize, create community, and ultimately, get things done. As Alan Moore notes in a focus on NY collectives from 1975-2000: “Artists’ collectives do not make objects so much as they make changes. They make situations, opportunities, and understandings within the social practice of art.”3 We are excited to explore the myriad ways these prairie collectives shift our communities, our approaches to artistic practice, and ultimately the arts sector as a whole.

Along with this archive, our focus on collectives will also include interviews, new writing about collective models, and responses to current collective programming. With contributions by Holly Aubichon, Megan Gnanasihamany, Ellen Moffat, Emilie Neudorf, Patterns Collective, Shushkitew Collective, and AKA artist-run, among others. Our focus on collectives will continue across the summer and fall with contributions added through to the end of 2022.


Collective Archive

In our continually growing archive, collectives that remain active are noted in red text on an orange background; those which are now inactive are in blue text on a green background.

Within each profile we have started making links to other articles across BlackFlash’s online archives as a way to better see connections across time. Our hope is that the archive will spark interest in future analysis as new alignments and connections are made.

As our focus on collectives continues across 2022, more collective projects and artists will be added. If you’d like to contribute to the archive, please complete this form.

2020 to 2022:

Eat Paint Collective

Patterns Collective

2011 to 2019:

SWARM Artist Collective

Biofeedback Collective

Taryn Knetemen & Alma Louise Visscher

Carnation Zine

Kyuubi Culture Artist Collective

Unheard Sound Collective

Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective

CONSTELACIONES

Tennis Club

2000 to 2010:

Panospria

1981 to 1999:

1960 to 1980:

Sioux Handcraft Co-operative


  1. Sylvette Babin, “Collectives Without Consensus?Esse: 104.
  2. Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, “Introduction: Periodizing Collectivism,” in Collectivism after Modernism, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 3.
  3. Alan W Moore, “Artists’ Collectives: Focus on NY 1975-2000,” in Collectivism after Modernism, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 216.

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