Mentor Of The Month

Q & A WITH SADIRA RODRIGUES

Feel free to add your comments or questions below

How long have you been working in the arts now?

I’ve been working in the arts for 8 years now. I finished my masters 8 years ago and that’s really when I began working, but as a student it’s going back 6 more years.

Do you find you’re at that middle manager stage of things, within the mid-career sector of your life? 

I feel like I’m at the transition from emerging into mid-career. I’m not yet established within the mid-career and I don’t necessarily want to be yet. I still think that I’m learning a lot. I do feel like I’ve moved out of that phase of subsistence living, which is so much apart of being an emerging administrator in this business, to having a little bit more stability so that I can take on experimental projects with things in a voluntary way that I couldn’t otherwise.

Why do you work in the arts? What keeps you coming back to it?

I don’t think I can imagine a society without culture in the arts. I think that it’s as important as healthcare is to society. If you think about any great culture in the past, you couldn’t think about them without thinking about the central value of arts and culture. That’s the beginning point, but my passion is contemporary Latin American and contemporary Asian practices. So for me Globalisation is another interesting layer to add on to the arts, because what I’m really interested in is global artistic cultures.

One of the focuses you were talking about is diversity. Can you speak to that a little bit?

When I finished my master’s degree I was approached by a new organization that had started in Vancouver to apply to the Canada Council for a grant called Assistance to Culturally Diverse Curators for residencies in the visual arts. I didn’t know anything about the grant and I didn’t know much about council, but it was kind of endemic. I didn’t really know about the work of diversity, but I knew that I was an immigrant. I had definitely dealt with issues around racism, but I didn’t think of cultural diversity as being an institutional issue.

When I received this grant and I did a two year residency at Centre A, it opened my eyes to the kind of work that needed to be done. What I had also realized while being at Centre A, is that the generation before me had been working around diversity in a particular way, which wasn’t necessarily how I wanted to work around diversity. Fast forward 5 years. I left Centre A in 2003, and I was asked if I wanted to work with the Equity Office Council to do some facilitation work with the culturally diverse organizations which they worked with. In 2006 they received money to actually have three facilitators across the country. I have been doing that since 2006, informally since 2003.

What does that mean exactly?

Multiple things, one thing is that I work with 27 culturally diverse organizations in my area. I am their resident facilitator, so if they need to do skills based development or if they have an issue. Then they can come to me and I can support building their capacity. But then there’s also the whole notion of advocacy, which is where I go and work with institutions to understand how to (in a meaningful way) incorporate diversity as a part of their programming. Not in a tokenistic way, but actually do some structural changes, and that’s really strategic planning on a one-on-one basis.

Why is it important to really focus on culturally diverse groups and support them in this way?

It is important to me, and it’s the cause I’ve taken up. For me cultural diversity is a critical issue because I work in the visual arts, which tends to be pretty white-washed in many ways. Not just in terms of the artists that they show in their galleries but in terms of the entire structure. I have never felt outside of those institutions. In fact as a woman of colour I feel like I am a privileged body in this political climate, where I do have the ability to work within institutions. Institutions seek me as well because in some ways I represent something they need. So for me there is that critical framework and I understand that it gives me a great deal of power to be able to work within an institution and change it.

For me the reason diversity is so important is because we live in a country that promotes it in an aggressive way with immigration from all around the world. So you invite people to come here, but then you don’t actually support their active participation in this culture. You provide them with the ability to remain an immigrant without really being apart of the mainstream culture. I think in a city like Vancouver where more than 50 percent of people don’t speak English at home, institutions should not be dealing with it in a tokenistic way, that it is a reality and a core centre of our cultures.

What do you think that the next generation can do to make sure that everyone is included in the discussion?

One thing I find really interesting about the next generation of emerging arts professionals, is that we’ve all grown up in really diverse environments. You start to take it for granted but at the same time, I wonder if you’re allowed to take it for granted? Do we still need to make sure that the next generation is making strides to be inclusive? 

Well I think you made a really good point. I actually don’t know if it will be an issue for the next generation because it’s a method of living that is so pervasive. Not just in terms of our artistic practice, but in terms of how you live your life. The kind of way you’re conscious about the world. So, it’s a hard question to answer because I think it’s hard to understand. I already look at the generation before me that dealt with issues around diversity and how different it is from how my generation deals with it. It isn’t so confrontational and it isn’t activist. In fact it’s about navigating through the institution and so I do think it will be different. I’m not sure whether I can pin-point exactly what that difference is for the next generation would be. They don’t think in terms of silos: whether it’s disciplinary or whether it’s culturally. It’s about mixing and melding and blending and how that will trickle down I don’t know, but I do think it’s a very good point. 

Do you ever find that it sends a strange message at all when so many of the directors of arts organizations or arts councils are white middle-aged men? Do you find that it has an effect, is it something that resonates?

Well it is always really interesting, but it’s a reality. Whenever I go to a major conference or sit in a meeting like this you look around the table. You don’t see yourself reflected in the senior management. I think a lot of the people around that table would agree that it’s a dieing generation in some sense, and that it’s a way of conceptualizing an institution. I don’t think that change is going to be as rapid as we would like for it to be, but these institutions have been around for 50+ years. Someone is funding these institutions. I think that change can occur, and definitely if you are committed as a funder to an arts and culture sector to representation broadly: whether it’s diversity, first nations or disability.  Then in some ways you have to commit to all forms of representation including your board and senior management. I’m pragmatic that senior management is probably the last one to change. The flip of it is that there is not enough people from culturally diverse communities trained, or that have been around in the industry long enough to actually be able to occupy those senior positions, but they are starting to now.

What can an individual (artist or arts manager) do to hammer this home in terms of diversity and inclusiveness?

I hope people (individual artists or arts administrators) who are interested in diversity are already willing to speak their minds. Get involved!

You can often times make more change from within than you can by banging down on the door. Get on to boards, publish, and challenge when things are written or when you disagree with things. Have a voice because I think that if you don’t then somebody else speaks for you. Also, if you’re an artist from a culturally diverse community that doesn’t feel the importance of these issues, it’s absolutely fine to be okay with that too. I think there are spaces with multiple ways of dealing with these concerns.