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Chinatown Concern Group is an organization of Chinese residents in Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside working to address neighbourhood issues. CCG is supported by the Carnegie Community Centre Association.
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Patrick Condon is the founding chair of the urban design program at University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Recognizing the need for collaboration as a fundamental part of designing sustainable communities, Condon has pioneered public engagement methods by successfully focusing attention on how to make systemic change in the way cities are built and operated, notably in his East Clayton project in Surrey, BC. More recently, he and his research partners collaborated with the City of North Vancouver to produce a 100-year plan to make the city carbon-neutral by 2107. Patrick and his partners received the Canadian Institute of Planners Award for Planning Excellence and the BC Union of Municipalities Award of Excellence for this work.
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Hadani Ditmars is a fifth generation Vancouverite and an author, journalist, and photographer who has worked internationally for over two decades. Reporting from Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Iraq and elsewhere, she has examined the human costs of sectarian strife as well as cultural resistance to war, occupation, and embargo. A former editor at New Internationalist magazine, she travelled to Baghdad in 2010 to write and photograph the May 2010 issue Iraq 7 years later - the legacy of invasion. Her best-selling book Dancing in the No Fly Zone (Interlink Books, 2006) recounts her time in Iraq from 1997 to 2003, and is one of the few books covering pre- and post-invasion reality. Her work has been published widely, appearing in the Guardian, the Independent, New Arab, Al-Jazeera, Sight and Sound, the Walrus, Haaretz, Ms. Magazine, the New York Times, Art Newspaper, Vogue, and Architectural Review, and broadcast on CBC, BBC, RTE, and NPR. Her next book, Between Two Rivers: a Journey Through the Ancient Heart of Iraq (commissioned by IB Tauris), is a travelogue using ancient sites as a narrative device to tell the story of Iraqi culture today.
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Am Johal is Director of Simon Fraser University's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. He is the author of Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene (Atropos Press, 2015) and is co-author with Matt Hern (with contributions from Joe Sacco), of Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale (MIT, 2018). He is the co-founder of UBC's Humanities 101 program and is an associate of SFU's Centre for Dialogue and SFU's Institute for the Humanities. He previously served as co-chair of the Impact on Communities Coalition, as a board member with the Vancity Community Foundation, the Or Gallery, the Vancouver City Planning Commission, the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House and many other organizations. He has been a Visiting Professor in SFU's Semester in Dialogue.
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Life of a Craphead is the collaboration of Amy Lam and Jon McCurley. Their performance projects include King Edward VII Equestrian Statue Floating Down the Don (2017), an iconoclastic act of dumping into the Don River a replica of a decommissioned colonial statue from India that was erected in a public park in Toronto since 1969; The Life of a Craphead Fifty-Year Retrospective, 2006–2056 (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2013), a speculative career retrospective of all the work they will ever make; and Free Lunch (2007), a public, anonymously advertised free lunch serving everything on the menu of a Chinese restaurant.
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Steffanie Ling is a producer of criticism, pamphlets, stories, essays, exhibitions, reviews, bluntness, anecdotes, shout outs, wrestling storylines, proposals, applications, jokes, readings, minimal poems, poems, dinner, compliments, and diatribes. She lives in Toronto, Canada, where she is currently the Artistic Director at Images Festival. Her books are NASCAR (Blank Cheque, 2016) and CUTS OF THIN MEAT (Spare Room, 2015).
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Donato Mancini's practice focuses mainly on poetry, bookworks, text-based visual art and cultural criticism. His books include Loitersack (2014), Buffet World (2011), Fact ‘N’ Value (2011), Æthel (2007), and Ligatures (2005). His most recent book, Same Diff (2017), was a finalist for the 2018 Griffin Prize. The italicised lines in Donato's poem are by Deanna Ferguson, from "Anecdotal Evidence Echoes" (Rough Bush, 2004). Donato would like to dedicate his poem to Michael Barnholden.
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Douglas McBay is a freelance writer by trade with a range of interests as a result of having spent a great deal of time in religious studies, psychology, and classics at the University of Manitoba, and a year on microcomputer systems at Winnipeg Technical College. His most recent works are an unpublished novel (“still being written”) and a philosophical treatise (“still being subjected to trial by life”).
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Ellis Sam currently resides on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. He was born and raised in Vancouver, B.C., and his work is focused on storytelling through music and video. He is in love with Rock 'n' Roll and the music of every country.
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Trevor Yeung is an artist who lives and works in Hong Kong. Yeung’s practice uses natural bodies and systems as a pretext for describing human processes and relations. Solo exhibitions include The darkroom that is not dark (Magician Space, Beijing, 2016); The Sunset of Last Summer (Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong, 2016); and no pressure:) (Gallery Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Zurich, Switzerland, 2015). Group shows include A Beast, A God, and A Line (Dhaka Art Summit 2018, Dhaka; Para Site, Hong Kong, and TS1 Yangon, Yangon, 2018); The Other Face of the Moon (Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, 2017); and Sea Pearl White Cloud (Observation Society, Guangzhou, China, 2016).
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Vincent Tao is a labour union organizer, housing activist, and educator of social movement history and practice.
Previously, Tao was the Education Librarian of 221A, where he stewarded the transformation of the institution's exhibition space as Pollyanna 圖書館 Library, a hybrid archive and public programming infrastructure. During his tenure, Tao developed 221A’s transdisciplinary research projects, free-to-attend educational programs, and community solidarity initiatives.
Tao’s significant collaborative projects at 221A were organized through his research program Notes on Permanent Education (N.O.P.E.): Rereading Room: The Vancouver Women’s Bookstore (2016) with Alexandra Bischoff; Pollyanna Sound Archive Prototype 01 (2017) with Yu Su; The Woodwards Amateur-Historical Society / W.W.A.S. (2017) and BITE THE HAND THAT FEEDS: FORUM ON ART AND DEVELOPER MONEY (2018) with Josh Gabert-Doyon, Brit Bachmann, Gabi Dao, and Byron Peters; Science Fiction and the Other (2018) with Juli Majer; and Comix for Community Solidarity (2018) with William Dereume, Ali Bosley, Jack Lloyd, and Andrea Lukic.
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Ryan Smith is a Vancouver-based artist and designer, and he is the co-founder of Brick Press, an independent art and design book publisher that works with Canadian and international authors. Offset lithography, publishing, artists' books, experimental printmaking, teaching, and research are at the core of his artistic practice.
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Gina Badger is a freelance editor with over a decade’s experience in art publishing, including stints as editorial director of FUSE Magazine (2011–14) and editor of exhibitions and publications at the AGO (2015–17). She holds a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal, and a Master of Science from MIT, Cambridge. Originally from Edmonton, Alberta, Badger is a settler of Norman, Huguenot and Anglo-Saxon ancestry born on Cree territory and currently living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations.
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Michelle Fu 符之欣 is Head of Admin & Finance and co-founder of 221A, where she has been an integral voice in steering 221A's path from a student-led collective to the multi-faceted cultural organization it is today. She is a collaborative and inclusive worker who is committed to ensuring the founding values of collective care and resource-sharing continue to guide 221A's policies and operations. Fu applies her training in environmental design, construction, and art making alongside her experience in non-profit administration and finance to meet to complex needs of the organization.
Fu has been invited to speak on artist organizing, reproductive labour and feminist economics at a variety of organizations and universities, including the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Emily Carr University, Langara University and The Future is You and Me, a mentorship program for young women of colour in the cultural sector. She was previously appointed to the City of Vancouver's Chinatown Legacy Stewardship Group and was Treasurer for Artspeak Gallery and UNIT/PITT Projects. Michelle is currently taking a break from additional appointments, instead choosing to raise Onyee 安怡, care for her friends and family, and explore hobbies and practices she previously wrote off.
mfu@221a.ca
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Brian McBay is Executive Director of 221A, a Vancouver-based cultural research and cultural space operator. Under his leadership, 221A and 221A Artist Housing Society operates a growing network of over 140,000ft2 across nine properties that provide non-market artist housing, artist studios, and cultural programming.
As a student Co-founder of 221A during the height of the 2007-08 global economic crisis, he is part of a new generation of leaders in the cultural sector aiming to advance the public appreciation of the arts while also reversing deepening inequality, xenophobia and colonialism in Canada.
Brian's dad was adopted, and is of mixed European ancestry. Brian's mom's side is Chinese-Canadian. His greatgrandfather, "Charlie" Lum Foon Ting, first arrived in Vancouver in 1898 as a teenager. His grandfather was Victor Gee Sow Lum (b. 1921), known as a local Chinatown baker alongside his brother Vernon Kwok Shing Lum (b. 1925) at the legendary Hong Kong Café (approx. 1941–1993).
Brian holds a Bachelor of Design in Industrial Design from Emily Carr University and applies his training to non-profit property design, construction and regulation. Brian was named a 2018 Fellow at the Salzburg Global Forum and has been invited to speak and write on art, policy and urban development at a variety of institutions and public forums.
In 2020, he co-founded the Sector Equity Alliance for Anti-Racism in the Arts (SEARA), a BC-based consortium that raised $300K in emergency relief funds for BIPOC Artists with over 100 non-profit cultural organizations. He is known as an active and outspoken collaborator, critic and advisor, championing inter-cultural anti-racism in government policy and cultural development in Canada.
In addition to his role with 221A, Brian has served on numerous non-profit and public sector boards including the City of Vancouver Arts and Culture Policy Council and the National Gallery of Canada. Brian is currently serving terms as a board member of the Chinese-Canadian Museum of British Columbia and the Greater Vancouver International Film Festival.
bmcbay@221a.ca
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Jesse McKee (b.1984) is a leader in the Culture Industries, a Curator of Contemporary Art and Design, and he is the Head of Strategy at 221A. 221A works with artists and designers to research and develop social, cultural and ecological infrastructure. There, he leads the Organization’s advancement, communications, research, and programming. The organization develops and operates 14 000 m2 of cultural-use commercial and residential real-estate across a portfolio of properties that are sub-tenanted according to a cost-recovery operating model. 221A’s artistic program hosts long-term Fellowships for artists and designers, as well as producing public realm art and design projects, and develops education and learning programs, which work with communities to improve the public amenities and reduce barriers at the organization's cultural infrastructures and beyond. From 2019-24, McKee is the lead investigator on 221A’s Blockchains & Cultural Padlocks Digital Strategy, which is developing a digitally cooperative culture by “recommoning” land, data and objects.
From 2020-22, he is a member of the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association’s Policy Advisory Council, and he is challenged by rebooting cities and public culture venues in equitable, novel and progressive ways in the wake of the COVID-19 long-tail global pandemic. Previously, he was the Curator of The Banff Centre (2011-15), and has worked with leading cultural organizations such as Western Front, Vancouver; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; The Independent Studio & Curatorial Program, New York; The Barbican Centre, London; Things that can happen, Hong Kong and Tranzit.org, Romania. In 2017, he was the curator of Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures, the inaugural edition of a civic triennial exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. McKee has served as a juror for the Sobey Art Award, and was a member of the Canada Council for the Art's Asia Pacific Delegation.
He has written essays and reviews for Canadian Art, C Magazine, Fillip, Border Crossings, Kaleidoscope, and Cura. A recent catalogue essay, Surreal Ghosts and Neuroplastic Ancestors correlates Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson’s filmmaking with the neuroplastic effects of Vancouver’s economic enclosure over the past decade; published by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia and Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. A recent monograph on the work of the artist Neïl Beloufa, People, Love, War, Data & Travels, includes an essay by McKee, Counting on People: How it Started… How it’s Going, and this text frames the productions of Beloufa’s films from the mid-2010s as they foretold a global pandemic all enacted through video calls, amid the consequences of social media’s unchecked narrative accelerants; edited by Myriam Ben Salah with Benjamin Thorel, and published by After 8 Books, Paris.
jmckee@221a.ca
