Rupture and Reckoning: Art as Practice for Racial Repair with Heidi McKenzie

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Free event, everyone is welcome. Zoom closed captioning. The talk will be recorded.

SAVAC is pleased to present a talk by multidisciplinary artist Heidi McKenzie as part of its 2026 AGM. Heidi’s recent project, The Forgotten Man: Reckoning the Sir George Williams Race Riots 1969, evokes a complex narrative centered on the artist’s emotional destabilization upon learning that her father supported Perry Anderson, the White biology professor whose academic racism catalyzed one of Canada’s biggest race riots.

The Sir George Williams Affair was a major Black-led student protest at Sir George Williams University in Montreal in response to the racist grading practices of professor Anderson, who was accused by six Black West Indian students. The protest involved a 13-day occupation of the university’s computer center, culminating in a police raid, violent confrontations, arrests, and significant property damage.

Heidi revisits this history through archival photographs and news clippings, transforming and translating them through digital collage, ceramics, textile, and cyanotype. A steel installation of the university building where protests took place anchors the exhibition, and houses the artist’s material interventions.

As the country’s largest student uprising, the incident challenged systemic racism in Canadian institutions with far-reaching international aftershocks, particularly in the Caribbean. Heidi’s creative meaning-making contextualizes the nuanced history of Afro-Asian mutual distrust and animosity in the Caribbean and its reverberations alongside anti-Black racism in 1960s Canada. Ultimately, Heidi invites audiences to consider the historical and ongoing power structures shaped by class, race, and colonialization, and the capacity for art to act as an agent of change.

What is an Annual General Meeting?

As an artist-run centre by and for artists of colour, we are accountable to our community. AGMs are held every calendar year and are open to everyone. We reflect on the past year and our role within the arts ecosystem, report on the organization’s financial state, and share overviews of current and upcoming programming. It is a valuable opportunity for reconnections between our board, staff and community. It is also when we elect prospective board members. Anyone who identifies as a person of colour is eligible and encouraged to vote.

If you wish to support SAVAC’s programming, you may send donations via e-transfer to indu@savac.net. Donations above $30 will receive a charitable tax receipt.

About the Artist

Heidi McKenzie is a ceramic and installation artist based in Toronto, Canada. Heidi completed her MFA at OCADU in 2014. Heidi is informed by her mixed-race Indo-Trinidadian/Irish-American heritage. Heidi uses ceramics, photography, multi-media, and archive to forefront themes of ancestry, race, migration and colonization. Heidi has exhibited internationally. Her work has been collected by the Royal Ontario Museum, Global Affairs Canada, the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery.

Heidi curated ‘Decolonizing Clay’ at the Australian Ceramics Triennale, 2019. She was inducted into the International Academy of Ceramics in 2022. Heidi’s installation, Division, toured in the US alongside works of Ai Wei Wei, Theaster Gates, Simone Leigh, and Magdolene Odundo. 

Heidi’s solo exhibition at the Gardiner Museum, Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories (spring 2023) explores the little-known migrant and labour histories of Indo-Caribbean indentureship through a feminist lens. Heidi presented Girmitya HerStories at the 2024 Indian International Ceramics Triennale in Delhi – bringing the Indo-Caribbean diaspora ‘home.’ Heidi has been invited to crest in China this spring as part of the International Academy of Ceramics preconference residencies and will be exhibiting in Jingdezhen, China. Visit: www.heidimckenzie.ca

Captions: 

Images: Courtesy of Heidi McKenzie.
Archival photography sourced by permission from Concordia University Libraries, Special Collections.