Melinda Spooner and David Diviney. Melinda Spooner currently lectures at NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. She has taught courses in the areas of socially engaged art, foundation studies, and studio practice at the University of Leth...More
Melinda Spooner and David Diviney. Melinda Spooner currently lectures at NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. She has taught courses in the areas of socially engaged art, foundation studies, and studio practice at the University of Lethbridge and Thompson Rivers University. For more than two decades, she has been active in practices that address issues of community, collaboration and social change. Her recent projects include "Shorelines: Creating Community" (2016) and "Moving Images: Community in Collaboration" (2012-13). Among other publications, her essay "Illuminate, Create, Celebrate - Community Interactive: How Artistic Community Collaborations Build Fellowship among Diverse Communities and Enhance Community Vitality" was published in Animation of Public Space through the Arts: Towards More Sustainable Cities (Coimbra: Almedina Press, 2013). In 2017, Spooner was a plenary presenter and workshop leader at the international conference Culture, Sustainability and Place, University of the Azores, Ponta Delgada, Sāo Miguel. David Diviney is the Senior Curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He previously held the position of Assistant Curator at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and Director of the artist-run centre Eye Level Gallery. He has taught courses at the Alberta College of Art and Design, University of Lethbridge, Thompson Rivers University, and Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning. He participated in the Canada Council for the Arts Asia-Pacific Visual Arts Delegation in 2014 (South Korea, Japan and Taiwan) and is a three-time curatorial panelist for the Sobey Art Award, Canada's preeminent prize for contemporary art. Diviney is the co-curator of the 2019 Bonavista Biennale titled "Floe", an exhibition of contemporary art projects situated in outport communities and historic sites along a 100 kilometre route in rural Newfoundland, Canada. Spooner and Diviney were part of a national curatorial team that developed LandMarks/Repères, a network of contemporary art projects staged in Canada's national parks that served as a forum for collaboration, knowledge sharing, negotiating of differing perspectives, indigenous epistemologies, and the creation of new frameworks of understanding through a coordinated art curriculum in sixteen universities. They recently co-authored the essay "A MEAT/MEETing in the Park: Ursula Johnson's (re)allocation and The Festival of Stewards" for the forthcoming publication Canadian Culinary Imaginations (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 2020).
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The Arts in Society
