Here, Better, Now is a four-part program that details forms of solidarity, art, activism, and policy change emerging from the overdose crisis.
Over two days on University of Toronto campuses in Mississauga and Toronto, Here, Better, Now serves as a concluding chapter of WISH YOU WERE HERE, WISH HERE WAS BETTER, a mobile program held by the Blackwood in October 2022. Through a screening, keynote speaker and panel discussions, contributors to Here, Better, Now share wide-ranging perspectives on the overdose crisis, informed by its differential effects across local sites and their histories.
Event Documentation
The event video of Opening: Precedents and Predecessors has now been posted on that event page, where it will be viewable until May 24, 2023.
ORGANIZING OUR GRIEF: A Collaboration in Response to the Overdose Crisis
Here, Better, Now also serves to launch ORGANIZING OUR GRIEF: A Collaboration in Response to the Overdose Crisis. This publication, part of the Blackwood’s Working with Concepts series, circulates strategies, reflections, and organizing principles that emerged from WISH YOU WERE HERE, WISH HERE WAS BETTER.
Free copies of ORGANIZING OUR GRIEF will be available at all events.
Erica N. Cardwell is a writer, art critic, and educator based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her book, Wrong is Not My Name; Notes on Black Art (Feminist Press, 2024). Her writing has appeared in ARTS.BLACK, Art in America, Frieze, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, The Kenyon Review, and other publications. Erica is currently Manuscript co-editor of Radical Teacher Journal and is a member of the International Art Critics Association. She has written exhibition and catalogue essays for artists such as Crystal Z. Campbell, Rico Gatson, Samantha Box, Chitra Ganesh, and Sandra Brewster. Erica is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
Rhiannon Carruthers is a graduate of Interactive Digital Media at University of Toronto. They began volunteering with the Toronto Raver Information Project (TRIP) in 2015 and worked as a youth harm reduction worker in Toronto's nightlife community, attending events and giving out free harm reduction supplies and information. They served as an elected board member for Canadian Students for a Sensible Drug Policy (CSSDP) for two years, advocating for drug policy reform. Their interests include youth advocacy, drug education, harm reduction, and the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, MDMA, and ketamine. They currently work in the field of conservation and outdoor education, as well as part-time as a Sherbourne Health Ambassador.
Theodore (ted) Kerr is a Canadian born, Brooklyn based writer and organizer. For the US's National Library of Medicine he curated, A People's History of Pandemic: AIDS, Posters, and Stories of Public Health. He edited an On Curating issue entitled, What You Don't Know About AIDS Could Fill a Museum. He is a founding member of What Would an HIV Doula Do? With Alexandra Juhasz, he co-wrote the book, We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2022).
Los Angeles native Marcus Kuiland-Nazario is an interdisciplinary artist, performance curator, and producer. Kuiland-Nazario’s works are long-term research-based cross-genre projects exploring extreme states of emotion such as grief, anger, and loss influenced by the cultural and spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora. His performance works have been included in national and international festivals, including the Rapture Festival, ICA London, London; the Rompeforma Festival, San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, Los Angeles and The Queer Commons: Politics of Friendship, Love and Affects in Skopje, Macedonia. Currently he is participating in Culture Hub's ReFest, hosting an Instagram Live talk series investigating masculinities for LA FREEWAVES with guests including Nao Bustamante, Sherry Vine, Madison Moore, Pavitra Prasad, Anuradha Vikram, Ron Athey, Guillermo Gomez Peña and Amelia Jones. He is developing an interdisciplinary work about his headstone and is Founder and Creative Director of THE WRINKLE ROOM, a performance lounge for connoisseurs of alternative culture who are over 50 years of age.
Brianna Olson-Pitawanakwat is an Anishinaabek Birthworker, jingle dress dancer, artisan, activist and member of Wiikwemkoong Unceded First Nation. She specializes in Indigenous led trauma formed approaches and arts based practice after nineteen years in the field. She is co-founder of Native Arts Society, an Indiqueer/Two-spirit-led gallery and studio in Toronto. She also co-leads Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction, a grassroots initiative that began during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to provide ongoing critical support to date.
Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers is a writer, director, producer and actor. She is a member of the Kainai First Nation (Blood Tribe, Blackfoot Confederacy) as well as Sámi from Norway. She was named the 2018 Sundance Film Institute’s Merata Mita Film Fellow and is an alumnus of the Berlinale Talent Lab and the Hot Docs Accelerator Lab. Her short documentary Bihttoš was selected as one of TIFF’s Top Ten Canadian shorts and also won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary Short at the Seattle International Film Festival. She acted in and co-wrote (with Kathleen Hepburn) the narrative feature The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, which premiered at the Berlinale in 2019 and received the Toronto Film Critics Association and Vancouver Film Critics Circle awards for best Canadian film. It was also nominated for six Canadian Screen Awards, and Tailfeathers and Hepburn won the CSAs for best direction and best original screenplay. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open was picked up for distribution by Ava DuVernay’s company, ARRAY, and is available to stream on Netflix in the United States.
Darien Taylor has been living with HIV for 35 years. She was one of the first women in Canada to be "out" about her HIV status. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she was a force behind a number of HIV and women-focused initiatives. This work included co-editing an international anthology of works by women living with HIV and creating Voices of Positive Women, a provincial health organization led by and for women living with HIV. During this time, she co-chaired the HIV treatment activism group, AIDS ACTION NOW! Over the years Darien has been continuously involved in HIV work. She was the Director of Program Delivery at CATIE, Canada's source for HIV and HCV information, and was more recently involved in a small, informal group of individuals who worked behind the scenes to ensure public recognition of U=U, the research demonstrating that people with an undetectable HIV viral load cannot transmit HIV sexually. She is currently working on a short semi-autobiographical film through the SSHRC-funded Viral Interventions research project at York University.
Jarrett Zigon is the Porterfield Chair of Bioethics and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. His research interests include the anthropology of ethics, problematics of being human, the political, addiction, and mental health. These interests are taken up from a perspective strongly influenced by post-Heideggerian continental philosophy and critical theory and are explored in his most recent books Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding and A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community.
Carlyn Zwarenstein is a Toronto-based writer. On Opium: Pain, Pleasure, and Other Matters of Substance was published in print in Canada by Goose Lane Editions (2021) and as an audiobook worldwide by ECW Press (2022). On Opium looks at the toxic drug crisis; chronic pain; opioids; capitalism & solidarity; loneliness & loss; dependence; drug user activism; and what we all need to be well. Opium Eater: The New Confessions (2016) is a shorter memoir about pain and opioid painkillers. It was a Globe & Mail Best Book of 2016 and has been taught on various undergraduate and graduate courses since 2017. Carlyn currently writes Live More Lives, a newsletter about fiction and experience; freelances features, essays and opinion articles about drug policy, environment, literature, and social issues; and is working on her first books without “opium” in the title. She studied biology and political science at the University of Toronto, graduating in 2001.
Fraser McCallum is Project Coordinator at the Blackwood Gallery. In this role, he works primarily on programs outside of the gallery spaces, including offsite exhibitions, public programs, virtual programming, and publications. Fraser is an interdisciplinary artist of settler Euro-Canadian ancestry, whose practice often draws together histories and ongoing sociopolitical conditions through archives, places, and stories. Fraser has held previous roles at Gallery 44 and Art Metropole, and received a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. His work has been exhibited at HKW, Berlin; Sheridan College, Oakville; Modern Fuel, Kingston; and The Art Museum at the University of Toronto. His video works have been screened by the plumb, LIFT, Hamilton Artists Inc., and Trinity Square Video. Fraser’s writing has been published in the Blackwood’s Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge series, PUBLIC, and Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies.
The Blackwood gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
Additional support provided by the Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies.
The Blackwood
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Road
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
[email protected]
(905) 828-3789
The galleries are currently open. Hours of operation: Monday–Saturday, 12–5pm, Wednesdays until 8pm.
