OCAD adds Black profs to address under-representation
Angela Bains Kestin Cornwall Kathy Moscou Michael Lee Poy Marton Robinson Hiring process inspired by similar outreach to Indigenous community
Angela Bains. Kestin Cornwall. Kathy Moscou. Michael Lee Poy. Marton Robinson.
These are the five Black artists and design experts who are now professors at OCAD University.
“It brings real tears of joy to welcome these five Black faculty members to OCAD University and address the faculty of design’s 144 years of Black under-representation,” said Dean Dori Tunstall, who is the first Black woman in the world to hold such a position. The five are the first Black profs in her faculty. “The overwhelming support of the Black communities in sharing the call and applying to the positions was crucial in making this Black cluster hire a success.”
In a statement, OCAD President Sara Diamond said while the tenure-track positions have been in the works for some time, they are also timely and fit in with the university’s overall long-term equity plan to decolonize its curriculum and policies. They are also a nod to the UN’s International Decade for People of African Descent.
This is an “important announcement within today’s context, given recent anti-Black racism protests and events,” Diamond said. “It shows how OCAD University is working towards structural change and to find ways to address the longstanding under-representation of Black faculty at our university.”
The new hires bring the total of faculty who self-identify as black to 10, out of 183.
In a telephone interview, Tunstall said OCAD U — formerly known as the Ontario College of Art and Design — began the process after a similar, successful outreach to the Indigenous community more than two years ago.
The professors were brought in under a special program of the human rights code which allows for targeted hiring to address inequality.
The thinking was “it’s been too long — let’s make it happen,” she said, adding that OCAD students have been “really strong advocates for wanting to have more Black representation in the faculty.”
While faculty on the tenuretrack are diverse, she said, so too is the student body, and there is a gap — especially when it comes to the cultural needs and knowledge to help with projects Black students want to do.
Hiring a small group “is really the most effective way to combat tokenization,” Tunstall said. When you hire individually, it’s hard to retain diverse faculty because “we learned from the Indigenous cluster hire that having a critical mass … (means having professors) who don’t get burned out in terms of the service they are able to provide, they don’t get burnt out by all the mentoring they are expected to do, they don’t get burnt out because you have enough people in the community to share the work — to share the committee work, to share the mentoring work and support one another,” she added.
Cornwall is an artist and illustrator who attended Sheridan College who also works on modern digital reproduction and screen-printing.
The advantage of hiring a group of five “is that we have a shared common goal, and we can see things from a similar perspective — but also different perspectives because I’m from Toronto and others are from other parts of the country or the world,” Cornwall said.
Moscou is an artist who is currently teaching at Brock University. Her work has been exhibited across the country, including Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum.
“I was thrilled to see that there was an institution actively seeking to acknowledge the lived experiences of Black people and peoples of colour,” she said.
She considers OCAD “a trailblazer for inclusive education” and in dismantling institutional racism.
Bains is an award-winning teacher at the British Columbia Institute of Technology who founded the design firm TransformExp.
Lee Poy is an artist, activist and architect in Trinidad who has taught at the University of the West Indies.
Robinson has studied physical education and art/visual communication and focuses on the Afro-Latino experience in his art.