Chained to the Gallery: 1970s Protest, Nationalism, and Anti-Racism at the Art Gallery of Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article details research into an archival fonds at the Art Gallery of Ontario (ago) chronicling protests that took place at the institution in the 1970s. The archive, assembled by the institution’s registrar, was either lost or stolen in the late 1970s and then re-collected. The re-assembled archive captures two major actions in 1972 and 1974 that coalesced around artist-activist fear of the cultural imperialism of the United States and anger at the ago’s unwillingness to support local artists. The narrative of cultural nationalism that underlies the two actions is challenged by four decontextualized photographs of an anti-racist picket at the gallery in 1974, found in the same archive but for which no further information was discovered. The article introduces the term “settling activism” to describe a phenomenon wherein radical actions that appear to challenge the status quo might ultimately contribute to its continuance. Using the four photographs to unsettle both the original protests and the author’s own positionality as a beneficiary of past activism, the article illuminates the complex interplay between activism, institutional response, and historical memory and suggests that anti-racist action and intervention have a much longer history in the world of Canadian museums than has been remembered.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".