Curating Intimacies: The Ace Truelove Collection and Decolonial Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this doctoral project, written on unceded Algonquin territory in Ottawa, Ontario, I share the process of co-curating, with Barry Ace and Earl Truelove the Ace Truelove Collection (ATC) of Indigenous and white settler art and ephemera. I consider what we may learn about Indigenous/white settler relations in Canada through the arts. “Curating Intimacies” is a research-creation doctoral project wherein I develop “engaged decolonial practice” through stories of artmaking and collecting Indigenous and non-Indigenous art and ephemera over thirty years. I offer an analysis of the ATC with results of our curatorial collective efforts to date, contextualized in Art History, Canadian studies, Indigenous Art History, Curatorial studies, Settler studies, and Indigenous sovereignty, and organizational studies across the fields of Anthropology, and Indigenous pedagogy, visiting, and sovereignty. I consider how relationships among people contribute to decolonial curatorial practices in curating through relationality, decolonial methodologies, and responsibility. I argue that the Ace Truelove Collection is already decolonial – the intention of Barry Ace (Anishinaabe, Odawa) and Earl Truelove (white settler) in acquiring artworks and ephemera is founded in the importance of relationships with artists, dealers, and scholars, and is integrated in the rationale for acquiring most works in the collection. As such, the collection represents a diversity of artists, styles, regions, and art markets. With a curatorial focus on the relationships that are the result of our collaboration, Barry, Earl, and I emphasize relations that are not rooted in binaries of white settler / Indigenous relations or art history. The artworks and the relationships among the artists and collectors reflected in the collection are pivot points upon which the interdisciplinarity of this doctoral project hinges. The artwork and ephemera in the collection reflect critical perspectives on art history, settler colonialism, and representation. The collaborative curatorial process, when contrasted with the capacities of large art galleries, can help us see how such relationships can change how we exhibit art and ephemera to provide a decolonial representation of complex histories of art in Canada.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.049 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".