Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100.5 FM in the Lower Mainland.
Speaker: On the podcast today, Lauren Chisholm talks with Kika Meme about her research on the multidisciplinary artist Chloe Onari as part of the Rung Wikipedia Scholars Program.
Speaker: Rung is a Canadian multidisciplinary space for creative explorations featuring work by Indigenous, Black, and people of color artists. It started out in 1991, created by Zul Suleiman and Sherazad Jamal, and they soon launched Rung Magazine.
Speaker: Rung went into a period of dormancy after its first decade, but relaunched in 2017 and is committed to generating IPOC creative knowledge and networks. As part of that journey, Rung held Wikipedia edit-a-thon events at Surrey Art Gallery and at Center A Gallery. In 2024, Rung launched Rung Wikipedia Scholars.
Speaker: The program focuses on researching and creating Wikipedia entries about IPOC-identified artists and communities. Kika Meme is a Vancouver-based Nigerian writer, journalist, and interdisciplinary producer, and she was one of the 2025 Rung Wikipedia Scholars, and I'm so pleased that she's joining me now. Hello, Kika. Hello, Lorraine. How are you?
Speaker: I'm really good. Tell us about the Rung Wikipedia Scholars program. What does it set out to do? The main goal of the scholarship is for scholars, students, researchers around the city to essentially create accessible archives through Wikipedia of BIPOC artists, BIPOC femme artists actually, I'll be more specific, in Canada.
Speaker: And I think in the last few iterations of it, that it has mostly set out to do that and it's been doing that and I think it's really good. Now, as I understand it, Kika, its scholars are sponsored by one of six partner organizations, organizations like Center A Gallery and Black Art Center. What kinds of supports and resources are scholars offered?
Speaker: First, there's a stipend that I believe each of the partner organizations provide to support the research and the time that the scholars dedicate to this research. But there's also a space.
Speaker: So in the course of the program, we did have two programs. We had a wiki edit-a-thon at the Surrey Art Gallery where all of us came together and spent about four hours kind of just researching together, having that space to discuss, to learn, to share, and to also access Suri Arts Gallery's library was a great resource for each of us.
Speaker: We also got to talk and be in contact with staff of Wikipedia to learn a bit more about what creating a Wikipedia page entails. What does it mean to create pages like that and also like the process of creating a page? So we did also get a sneak peek into...
Speaker: I guess the back end of Wikipedia. It is famously known for like the front end of it, which is actually the pages and the information about how the whole process of actually putting those pages together is what we were privileged, I would say, to understand and learn through the program.
Speaker: Well, give us a little bit of a glimpse into that because Wikipedia has become such a valuable resource to document knowledge based on volunteer and crowdsource contributions. How does the process of submitting a new entry for publication work?
Speaker: you create a draft of all of your information with all of your references. And referencing is a very big part of the process.
Speaker: Once all of that is put together, there is a team of hundreds or thousands of editors worldwide, volunteer editors that I've learned, that pick up the draft and read and edit essentially deem it fits, it being the subject, the person, the place, or the thing, if that is notable enough for Wikipedia, and if the references are verifiable or trustworthy enough for their standards.
Speaker: And that could either, like I say, make or break your submission, because if it isn't to their standard or their guidelines, the piece probably would never go up.
Speaker: Let's turn to your research now. Why did you choose Chloe or Nari to research? I was first very interested in, I began thinking about canonical Black artists and events in the Canadian art space and art industry.
Speaker: And I stumbled upon this exhibition, Black Women, Where and Where We Enter, I believe is the name, which is recognized and known as one of the first major exhibitions exclusively of and by Black women to tour Canada.
Speaker: in 1989. And when looking at the Wikipedia page and kind of learning a bit about that exhibition, I noticed out of the 11 participating artists, seven of those who didn't have Wikipedia pages and i kind of looked at each of those seven who didn't have Wikipedia pages one by one to see why, to see what is out there about their work, about them. And Chloe was the most intriguing to me because
Speaker: she was there like online, like her name was plastered everywhere. You could get a sense of who she was and what she did, but there was still this elusiveness of how well, like you could see a lot of her involvement in different things, but the, I guess, expansive nature of her career wasn't captured or just like easily found.
Speaker: And i I believe that is what drew me into wanting to research about her and then create a Wikipedia page. Well, it's interesting because i went to the page for that exhibition that she was included in and I saw these lists of names and then they were in red and I clicked on it and it was like, there is no entry for this person. So clearly pointing out a gap in knowledge there.
Speaker: Yep. And I think the last Wikipedia editor or writer for that page did a very important job in highlighting all those people whose names are read, which is like paying it forward to the next person. Like these are the people who deserve and need to have these pages created.
Speaker: Well done on their part. Give us a glimpse into Chloe's story. She was born in Barbados, but came to Canada eventually. And she seems to have such a diverse practice from training as a nurse to being a community builder and a visual artist.
Speaker: Yes, from what I was able to find out through weeks and weeks of swimming around, she was born in Barbados, she lived in England, and after a while she came to Canada and In the midst of her moving to Canada, she got into the arts. She did have a profession in nursing and in the medical field, but then she was also very involved in arts and her arts were very multidisciplinary.
Speaker: She did stuff with indigo dye making, textile work, installation, and even outside of visual arts, she was also very prominent in the music and the jazz scene in Toronto that I've learned.
Speaker: She worked with her husband, Bill Smith, and they created, or they had this trio called Onari Productions where they hosted jazz performances around the city, which I found very interesting.
Speaker: she was also very involved in this jazz publication that Bill was also a part of Coda magazine. And you can just see there are so many threads of her presence in different parts of the city, in different parts of art history as a whole in Toronto or Ontario.
Speaker: And very famously, she was part of the Black Women When and Where We Enter exhibition, which shot her into prominence because that was a very big exhibition that began touring.
Speaker: it was in Toronto, a couple of places. It went to Ottawa, went to Victoria. Yeah. And then very beautifully, the work found its way back again. So from 1989, found new life in twenty twenty three through the work of andrea fattuna where the exhibition and the core of the exhibition was brought back to life through new exhibition titled, Practice as Ritual as Practice.
Speaker: And then from what I learned recently, she became sick very later on in her life and she passed away recently. Now, Kika, you reflect that you wrestle deeply with Wikipedia's restrictions. What were some of those restrictions that you came up against? And tell us your thoughts about that.
Speaker: Well, well, the first thing is. I would say notability. That was something that came up time and time again. Well, this person isn't notable enough. This person doesn't have enough coverage. This person doesn't have this.
Speaker: And i found it
Speaker: ironic and, again, frustrating in the sense that, well, who are you to determine notability. you know Why doesn't local impact trump this objective notion of notability, you know, just seeing from what Chloe has done.
Speaker: and I didn't even mention, she was also one of the founding members Canbia, which is the Canadian Artist Network, Black Arts in Action. And she's just been, she's been part of important points in Black Canadian art history that I i find that portion of restriction being notability suppresses.
Speaker: That's one thing. and Another thing is in reference, and I mentioned that's a very big part. They are looking for very specific types of referencing and documentation. and It has to be third party, it has to be objective, it has to be this.
Speaker: Meanwhile, the purpose of a the scholarship, and B, Wikipedia is to highlight these these archives that are not easily accessible and to make them accessible.
Speaker: So for instance, we have, or a lot of just the artists that we all looked at and myself and my cohorts, or even just like Black artists in general continue to exist on the margins. like Documentation comes in different ways.
Speaker: Many of the documentation I found on Chloe were somewhere kind of like first-hand accounts. I found like letter correspondence when she was working on the exhibition and liaising with galleries and gallery staff on contents of her work or like installation um specifications.
Speaker: And none of those things were admissible by Wikipedia. you know They had to be very specific, like, oh, it has to be like an exhibition review or it has to be in the newspaper.
Speaker: And it's like, well, a lot of these artists don't get to those points and it's not by any fault of their own. So it kind of just like keeps these artists stuck in this cycle of,
Speaker: invisibility where the main media won't cover them. And those who do the work of trying to cover them and document them are then being shut down by some of these platforms.
Speaker: Kika, these histories and stories of artists and other cultural actors, as we know, are often erased, especially when they're women, racialized, indigenous, or or otherwise marginalized. How do you hope that bringing these stories to light and documenting them on Wikipedia can have a positive impact?
Speaker: I believe it serves as a very basic and again, accessible entry points into these artists and their work for people to discover.
Speaker: If nothing else, discovery is the main point. I think people having even just a a general sense of what some of these artists do and have done and their place in I guess, art history is is important for people to then, who are further interested, want to do further deep dives into their work.
Speaker: I think visibility is a very difficult thing so far that I've noticed for BIPOC artists in this city and most specifically black artists and I'll talk for Vancouver and what I've noticed recently, it's hard to find people. It's hard to know what people have done because no one, there's no one directory. There's no one,
Speaker: I guess, resource pool that even just gives you a good sense or like a consolidated sense, an idea of what people are doing part time. So I think Wikipedia and these Wikipedia pages are really good entry points for documenting the work of emerging and emergent artists, most specifically BIPOC artists.
Speaker: Well, it's been wonderful talking to you, and I really appreciate your speaking with me today, but also for the the work that you're doing. Yeah, thank you so much. I really enjoy talking about the work and the scholarship because it is very important work. And even while doing the scholarship, I learned about many other archival and um documentation projects in Canada, particularly for BIPOC and Black artists that are doing similar work. And it's it made me realize how much of a gap there is in these documentations.
Speaker: So I'm very grateful to have been a part of it and to talk about it today. Well, I hope that I will see Chloe Oneri go from ah red to a active of hyperlink in the entry that we read.
Speaker: I hope so too. Thank you so much, Kika. All right. Thank you very much. I've been speaking with Kika Meme. She is 2025 Rung Wikipedia scholar. You can read her draft entry on Chloe Oneri as well as a reflection on that research at rung.org.
Speaker: That's R-U-N-G-H dot org. You've been listening to the Red Eye Podcast, produced by an independent media collective based in Vancouver.
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Speaker: Thanks for listening.
