Gathering in Montreal for the annual UAAC conference is always met with enthusiasm where UAAC attendees happily and eagerly navigate a busy conference schedule and a bustling city centre with plentiful art, culture and food offerings.

This year’s conference is generously hosted by Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts and the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. At our opening reception on Tuesday October 13th at 5 pm we’ll be celebrating this year’s award winners: Book, Teaching, Lifetime Achievement, Recognition, and EDIA. Please join us for the opening remarks and awards. Our keynote this year is Montreal-based artist Abbas Akhavan, whose work Entre chien et loup currently represents Canada at the Venice Biennale. He joins Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre, Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Curator of Quebec and Canadian Contemporary Art at the Musée des beaux-arts Montreal for a conversation about his practice. This event is Wednesday October 14th at 6 pm. Registration is free but required: RSVP: https://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/activities/special-guest-abbas-akhavan/

Montreal is one of the largest conferences of late with seventy-seven sessions over three days, with one satellite session at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. 300 papers are listed across those sessions, with more than 378 unique chairs, co-chairs and presenters. Additionally, the Design, Research-Creation, and Photography caucuses offer dedicated time and space for members to gather together to discuss issues and innovations in their fields. Our publishers’ hall has more than 10 presses in attendance and will support our members book launches.

While the schedule, which extends over three days, is packed, UAAC continues to invite ways for our membership to ‘gather otherwise’ including the return of Mothership. Rachelle Sabourin, Susan Cahil, Erin Morton and Kristy Holmes have created a community-based space throughout the duration of the conference that engenders “collective practices of care” and seeks to create “moments of connection built through shared care and joy”. In this “educational undergrowth” institutional and colonial spaces are de-centered prioritizing embodied, relational, and nourishing acts of community-building. As the session co-chairs explain in their abstract: “we invite participants to imagine and inhabit more equitable, sustainable, and collectively sustaining forms of academic life. All are welcome aboard Mothership”. Mothership pushes us to attend carefully to queer, decolonial, abolitionist, and bewildering practices that flourish in the weedy undergrowth of academia. Other alternative formats include: Dishing out around the kitchen table: A praxis to explore Black experiences and perspective in the Canadian art milieu co-chaired by Mélissa Andrianasolo and India-Lynn Upshaw-Ruffner. This session uses the Long Table format, inspired by Split Britches, in which a long table in the center of the room, with a microphone on each end and covered in paper, invites participants to sit at the table and contribute to the discussion. The table centers on the importance of oral histories and spaces for dialogue in Black communities in Canada; and Fierce Tenderness a workshop co-chaired by Carla Taunton and Julie Holenbach which includes experimental presentations, participatory modes of exchange, interactive creative actions. There are film screenings, performance lectures, and a robust array of panel presentations, round-table discussions, and research-creation exemplifications. It is truly remarkable the breadth and depth of Canadian art scholarship and practices!

Over the past number of year’s UAAC has strived for meaningful ways to engage in accessibility, sustainability, equity and to consider how we are emplaced. This year, the UAAC conference organizing committee was asked to not replicate the practice of inviting Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers, who are external to UAAC, to do the labour of opening the conference event. Rather, we were encouraged by Donna Goodleaf, Director, Decolonizing Curriculum and Pedagogy at Concordia, to critically interrogate our positionalities, relations to land, and to do the work of land acknowledgement from within our organization. I want to express enormous gratitude to Board member Sandra Huber, who took on the task to thoughtfully craft a UAAC response to land acknowledgement that questions our relationships with place, settler colonialism, and institutional racism. Dean Annie Gérin has graciously agreed to read this statement at the opening reception. This is merely an opening gesture and by no means replaces decolonial work on Turtle Island, nor in our respective institutions. Cree scholar and artist Kai Recollet writes about kin/dling – where relations are gathered together to spark or ignite action. It is my hope that this UAAC statement becomes one means that we might work together for a different future.

Organizing the growing UAAC conference is an enormous undertaking particularly in a time of increased financial and job insecurity within higher education. The care and commitment that shapes this year’s conference is indebted to the hardworking organizing committee from Concordia: Gabby Moser, Nicola Pezolet, Sandra Huber and PhD student Temple Marucci-Campbell. Gabby, in particular, stepped in with relatively short notice but with abundant enthusiasm to take on the work of hosting the conference. It has been a true pleasure to work with the Concordia team, and I thank them for their unwavering support and excitement. I thank Dean Annie Gérin and Concordia University, the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, and the Musée des beaux-arts Montreal for additional financial support in making this year’s conference possible. I’d like to acknowledge the Simone De Beauvoir Institute and the students in Kevin Yuen Kit Lo's graphic design class who produced our conference designs, signage and wayfinding.

UAAC is especially thankful of our superstar Executive Director Paola Aron Badin. Her energy, passion, and organizational skills are unparalleled. She makes spreadsheets and google docs look appealing UAAC’s Board of Directors are likewise a generous, creative, and supportive group of people always willing to take on extra projects, initiatives, and offer valuable perspectives. My thanks go to Alena Buis, Keith Bresnahan, Yani Kong, Soheila Esfahani, Sandra Huber, Anton Lee, Natasha Bissonauth, Tatiana Mellema, Anuradha Gobin, Rachelle Sabourin, and Erin Silver.

I am always humbled by the efforts of UAAC organizing committees, board members, and the membership at large for the ways in which we come together as artists, cultural workers, and scholars to do the work of advancing creative practice in Canada. I look forward to seeing everyone in Montreal.

For the first time in a decade, UAAC’s annual conference returns to Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, and we are thrilled to welcome you.

The 2026 annual meeting mirrors the cultural diversity and multilingual nature of the city, which is also home to a dynamic arts ecology, where artists and curators use local practices to make connections to transnational communities. The panels and events planned across campus over the next three days examine themes of opacity and refusal, sovereignty and sustainability, taking stock of the state of the field within contemporary art, art history, curatorial practice, and visual and material culture studies. In keeping with Concordia University’s history of theorizing and advancing research-creation as a method, there is also a focus on practices of repair, weaving, assemblage, drawing, hosting, re-making and re-appropriating as methods for making and sharing knowledge.

These issues are also taken up in the keynote lecture by Abbas Akhavan, currently representing Canada at the Venice Biennale, who will be in conversation with Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Curator of Quebec and Canadian Contemporary Art, Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal on Wednesday, October 14th. The second event in the “Beyond Wilderness” national series of public talks organized by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, the lecture will interrogate the human impulse to capture and contain nature, and the stakes of representing animals in contemporary art on a world stage.

Taken together, the 2026 UAAC conference events reflect the Department of Art History’s wider disciplinary commitments to decolonizing arts institutions, to fostering research into histories of Black and diasporic artists, and to centering Indigenous worldviews.

We wish everyone a generative and engaging conference!