Yaniya Lee: Writing as Witnessing

February 26, 2026

In October of 2025, writer Yaniya Lee spent a week in Edmonton at the invitation of the Mitchell Gallery. She had been asked to write about New Routes: threads across space and time, an exhibition of work by Edmonton-based artists Raneece Buddan, AJA Louden, Garfield Morgan, and Elsa Robinson. Her exhibition essay, Medicine for a Nightmare was informed by almost a year of conversations and exchanges with the exhibiting artists. While in Edmonton, Yaniya presented her recent research New Methods for Black Canadian Art HIstory in a talk at the Mitchell, and participated in a conversation about her work at the launch of her recent anthology Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art.

Across her week here, she spent time getting to know artists and the artistic community, all the while working to situate and place these Edmonton artists’ methods and approaches within larger contexts. Near the end of her visit, we sat down with her to talk about Edmonton, art history, and the act of writing about art.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Yaniya Lee (YL): If I have a conclusion based on conversations I’ve had with you, being here for a week, it’s that people are making work on their own terms, at home in their studios. But I wonder—when do people connect? It seems like a secret city where people are secretly doing their things and maybe talking about it. From my outsider perspective, there seems to be a gap. When are you having conversations? When are you sharing what you’re working on, or your ideas? I hear there is a limited amount of exhibition spaces where people can show their work, and so that doesn’t happen that often. And then people just continue to make their work. What’s missing, because it’s so siloed here, is a space where people can learn from each other, and grow from that.

Christina Battle (CB): Yeah, in some ways I feel like maybe that is due to one of the benefits of living here, which is that a lot of people have studios in their homes compared to other cities. I mean, not everyone, obviously, but I think that’s a difference, there aren’t as many collective studio spaces. People are still making things in their studios—mine’s in the basement—but it means that you don’t butt up against people to have those conversations or connections. The way that Zach and I originally met when I moved back here was because I randomly ran into an artist who I had known from years earlier at an event. We were at this academic talk and we were both sitting around the table just rolling our eyes the whole time, because it was so boring and (unnecessarily) academic. We were chatting in the hallway afterwards and she was like, Oh, I’m meeting up with this group of artists who want to meet and talk about art. It was this project that Zach and April (Dean) had started to kind of fill that gap and to bring artists together in discussion.

YL: There you go. So it does happens!

Zachary Ayotte (ZA): It was very short lived, which is one of those things that is funny to think about in hindsight. But we started in 2019, and we were losing the studio space we were using; the building has since been torn down. And I think it killed the momentum, which is also a very common thing in Edmonton. You get these blips. And it’s not just in the arts, it’s in other fields too. I was just speaking with a bunch of designers who were talking about this rhythm, where there’s just not enough of a critical mass to support a lot of these fields that aren’t the traditional professional jobs that people go into.

YL: And they die down or it’s just not happening anymore?

ZA: Yeah, it happens a lot with sort of indie or alternative spaces—they have a great couple years, and then almost kind of lose steam for whatever reason.

CB: I also wonder how much of it is seasonal. I feel like more than anywhere I’ve ever lived, Edmonton is so impacted by the change of seasons. In the summer, everyone is busy doing their own thing. You’d think that you’d see people more in the summer, but everyone’s gardening and traveling and camping and just hanging out. Then the winter is kind of hibernation. So it’s fall and spring that end up feeling active and social.

ZA: And I think because this is such a car city, and because there is such sprawl, I think people are not as prone to braving the weather.

CB: I feel like blaming it on my age, but it’s hard for me to know if it’s an age thing or a style thing.

YL: We were at the opening at the Mitchell on Thursday, I was at that performance at Latitude 53 on Friday. I don’t think it’s age. There were people of all different ages, and afterwards all of them were going home.

CB: Maybe Edmontonians are home bodies.

YL: Yeah, and they’re totally satisfied. Everybody seems very content.

CB: I think contentment is very much the vibe, but I think of it in a positive way, because—ignoring the realities of precarity and austerity that also exist here, it’s pretty easy to live as a creative person here, generally speaking. Being able to be a freelancer—I’ve never known so many people who do that as a primary gig. It’s so much more possible to live the life of an artist, where you’re in control of your schedule, you do work here and there, you have your studio, and that’s your life. And while it might be a hustle, that’s the balance that a lot of artists in other places are looking for. Actually having time in the studio is such a generous privilege to have, but it means that you’re not using your extra time in those other social ways.

YL: I think another thing to put in the pot of this conversation is: What are the measures of success? From the way we’re talking about how art practices happen in Edmonton, maybe the measure of success here is being able to make your art happily at home.

ZA: I’ve been thinking about what you were talking about at your talk yesterday,¹ about rethinking the structures within which this stuff lives, and I think part of me is like, What does it mean to be successful within a traditional art world?

YL: Get gallery representation, get shows, get money, quit your day job, have an assistant, have a studio.

ZA: And as a result, your goal is to basically make your work progressively go up in price, right?

YL: Yeah—to have a discourse around it and have people write about it.

ZA: And some of that stuff, I’m just like, Why? Why is that the goal? Why is making your work in some ways inaccessible—more inaccessible to people—the ultimate goal of art making?

CB: But also, I feel like a lot of people here have the first half of that already—having time to make work. And that’s the big thing, in a way. I mean, I think the reason why you were invited to come to Edmonton and engage with artists in the New Routes show is because of a desire for the rest.

YL: Wanting to be written about, wanting to be seen outside of this place.

CB: Because we actually don’t even see one another’s work very often, let alone having the public or outsiders see your work. I’ve benefited because I already built a lot of relationships from afar before moving back here, and so I can kind of just ride that wave—I don’t know for how long.

YL: You’re engaged and you’re seen.

CB: But otherwise, it’s not like curators and writers come here often. Last night you gave that wonderful prompt to everyone: You can all write about art. And I’ve been thinking—how could that happen here?

YL: I don’t know, people could start pitching to art journals.

CB: No, I mean more—like what you’re calling for is for writers to have a relationship with the thing or the work or the artist that they’re writing about. I feel like people have those relationships here, but there’s still such a distance. It would be hard for me to see or to imagine a world where there’s critical writing about artists in Edmonton from artists in Edmonton.

ZA: When you say critical, do you mean negative?

CB: I don’t mean negative, I mean critical.

YL: Like analytical.

CB: What I think artists actually want to hear is—this is working and here’s why I think so. Take the studio visit as an example, where there is that space for critique. And I don’t know that there’s a vibe for critique here.

ZA: I have a friend who really wanted to write this piece about Edmonton saying, maybe we support things too quickly here, and that maybe it actually hurts a lot of creative industries to say Ooooh the second somebody starts a jewelry line or something. His thinking was that maybe if we were a little more discerning it would actually encourage people to take one more step towards getting better. I think that is kind of what you’re talking about.

CB: I think Edmonton does have a real entrepreneurial spirit and it’s hard to be like, Nah, you shouldn’t do that. Everybody’s up for it, and wants it. But I feel like an outsider perspective is also really helpful. So maybe what that relationship looks like is someone like you coming here and spending time and getting to know people.

“I want to ask new questions, tell different stories, practice care, and refuse complicity. If we achieve critical mass, we will cause a shift, just by doing our own, regular work.”²

YL: Why don’t they have an art writing class at the University? Or a series of workshops? And encourage people to be publishing those things to start this conversation of witnessing, of public witnessing of each other, so there can be a conversation around a context for the kinds of practices that are here.

ZA: Especially because in order to write about something, you have to first think about it. And so it encourages people to look at something and consider what they think about it, and what they are experiencing in relation to a work. And I think some people do that when they look at artwork, but I don’t think everybody does, and I think part of that is that I don’t know that we necessarily teach people how to have a relationship to art or to trust the relationship they are having. I think giving everybody a voice to say, Your response to this is valid regardless of what it is. I was thinking a lot about something you wrote that I really loved. It came up last night, but it’s also in the book, this question of: How do we create structures that are ethical and care based? I think part of that is this inclusion of perspective. If you acknowledge that a piece of work can be experienced in 360 degrees, then each one of those ways of looking at it is legitimate. That it seems to some degree, that the only ethical way to think about that work is to think about all 360 degrees of how to look at it.

YL: And it’s very interesting. You will want to read all those reviews that each have a different take and that allow you to see the work in this different way. It’s more interesting.

ZA: Yeah, it’s interesting too. I was thinking about art history taking this perspective at a time when hopefully history itself is also doing this right. I was thinking about things like the 1619 project, and alternative narratives to how we have recorded the dominant singular voice of history itself.³ Art history and history both do this, right? History does the exact same thing in terms of saying,

YL: This is the perspective.

ZA: Yeah, which ignores so many individual stories and individual perspectives.

YL: Because they got to tell one big main story—the heroes, the victors, and the losers.

ZA: Right? Linear, not the constellation.⁴

YL: It’s uncomplicated. The more I’ve gotten interested in art history, as opposed to art criticism or art writing, it seems like it is about method and how we do things—the idea that if we can’t directly change the discipline, we can change the strategies that we use within it, and then that will lead to change within the discipline. It’s how we do art history that has to change, not history itself. We can try different ways, like the 1619 project, doing interviews, or changing the starting point. What can happen when we move things just ever so slightly?

CB: And I think talking about things in relation to other things too, like thinking about art history, I’m just having flashbacks to defending my dissertation. I had to give a public talk where everyone was there, not just my committee, and someone from the Art History Department was questioning why I wasn’t looking back at a particular legacy of art history in relation to the work that I was doing—the legacy that he wanted, or the legacy that he knew. And I was like, Yeah, I just don’t care about that actually.

YL: What happened? Did you pass?

CB: Yeah! haha! But it was this moment where I was like, Right, you’re an art historian. Even the idea of thinking back—which I am all for—but thinking back in that particular way just wasn’t something I really related to.

YL: I like what you’re saying. It suggests we can recontextualize the discourses and transform how we make art history by putting it in different conversations or relationships historically.

CB: Yeah, historically or even not. I think historically is interesting to me if you’re doing it in that expanded way, but it feels like I’m allergic to it if I have to speak in relation to a particular canon.

YL: We can stretch the breadth of what, and how, we understand.

ZA: Which I think challenges this system a little bit, or that traditional structure, which makes me think about your tactics essay a little bit—which I’ve loved so much. Divya Mehra’s use of the white text on the white wall is so brilliant and hilarious, but it’s also challenging that structure from within the structure, which is so hard to do. I think recontextualizing the way you think about history in that way is also drawing attention to that structure, and as a result, kind of pushing against it in a nice way.

YL: Maybe the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house…

CB: This is also why I love that you include so many interviews in the book too, because I feel like your privileging the conversational and putting it in relation to critical texts changes the way that I think and feel about some of those histories as well. The interview is such a profound form for getting to know some of these relationships and the ways that artists think about their work, which often might not be at all how we thought that they thought about it or who they’re looking to or who their mentors are or what they’re interested in.

YL: Or curators. You don’t often hear from curators. They write their text, and they do this invisible behind the scenes labour. But you don’t often hear where they were going, what they were doing, or what it meant.

CB: I was thinking maybe this is also because things have changed a lot since—basically 2020 I guess—where I do feel like this focus on interviewing as a record or looking back and correcting the histories or the records by inserting those voices who were omitted. It’s interesting how that tends to be through recording conversational interviews too. It’s not often as privileged in arts writing. The traditional approach to writing about art is to describe the artwork without the personal perspective of the writer or how that artwork actually relates and changes the way they move around it, or think about it, or how it affects their lives. And I feel like the form of the interview helps do that. I mean, we’re doing it right now. It’s impossible to not go off on tangents in a conversation. And those tangents are actually what I think is the most interesting thing about art making.

YL: Yeah, those multiple overlapping contexts.

ZA: You’re making me think too about one of the things you talked about yesterday—about artists not having to have the language to talk about what their work is about and letting that come from other people. But then we have this position where there are other people who do it so authoritatively and so singularly that it frames work in a very specific way.

YL: It doesn’t do it justice.

ZA: Conversation allows two people to work it out together in a way.

YL: Yeah, and it allows the work to have an effect. That’s what you want, for the work to generate a conversation. At least I think so, I hope so. For it to put ideas out there that are prompts or provocations.

ZA: Somebody said to me recently that artists are always making work to pose arguments, and I just don’t think about art that way. I think about it more than anything as asking a question.

YL: And there’s a difference between asking questions and posing arguments.

ZA: I guess I mean this broadly, but I think the works that I relate the most to or that stick with me are the ones that haunt me. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a negative way, but the ones that take up residence in your brain somewhere and are like, Oh, I’m not done with you yet. That’s the stuff that I’m the most interested in. And it’s not always arguments that do that to me. It’s more often a question that I can’t easily answer.

CB: I feel like— I mean, who knows how all artists feel—but I would be very shocked to think that artists make work to set up an argument or prove an argument. I feel like artists are trying to work through questions, but they might not even necessarily know what the questions are. When they finish, they still might not know what the question was exactly or whether they answered it.

ZA: Especially in a way that you could articulate in language.

CB: Yeah, and I mean, this is why we look to writers to help us put it into language or to help add that context. But then, if your work is just described in a way that is devoid of any relationship or conversation or real understanding, it’s sort of like: You didn’t even really help me to figure it out! I remember when I started making work, and learned you have to write a description for your work, I was like, What do I write? I don’t know. And a friend said something like, Oh, you don’t have to write much. It’s up to the curators and the writers to write more about it. And I loved that idea, so from the start all of my descriptions for early films are basically one abstract line of poetry. Because I was like, Okay, great, other people will write about it. And then I kind of realized, Oh, that doesn’t actually happen. Because when they do, they also have nothing to go on.

ZA: Yeah, I was listening to an interview with a book critic whose work I really love, and she was asked about when she has to write about something that she doesn’t like. She said, You know, I’ll often stage that in the work. I’ll argue with myself in the writing, so that it’s clear that I’m uncertain or that I’m butting up against something both in the work and potentially in myself. I find that stuff so interesting, in part because it is about watching somebody think—and watching somebody think about work. I think that’s more instructive than somebody telling you what something is about.

YL: Yeah, you mean the critic or the artists themselves?

ZA: The critic. One of the things I love to read is watching somebody try and think on the page and try and solve something or try to think through something. I think so much of the art writing that I respond to is from a first person perspective, trying to understand work and understand their relationship to it.

I guess I think of art writing as a conversation with artists through their artworks. They make the artwork. You’re a writer, you’re working with language, and then you’re like, This is what I think I see and what I think is happening. I may not be right, but here’s my proposition.

CB: There are a couple things I wanted to ask you about, and I think one of them is about this idea of needing more writing, because you’ve mentioned that before, even when we were in conversation years ago, you made that comment. I would love to hear more about that.

YL: For the reasons that we’ve been talking about, I don’t think that the responsibility should be on artists to explain their work. I would love this idealized world in which artists are working with their materials. They’re asking their questions, making arguments, whatever they’re doing, they are engaged in their practice and trying to work out making, and that’s what they put out into the world. They’re communicating, thinking, feeling, being, through the work. And the work is what is there, its material. And then that’s when a writer can come in, or that’s when an audience or a viewer gets to interact with the work, experiencing whatever it brings up for them. Less of an onus on artists to explain everything. I think good art works on its own, and that’s hopefully what an artist can achieve—to make something that stands on its own.

And then in terms of more writing, I think there are different roles in this universe of art making. And yes, viewers—you want to make art, and people will take it in and it’ll shift something that way. But thinking in an ugly, practical way, about the art world and this political economy, I think there are roles. We’ve got curators, we’ve got directors, we’ve got artists, dealers. If you’re putting art in a political economy, I think that writing about art should have a space in that economy. We’re not going to pretend that that political economy doesn’t exist. We have to have a diversity and an intense variety of perspectives looking at that art and leaving a trace of their impressions of it so that it can be taken up by the dealers, the art historians, by whoever else. I guess I think of art writing as a conversation with artists through their artworks. They make the artwork. You’re a writer, you’re working with language, and then you’re like, This is what I think I see and what I think is happening. I may not be right, but here’s my proposition.

And then we just need more of that so there can be all different perspectives on how a work can be taken up, because when there are just a few gatekeepers, which is kind of how it works now, you’ve got a few editors and writers who have access, or feel like they are allowed to write, or can have opinions. I think art writing is witnessing. It’s allowing the work to be alive and to have a kind of legacy. And you want that, you want the documentation. You want to know what happened 40 years ago or 50 years ago or 70. I am thinking of the present, but also of how we give life to these artworks. And it wouldn’t be enough for just me to write about an artwork. It would be really great to have 17 people write about an artist’s career.

ZA: When you talk about giving life to it, I think some of the singular art historian perspectives are not life giving, right? It’s very static.

YL: They work with what they’ve got a lot of time. Which is why we need more writing, and a diversity of perspectives on what an artwork means.

CB: I keep thinking too about how many artworks there are out there—or how many artists there are and how few writers there are writing about it all. I love this idea that you were just sharing, and that you mentioned earlier, of having multiple writers write about one work. And I’m just trying to imagine that, because I feel like there is an imbalance, and I think it’s partly by design too—and by design I guess I mean funding, but also the way that academic institutions train artists in maybe the last 15-20 years in this country. I was thinking last night about how, you know, every class that I’ve ever taught, and I’m not alone, I’ve made artists write about shows and the things they see and engage with, they’re constantly forced to write stuff, because we see it as being an important part of learning about how you function as an artist and how you make work in dialogue with others out in the world. And yet for the most part, when artists leave institutions, they might keep making art, but they very rarely keep writing about art. It’s almost like a de-privileging happens. And maybe that’s because we don’t have a national magazine anymore, we don’t have the outlets for it. But I think it’s also that exhibition spaces—although they will commission writing about an artwork—they don’t seem to be invested in art writing so much anymore. I feel like it’s one of those budget lines that quickly gets cut when they don’t have the money. I get why there’s a privileging of artists, exhibition space, and opportunities, but what’s the opportunity of showing work if no one ever is going to write about it?

ZA: It’s an ecosystem, right? Having one without the other feels incomplete.

YL: I agree. I also think this idea of having more eyes on it, more witnessing, means that some things will get seen and talked about more than others. And that’s ok, but that doesn’t work if nothing’s getting written about. It works if there’s this kind of ongoing conversation about artworks that then creates a context and a story. Not all art achieves what the maker sets out to do. Some art is better than other art, right? We find that out through understanding it in context. It doesn’t float or sink on its own.

ZA: I think understanding where something isn’t working, when something doesn’t click, but that you can see what they’re going for, is valuable. I think understanding the gap between those two things as a viewer is really useful.

YL: That used to be my big thing as an art writer, to try and understand a work on its own terms, and to be careful not to impose. What was the artist trying to achieve? How did they meet that goal, or miss it? That’s a hard thing, but at least you’re talking about the work on its own terms.

CB: Okay, here’s another thing that I love and wanted to ask you about. This is from the essay about Dionne Brand’s novel “Theory.” First this prompt:

“What I had wondered was, does theory get you closer to or farther away from the thing you are looking at?”

And then it ends,

“I no longer want to just look with my mind with theory. There has to be something else. As I read the novel, I thought about different ways of looking. There’s something about love there. I want to let love reshape my ethics and aesthetics, that has shaped how I see. I want to get to a somatic way of seeing. I want to see with my whole entire body. And I think the key to doing that is to never let theory dampen love.”

Reading that, I feel like this is behind the conversations we’ve been having around what the COI publication can be—really thinking about, How does art make us feel? How do we love it? How do we respond?

ZA: It’s interesting that “art magazine” doesn’t mean that. It comes with baggage that suggests that those approaches are not intellectual.

YL: It’s strategic. It’s calculating.

ZA: Which, again, makes me think about what art writing that was funny would look like, or that was playful, and that played with form. Especially if it’s responding to work where that makes sense, where the work itself is funny.

YL: I think there can be something vulnerable in the difficulty of art—when writers or critics write from how things feel. Because those feelings can be uncomfortable, and maybe you don’t have a language for them. And artwork, some good artwork, does that. I’ve had that experience. It doesn’t give you answers; and it may take weeks to process, and that’s fantastic.

ZA: That makes me think about deadlines too—the way that deadlines push people to come up with a conclusive answer, sometimes long before you actually have it. Especially if it is something in your body that you have to translate and you’re like, This is gonna sit here for a while, and I’m not gonna know what it means until it happens organically. You can’t force it.

Yaniya Lee is the author of Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art (2024, figure ground/Art Metropole) and Buseje Bailey: Reasons Why We Have to Disappear Every Once in a While, A Black Art History Project (2024, Artexte).

In 2025, Lee received her PhD in Gender Studies from Queen’s University for her portfolio project “Black Art Study: Methods and Methodologies for a Black Studies Approach to Canadian Art History.” Among the projects she developed are the Black Canadian Art History Scholarship Database (blackartstudy.ca) and Doing the Work: Selected Syllabi (greyzonepedagogies.com).

She has published in journals and magazines including Racar: Canadian Art Review, C Magazine, Flash Art, Montez Press, and Asia Art Archive. In 2020 she co-edited a special issue of Canadian Art magazine on black artists and black art histories.

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Footnotes:

1
On September 20, 2025, Magpie Books in Edmonton hosted a book launch with Yaniya in conversation with Christina.
2
Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art, Yaniya Lee, 2024, pg. 71 (figure ground/Art Metropole).
3
The 1619 project is a long-form, ongoing initiative by the New York Times Magazine that takes a critical approach to the traditionally revered figures and events of American History—especially by centring slavery and its ongoing legacy.
4
See Yaniya’s 2025 project: Black Art Study — a Black Canadian Art History Scholarship Database.