To All the Unnamed Women – Discussion with Michaëlle Sergile

Discover Michaëlle Sergille’s artistic process. She tells us about the works she created, about the images and objects featured in the gallery.

September 10, 2024

” I realised there was a disconnect between the visual arts and craft, as if they were two things that couldn’t coexist. […] I felt that weaving itself had been sidelined.”
–Michaëlle Sergile

As part of its Artist-in-Residence program, the Museum presents the exhibition To All the Unnamed Women by artist and independent curator Michaëlle Sergile, a tribute to the lives of Black women in Montreal between the years 1870 and 1910.

Through a blend of archival sources and fiction, the exhibition chronicles the origins of the first organization in Quebec to be created by Black women, the Coloured Women’s Club of Montreal. Drawing inspiration from the notion of critical fabulation theorized by the American author Saidiya Hartman, the exhibition explores the relationship between history and archival violence.

In 1902, a group of Black women working in various fields founded the Coloured Women’s Club with the aim of helping migrant families to find housing and obtain financial assistance. When the initiative began, the names of many Black women were already missing from Montreal’s archives.

For this exhibition project, Michaëlle Sergile explores the Museum’s collections, reflecting on the social and political context in which this foundational club for Montreal’s Black communities was created, and on the women who contributed in one way or another to its creation.

Michaëlle Sergile

Michaëlle Sergile is an artist and independent curator working mainly on archives from the postcolonial period, from 1950 to today. Through her artistic work, she aims to understand and rewrite the history of Black communities, and more specifically of women, through weaving. The artist uses this technique, often perceived as a craft medium and categorized as “feminine,” to question the relationships of domination linked to gender and ethnicity.

She has recently exhibited at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art de Joliette, the Fonderie Darling and the Off Biennale in Dakar, Senegal. Her name featured on the long list for the prestigious Sobey Art Award in 2022. In 2023 she won the visual artist of the year award at the Gala Dynastie and began a residency at the Fonderie Darling.