May 24, 2025 - Empathy practices

Panel with eunice bélidor, Annie Wong, Raven Spiratos & Avalon Mott

Date: May 24
Time: 2-3:30 pm
Language: English
Places available: 30

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Join artists and curators Annie Wong, Avalon Mott, Raven Spiratos, and eunice bélidor for an open conversation about the role of empathy in curatorial practice today. Together, they’ll explore how curators and artists can work with care to create spaces that invite curiosity, connection, and deeper engagement with art.

Rather than treating the gallery as a neutral space, the panel considers how exhibitions can reflect the values of the communities they serve. Through storytelling, reflection, and personal insight, the speakers will share how empathy shapes their curatorial approaches—whether by building trust with artists, acknowledging the emotional weight of certain works, or slowing down to create room for dialogue and understanding.

This conversation will explore how curatorial work can respond to social context and lived experience, offering practical strategies for creating exhibitions that amplify underrepresented voices and foster belonging. The panelists will share challenges and possibilities they've encountered in their own practices, inviting us to think critically about the ethics of care in exhibition-making.

Together, we’ll consider how galleries might become more than sites of display—how they might serve as spaces of connection, mutual respect, and shared meaning.

Born in Montreal, eunice bélidor is a curator, author and researcher. Her curatorial practice addresses epistolary writing as a vector of affective archives in curatorial research. She holds an MA in Art History and Visual Culture and a Graduate Diploma in Curatorial Studies from York University (Toronto). Her projects have been presented at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Galerie de l’UQAM and at articule. Her writing has been included in the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, esse arts + opinions, Espace, and Vie des Arts. In 2018, she received the TD Bank Group Awards for Emerging Curator of Contemporary Canadian Art from the Hnatsyshyn Foundation

Avalon Mott is a curator and arts administrator originally from Vancouver, now calling Tkaronto/Toronto home. She holds a BFA in photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and an MFA in Criticism + Curatorial Practice from OCAD University as the recipient of the Presidential Scholarship and Ontario Graduate Scholarship. Mott was a founding member and co-director of FIELD Contemporary (Vancouver), and has curated for numerous galleries and festivals in British Columbia and Ontario. Alongside her current position as Director at Xpace Cultural Centre (Toronto), she is a contributing member of The Plumb (Toronto). Her curatorial practice engages the curatorial methodology of exhibitionary affect, and examines how it can heighten moments of feeling in the gallery space through prioritizing individual relational experiences of the works on display.

Raven Spiratos lives between Tiohtià:ke / Montreal and Tkaranto / Toronto. She holds a Master’s of Art History and Communications Studies from McGill University, supervised by Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson (SSHRC-funded). Her graduate research retrieved Black stories and textual portraits from various sources: the newspaper archives of Canadian fugitive slave advertisements, Canadian currency (Viola Desmond on the 10$ bill) and contemporary art (Wanted series by Camille Turner and Camal Pirbhai) through the lenses of reading against the grain, reparative aesthetics, and decolonial art historical methodologies. She is currently an independent Curator.

Annie Wong is an artist, writer, community organizer and curator. Wong’s practice is heavily collaborative and often engages communities to produce a collective form of carework as the basis for artistic production, allyship building, and spiritualism. She has widely exhibited across North America and has published in various art and poetry magazines. She was formerly the inaugural Curator of Programming and Public Engagement at Gallery TPW; a member of Friends of Chinatown Toronto; and currently serves on the board of Toronto Chinatown Land Trust.