Stanley Février: Performing the Invisible

Abstract:This article examines how the Québécois artist Stanley Février approached the absence of BIPOC artists exhibited and collected at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) with three performative projects that successfully forced the institution to revisit its collecting and exhibiting practices. In An Invisible Minority (2018), the artist infiltrated the MAC as a security guard after assessing that this was the only culturally diverse body of employees in the museum. Février then showed an installation at ARTEXTE composed of statistics, comparative charts, and other quantitative data points that highlighted the lack of representation in Montreal galleries and museums. It’s Happening Now (2019) was a guerrilla action organized with other collaborators where performers clad in black skinsuits dragged fifty years of annual reports by the MAC tied to their ankles before shredding them in the museum’s main lobby. In conjunction with these project, MAC-I was created as an alternate, unsanctioned portal to the MAC official website to promote the practices of non-white Québécois and Canadian artists. While Février’s figurative sculptural work has garnered attention, with recent acquisitions by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, his more immaterial, institutionally critical, performative works remain undervalued and framed as ‘activism’ rather than their own aesthetic events.