Michaëlle Sergile

Founded in 1902, the Coloured Women’s Club brought together several Black women working in various fields to meet the needs of newly immigrated families.

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. 

About the artist

Michaëlle Sergile is an artist and independent curator working mainly on archives including texts and works from the postcolonial period from 1950 to today. Her artistic work aims to understand and rewrite the history of Black communities, and more specifically of women, or communities living in diverse intersections, through weaving. Often perceived as a medium of craftsmanship and categorized as feminine, the artist uses the lexicon of weaving to question the relationships of gender and race.

She has recently exhibited at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art de Joliette and the Off Biennale de Dakar. Her name was also on the long list of the prestigious Sobey Award for the Arts in 2022. In 2023, she won Visual Artist of the Year at the Gala Dynastie and began a residency at the Darling Foundry.

Artist-in-residence program

The Artist-in-Residence program invites artists to take a critical and conceptual look at the McCord Stewart Museum’s collection, reflecting on the connections between their artistic practice and the objects and stories they uncover during their research. As part of this research-oriented creative activity, artists are encouraged to communicate their own interpretation of the collection and propose new ways of interpreting history in its many forms.