[Summer 2025]

To All the Unnamed Women
by Érika Nimis

[EXCERPT]

The McCord Stewart Museum’s Artist­-
in-Residence program, launched in 2012, invites artists to immerse themselves in the museum’s collections, including the Notman Photographic Archives, in order to form new interpretations of them. In 2023, Karen Tam produced the immersive installation Swallowing Mountains, paying tribute to the women of Montreal’s Chinese district in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The artist and independent curator Michaëlle Sergile took a similar approach to re-evaluation of Montreal history.

In her project To All the Unnamed Women, Sergile explored the Black women’s community in Montreal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which has left almost no trace in archives and collective narratives. By conducting painstaking research in which she cross-referenced the Notman archives with those of the Union United Church, a congregation founded in 1907, Sergile uncovered the central activist role played by Black women despite their invisibilization.

[…]

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 129 – FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Michaëlle Sergile]

Érika Nimis is a photographer, historian, and publisher, specializing in the history of photography in West Africa, and a researcher affiliated with the Art History Department at UQAM. In 2020, she began a photographic project on Ukraine, the home country of her paternal grandmother.