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The Board of Directors of UNIT/PITT Society of Art and Critical Awareness will be holding a virtual Annual General Meeting on Wednesday, July 8, 2020 at 6:30 pm PST.
To RSVP, email info@unitpitt.ca by 12 pm PST on Wednesday, July 8. Please specify if you prefer video or telephone conferencing so that we can deliver the correct information and relevant documents in advance.
UNIT/PITT Society for Art and Critical Awareness is a charitable non-profit artist-run organization that supports art and critical awareness by offering the tools, space, resources, and mentorship for emerging artists and community members to engage in experimental creative work that advances a more expansive, inclusive reality for art and cultural production. We are currently located at 8 East Pender Street, also known as 8EAST.
UNIT/PITT has a working board that meets bimonthly. Board members support the Executive Director; engage in ongoing strategic planning; and participate on various working committees including programming, human resources, fundraising, and archives.
We are looking to fill a limited number of vacancies on the Board of Directors, and we are also looking for community members to volunteer on our working committees. In addition to providing invaluable assistance to the organization, serving as a committee member is an excellent way of determining if board involvement interests you in the future.
We are especially seeking board and committee members with any of the following skill sets and/or knowledge-base: design, fundraising, publishing, public art, disability art, community engagement, non-profit governance, charitable law, accounting, library studies.
U/P is committed to providing leadership positions to BIPOC, trans, Two-Spirit, queer and disabled people, and people with lived experiences of poverty. We prioritize applications from self-identified members of communities that have experienced marginalization.
To apply, please send a CV and brief letter of intent as a single PDF to governance@unitpitt.ca by Friday, July 3. Applicants will be contacted before July 7, and nominees will be asked to attend U/P’s virtual Annual General Meeting on Wednesday, July 8 at 6:30pm.
As the Board and Staff of UNIT/PITT Society for Art and Critical Awareness, we unequivocally support Black, Indigenous and people of colour communities — including trans, Two-Spirit, queer and disabled people — in demanding justice for white supremacy-driven murders, and defunding police.
U/P operates on stolen land belonging to the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, known colonially as Vancouver. The organization was founded as Helen Pitt Gallery in 1975 by the Student Society of what is now Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and merged with Unit 306 Society for the Democratization of the Arts in 1981. U/P has operated in and around the neighbourhoods of Gastown, Downtown Eastside and Chinatown, and is currently located at 8 East Pender Street, within view of the Georgia Street viaduct that displaced the Black community of Hogan’s Alley beginning in the late 1960s.
U/P’s leadership is predominantly white-led. We recognize the urgency of interrogating the whiteness of our organization, particularly as we strive to offer meaningful and fairly compensated opportunities to Black, Indigenous, people of colour, trans, Two-Spirit, queer and disabled artists and writers in our neighbourhood. As the beneficiaries of municipal, provincial and federal funding, colonial funding models that have historically favoured white-led institutions, we are implicated in systemic racism. As an artist-run organization that calls itself a “Society for Art and Critical Awareness,” we have the responsibility to do better.
We would like to reaffirm our commitment to amplify and support the work of locally-based and emerging Black, Indigenous, people of colour, trans, Two-Spirit, queer and disabled artists and writers, and will additionally carry out the following actions in this program year:
Over the last three weeks, Staff and Board have begun this work. In 2021, U/P will issue a public statement that follows up on the progress of these actions. Our ongoing commitment to anti-racism will be published to our website under “About,” here.
As witnesses of over policing and the policing of homelessness in the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown neighbourhoods where we operate, we call upon the City of Vancouver’s Mayor and Council to exercise more authority to cut funding to the Vancouver Police Department, and redistribute those funds to critical social services and social housing. In his capacity as Chair of the Vancouver Police Board, we call upon Mayor Kennedy Stewart to show leadership in proposing and implementing a VPD minimum budget reduction of $152 million in accordance with the COV operating budget shortfall projections due to COVID-19. Additionally, we ask that the Mayor use his position to demand that the charges brought against seven individuals arrested at the Hogan’s Alley Revival Viaduct Occupation on Monday, June 15, 2020 be dropped immediately.
In crafting this statement with care, we recognized that the artists and writers that we work with deserved a quicker institutional response. We apologize to members of our community that were hurt by our public absence in this important conversation about policing, racism and white supremacy, and complicity in the arts.
Over the last year, U/P has collaborated with groups that are actively fundraising, and we encourage our members to support the following initiatives:
AFRO VAN CONNECT, organizers of The Black Market at 8EAST, empower the voices of African Descent youth through conversation, collaboration, creation and performance. They are hosting the “Black Space Symposium Virtual” July 23-25 to start a new conversation about the importance of Black Spaces. They also recently launched The Legacy Growers Collective (LGC), an initiative for Afro-Indigenous centred farming and gardening, outdoor education, and food security. To learn more and donate, visit http://www.afrovanconnect.com/
Wrong Wave 7 (Nov 19-21, 2019) was curated by Betty Mulat and Zam Zam of NUZI COLLECTIVE, a music collective dedicated to providing a platform for Black womxn, Indigenous womxn, queer WOC, and trans* folks within the Vancouver electronic music scene. NuZi strives to strengthen and promote Black culture by nurturing spaces for expression, encouragement, safety and togetherness. Follow @nuzicollective on Instagram, and visit nuzi.ca to learn more.
VANCOUVER BLACK THERAPY & ADVOCACY FUND, created by Betty Mulat, is a not-for-profit initiative that aims to raise funds to make mental health support more accessible to Black community members in the Lower Mainland. Donate: https://www.gofundme.com/f/vancouver-black-therapy-amp-advocacy-fund
Other local organizations to support:
Black Art Gastown
Black Arts Vancouver
Black Lives Matter Vancouver
Black Women Connect Vancouver
Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP)
Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre
DTES Response
Hogan’s Alley Society
Pivot Legal Society
WISH Drop-in Centre
Yarrow Society
