Born: Unknown, Canada
Died: NA
Country most active: Canada
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
As with statues, efforts to address the problematic nature of these tributes often meet with backlash. In 2022, the Canadian city of Calgary commissioned Chinese-Canadian artist Annie Wong to create a site-specific public artwork addressing this very topic in James Short Park. Taken down after only four days, Wong’s installation featured seven printed banners with quotes from interviews with the local Chinatown’s community members about Short’s racist history and the city’s paltry efforts to acknowledge the historic mistreatment of its Chinese citizens. The quotes included, “James Short was a racist,” “Erasing a name in history cannot erase what was done,” and “James Short was a leader in the anti-Chinese movement.” For context, Short, a lawyer, represented Caucasian citizens of the city who wanted to prevent Chinese Calgarians from establishing Chinatown within the city centre in 1910. “Those people do not beautify any property, and in fact they tend to make a district obnoxious,” he told the Calgary Herald that year. “They have no idea of sanitation at all.” Despite the clear accuracy of Wong’s banners, and the fact that she did what she was hired to do, historical truth was deemed too controversial to be stated publicly more than 100 years later.