Aunties | Anti treats the aunty not as a fixed family role, but as a relational practice: guidance, kinship, chosen family, protection, humour, accountability, memory, and resistance.
Installed at Mount Royal University on March 7, 2025, in time for International Women’s Day, the exhibition brought together works by MRU students Alaskan Manywounds and Avery Follett with work by the Jellybean Collective: Jaime Waucaush-Warn, Karen Pheasant-Neganigwane, Gloria Pérez-Rivera, and Celeste Pang.
The project’s framing moves across Indigenous, Latin American, queer, and chosen-family contexts. Rather than reducing “aunty” to genealogy, it asks what kinds of responsibility, counsel, refuge, knowledge, and collective memory become possible when kinship is understood through relationship.
Being an aunty is an honour, and a responsibility.Aunties | Anti project statement
Big aunty energy
The exhibition describes “big aunty energy” as both warmth and insistence: a demand to enter stories and public spaces from which Indigenous women, racialized people, and queer people have historically been excluded. In that sense, the “Anti” in the project is not separation from relation but a politics made through it — anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive.
Knowledge + counsel
Aunties are approached as carriers of tradition, mentors, confidantes, and people to turn toward — a role grounded in relationship as much as lineage.
Family + solidarity
The exhibition considers how multigenerational family life can be sustained through women’s practical authority, complicity, care, stories, and everyday support.
Chosen family
Within 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, aunty-like relations can name mentorship, intergenerational belonging, accompaniment, and care beyond biological family.
From relation to public space
The Jellybean Collective emerged from conversations among colleagues who wanted to work creatively together and to make an exhibition that could hold gender equality, cultural difference, artistic practice, and solidarity in the same public space. The exhibition’s March 7 installation transformed a highly trafficked part of MRU into a site of family archive, student work, visual storytelling, and collective recognition.
