James MacSwain, multidisciplinary artist and pillar of Nova Scotia's cultural community, died September 6 at the age of 80, at home, surrounded by friends. The NSCAD community mourns this prolific artist, who worked in performance art, animation, film, bookmaking, and sculpture.
From Amherst, Nova Scotia, MacSwain completed his BFA across the border at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, but he spent most of his life in Halifax. He taught at NSCAD for 40 years, inspiring and mentoring countless students and colleagues.
Assistant Professor of Media Arts Becka Barker, who teaches animation at NSCAD, was his student and his friend.
"It's funny to say Jim was my teacher at NSCAD first, because although that's true, it went so far beyond that. He was my neighbour in the north end, my peer in the experimental animation scene, and later, my co-worker at the Centre for Art Tapes (CFAT)."
"A little more than 20 years ago, when we worked together at CFAT, on a day I was super frustrated with the grind, I straight-up asked Jim what the secret was. How could I keep it up, trying to make a life in the arts here in this small city I loved? How did he do it? And Jim had no real answer for me! He kinda just shrugged and said, "you just keep doing it."
Celebrating him with friends in his passing a few days ago, Barker was struck by that memory.
"His life imitated art, not the other way around. His animations, his collages, and his performances it's all in motion, it's all synthesis. It's all time. And that's how he mentored me: the accumulation of moments of small, almost imperceptible change, and in what he bound together."
Many local artists have similar stories. He was hugely influential in the development of Halifax's artistic scene. Among his many accomplishments, he co-founded both the Atlantic Filmmaker's Cooperative and the Centre for Art Tapes, two of Halifax's now-essential artist-run centres.
Social and community activism were core to his work. Growing up gay in Nova Scotia at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence, queer culture, the gay rights movement, and the AIDS crisis were frequent themes of his work. He also had a wicked sense of humour, which he frequently directed not only at the vicissitudes of life, but also the hypocrisies embedded in Nova Scotian society.
In 2011, he was awarded the Portia White Prize, Nova Scotia's highest cultural honour. Saint Mary's University Art Gallery curator Robin Metcalfe called him Halifax's Cocteau' in a 2015 C Magazine article.
In 2023, Part-time Professor Eryn Foster and filmmaker Sue Johnson released a loving tribute to MacSwain, a documentary entitled Celestial Queer. Foster and Johnson began filming him in 2014 speaking to him at home, while travelling, making art, as well as including excerpts from his work and archival photos from his life.
"He's such an iconic person. His work is so unique," says Foster who was his friend, and who worked with him at the Centre for Art Tapes and the Eye Level Gallery.
"I teach a class called Professional Practices [at NSCAD] and one of the ways I teach it is to provide models of how to live as an artist," said Foster in 2023, at the time of the film's release. "I often talk about Jim as an example of someone who's found really experimental and alternative ways to exist on this earth, whether it's through living in a communal house or working in an incredibly interdisciplinary way. Jim being a model for all the possibilities, all of the things that NSCAD attempts to and wants to represent as an institution. He was there teaching these things; I think even just through his existence, he offers the rest of us a model for what life can look like as an artist."
He will be sorely missed by his friends and colleagues in NSCAD community, and by Nova Scotia's artistic community as whole.
