Name Persimmon Blackbridge | Role Writer | |
Nominations Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction Books Drawing the Line: Lesbian, Prozac Highway, Sunnybrook: A True Story with, Her Tongue on My Theor | ||
Persimmon Blackbridge (born 1951) is a Canadian writer and artist whose work focuses on feminist, lesbian, disability and mental health issues.
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Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Blackbridge moved to British Columbia with her family as a teenager, and has worked and resided in Canada ever since. Along with artists Susan Stewart and Lizard Jones, she has been a member of the Vancouver-based Kiss and Tell collective.
A portrait of Blackbridge, by her Kiss and Tell colleague Susan Stewart, is held by the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives' National Portrait Collection, in honour of her role as a significant builder of LGBT culture and history in Canada. She is also featured in the 2006 National Film Board of Canada documentary film Shameless: The Art of Disability.
Artistic career
Blackbridge's work as an artist has been in a variety of domains, including performance art, installation art, video art and sculpture. In 1991 she was the recipient of the VIVA Award for her sculptural installations.
Major Exhibitions
Doing Time was Blackbridge's 1989 exhibition at the Surrey Art Gallery, created in collaboration with ex-prison inmates Geri Ferguson, Michelle Kanashiro-Christensen, Lyn MacDonald and Bea Walkus. Incorporating twenty-five life-sized cast-paper figures of the four women, the installation also included texts written by the participants. This marked the first exhibition where Blackbridge worked with large-scale multi-media assemblage.
Still Sane was her 1984 exhibit in collaboration with Sheila Gilhooly at Women in Focus gallery. This exhibition focused on Gilhooly's experiences of being institutionalized for being a lesbian. To create this exhibition, Gilhooly and Blackbridge spent 36 months creating a sculptural and written record of Gilhooly's time incarcerated in the hospital.
Both Still Sane and Doing Time were cited in the awarding of the 1991 VIVA award to Blackbridge.
In 2016, her exhibition Constructed Identities was the first to open Tangled Art Gallery, a fully accessible gallery dedicated to art focused on disability issues.
Writing
Although predominantly a non-fiction writer, Blackbridge has also published two novels. Her novel Sunnybrook won a Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction in 1997, and her novel Prozac Highway was a shortlisted nominee for the Lambda Literary Award in 1998. She was also a frequent contributor to Rites, one of the major Canadian LGBT publications of the late 1980s.