Generating Archives of Community Care with Artists’ Tarot Decks

This essay discusses three artists’ tarot decks from a collection displayed at the Archives of Ontario from October 28, 2024 to March 31, 2025. These tarot decks are Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan’s Winnipeg Tarot Co. Tarot Deck (2010), Ron Ewenin-Wapemoose’s Treaty 4 Tarot (2023), and Mimi Khúc’s The Asian American Tarot (first created in 2016 with expansions in 2024). It is notable that these creators are members of LGBTQ+, Indigenous, and Diasporic Asian communities respectively—all of which have historically been excluded or misrepresented in institutional archives. The paper argues that each of these decks are valuable pieces of cultural ephemera that form community archives to fill archival silences.