At a curatorial talk, Junaid stated that the impetus for this exhibition came from John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (also on display at The Rooms). Akomfrah’s wash of water, sound, and history takes viewers through a constantly moving ocean, asking us to consider the oceanic sublime, a space of wonder and magic, violence, destruction, and death. It’s this wash of contradiction that Junaid locates in this place now called Newfoundland and Labrador: a wash of beauty, connection, and foodways, on the one hand, and silence, violence, and haunting, on the other.

Junaid grew up in St. John’s, and she feels the city and its landscape deep in her bones. One might then reasonably expect that she would have encountered stories of Black life during her childhood. But as she observed during her curatorial talk, such stories never formed part of her girlhood education. St. John’s, and Newfoundland and Labrador more broadly speaking, have instead long been imagined as white spaces shaped by Irish and English (and to a much lesser extent French) histories.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that the overarching theme of the exhibition is that of silence: the silence of forcibly suppressed stories alongside the silence of lost ones. What Carries Us includes not only a variety of works by artists based in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and the UK, but also archival materials and archaeological artifacts. Taken together, they invite us to reflect on storytelling and identity, and on how we might imagine things differently.

The theme of silence is told perhaps most hauntingly in the form of the garments worn by a man with the initials W.H., an otherwise anonymous sailor of African heritage whose grave in Labrador emerged in the 1980s as a result of coastal erosion. The garments rest alone in a darkened room, their story a reminder that twenty percent of all British and American sailors in the early nineteenth century were black men. What brought W.H. to these shores? How long was he here? Which parts of this place had he visited? Who did he encounter along the way? How did his voice sound? What were his favourite foods? What did he do in his spare time? These are silences we can’t recover; they remain only in shadows.

Meanwhile, Shelley Miller’s Trade (2020), constructed as a series of seemingly edible blue-and-white tiles made of icing sugar, gelatin, and edible inks and arranged in the form of a patchwork tile mural, offers a material commentary on the ways that the unfree labour of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Caribbean supported and sustained European wealth. I’ve seen such tiles in many Dutch museums over the years, often decorating fireplaces and kitchen walls. Here, however, they tell a very different story, drawing out the triangle trade that linked Newfoundland and Labrador with Africa and the Caribbean. Perhaps because of my own Dutch family histories on my father’s side (histories that tangle simultaneously with Dutch Caribbean colonial histories of slavery and indenture on my mother’s side), this piece stood out most to me. The stickiness. The sweetness. The sugar that binds oppression and wealth together, all of it captured in innocuous blue and white tiles that you can buy in any cheesy tourist shop in the Netherlands. What was the cost of sugar? asks the title of a novel by Surinamese author Cynthia McLeod. What, indeed.

But silence is not just grief-laden or mournful in this exhibition—it’s also pointed, political, and playful. Camille Turner, whose Afronautic Research Lab featured at the 2019 Bonavista Biennale, returns here, locating histories of enslavement not just in faraway Caribbean colonies but also right here in this place. If the island of Newfoundland is seen, today, as an isolated outpost, its history gestures towards a long imbrication in the Atlantic slave trade. Turner’s immersive research lab, which includes not only film but also a table filled with books, archival materials, and the tools of the archival researcher’s trade (pencils, blank paper, magnifying glasses), chronicles the nineteen slave ships constructed here and reminds us that it’s all too easy to separate ourselves from messy, oppressive histories. It also asks us to consider what it means to take up a violent inheritance.

The work of Sonia Boyce takes a playful carnivalesque approach. In “Crop Over” (2007), a two-channel video installation, she chronicles a Caribbean festival, with all the colours, music, and dancing so common to many Caribbean celebrations. But Boyce’s “Crop Over” is playfully—and pointedly—subversive. Her characters dance not just in the streets but also through houses and landmarks created as a result of the trade in slaves and sugar. Stilt-walking folk figures dressed in sequined outfits romp through formal gardens and clamber around staid sitting room furniture. They plant themselves on stone balconies and peer around corners, their presence a mocking reminder of the unruly, colourful bodies whose unfree labour made these great homes possible in the first place. In many ways, “Crop Over” reminded me of the spoken word poetry of El Jones (“Dear Benedict” in particular): it’s cheeky, spirited, pleasure-filled, parodic, and, at the same time, deeply political.

What Carries Us is not a large exhibition. And yet it packs a punch. Each element, from the archival materials to the archaeological artifacts to the artworks, offers an opening towards a reimagining and a retelling of Newfoundland and Labrador and the people who have visited its shores and called it home.

Black American visual artist Heather Hart’s series of rooftop oracles based on the four directions (East, West, North, and South) is an-ongoing series of work that offers prophetic predictions for imagining new futures. Most recently, she’s created Northern Oracle, an exhibition curated by Ann MacDonald and presented in partnership with the Africville Heritage Trust at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Hart created a rooftop installation “Northern Oracle” which consists of a massive wooden top of a house that spans the entire gallery, and is accompanied by several mixed media drawings. Her work provides a powerful example of what bell hooks argues in her essay “Postmodern Blackness,” about the need to continually interrogate how “racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated solely with concrete gut level experience conceived as either opposing or having no connection to abstract thinking” (hooks 2318).

Paradoxically, Hart’s work is all about abstract thinking. Her art invites viewers to reconsider lost and hidden Black histories, to probe how race shapes access to ownership, and to explore physical spaces and the perspectives they offer from a wide variety of vantage points. Hart’s abstract work opens up possibilities and in particular, acknowledges the effects of colonization and dominion in relationship to Africville. Northern Oracle examines the significance of people having a place to call home, and how this relates to Africville, an African-Canadian settlement, forcibly located outside of Halifax which was first populated by Blacks in the mid-18^th century, and ultimately systematically demolished in the 1960s because of white Haligonian’s racist ideals. Haligonians deemed the community unfit and wanted to redevelop the land for industry; in turn, Africaville was razed to make way for new buildings.

For hooks, the work of Black artists and writers continue to be understood through “narrow” and “constricting notions of blackness” (hooks 2322). Hart can be read as engaging with hooks’ theory by reconsidering the history of Africville through architecture and art. Hart recreates a rooftop, or a home in the form of an oracle for Black community members to return to, building a site in which they can climb on top of the roof and in doing so, literally and metaphorically, reposition their social status as marginalized Black folks. Hart pointedly invites visitors to access Northern Oracle, by climbing onto the rooftop and ducking under the floor-level attic. Northern Oracle includes various vantage points where viewers can reflect on and potentially reconceptualize (if only momentarily) their ingrained ideas about Black power and influence—or its lack. She even encourages those who climb the installation to “shout from rooftop,” providing a place of performative liberation for Black viewers.

Inside the attic – which holds literary importance as a place Black slaves used to hide from slave-catcher and watch their masters in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin – viewers can look through a peephole to see several texts about the Africville settlement on display including Jon Tattrie’s The Hermit of Africville, Shauntay Grant’s Africville, among Dorothy Perkyn’s The Last Days of Africville, amongst others. Notably, the words of the authors on display include those of Jon Tattrie who is a white male journalist, a seemingly contradictory voice to include in this kind of an exhibit.  

But perhaps the artist wants viewers like myself (a queer Qualipu Mi’kmaq woman) to explore what hooks describes as a suspicion towards a “postmodern critique of the ‘subject’ when they surface at the historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time” (hooks 2322). Next to the peephole, which provides access to various texts, Hart has placed a dream-like drawing, and sign that reads: “The artist invites you to press gold into the drawing in exchange for a wish.”  If the concept of an oracle, which predicts the future, is central to Hart’s installation, the inclusion of Tattrie’s text and the framing materials Hart employs could be understood as linking Hart as an artist to the underclass poor Black communities whom Tattrie writes about but also providing the opportunity to alter that future by making a wish and foreseeing a different set of potential outcomes for the Black community in Halifax. Hart’s postmodern art creates a space where Black communities can come to bond, re-centre, and reimagine power structures through critical and cultural exchange. Her installation challenges the idea of “the primitive,” and “authentic,” (hooks 2323) by unpacking the racial hierarchies that have shaped Black lives in Canada and offering spaces to perform alternate possibilities.

In Hart’s mixed media drawing, “Oracular Rooftop (Auntie Entity) 2016,” watercolours are combined with denim to create a collage on paper. This drawing includes a gold painted box with gold leaf; viewers are encouraged to add their own piece of gold leaf onto the drawing in exchange for a wish. This request by Hart actively encourages viewers to reflect on and engage with their own individual power and agency, prompting much like hooks a “critical dialogue with the uneducated poor, the black underclass who are thinking about aesthetics” but may not be recognized as doing so. The artist has created a space for critical exchange through art, and uses the oracle as a means to make a meeting place where “new and radical happenings,” (hooks 2325) can and are taking place. The opportunity for audience participation and offering of a wish is the radical shift in Hart’s work and a powerful example of hooks’ essay in action.

In the 1960s, Africville was demolished by the municipality under the pretense of urban renewal. This act of destruction and the displacement of its residents was the ultimate embodiment of generations of systemic and overt racism against Black people in Nova Scotia.

Almost twenty years after the last Africville home was demolished, Mount Saint Vincent University (MSVU) collaborated with the Africville Genealogy Society, the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, and the National Film Board to develop the exhibition and symposium Africville: A Spirit that Lives On and the NFB documentary, Remember Africville. The exhibition explores the story of Africville and toured across Canada, showing in several prominent institutions

Marking the 30th anniversary of the 1989 exhibition, the collaborators reconvened with the addition of the Africville Museum (established in 2010 following the Africville Apology), to reactivate the gallery space to remember and celebrate the vibrant community that once was

The exhibition is composed of three major components: archival materials from the original exhibition, visual artworks and literary works, and scheduled performances and presentations. The archival materials include symposium transcripts, newspaper articles, publications, and films. The artworks and literary works, some recalled from the original exhibition and others newly added, comprises photographs, paintings, mixed media works, poems, films, and media-based installations.

The performances and presentations took place on and off site, chosen and organized by the Africville Genealogy Society, the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia and the Africville Museum. MSVU deliberately extended freedom to its collaborators for agency and self-determination over the programming that would take place in the space

Through the combination of these three components and exhibition strategies, Africville: A Spirit that Lives On – A Reflection Project creates a potent space for difficult conversations and social justice

Upon entering the gallery, I was greeted with audio recitations of poetry by Martha Mutale. Her three poems set the tone for the rest of my time with the exhibition. Her words were powerful, unapologetic, thoughtful, and heartfelt

The National Film Board documentary Remember Africville was next. The film spoke to the injustice and wounds that were still open twenty years after Africville’s destruction. There was a considerable collection of archival newspaper clippings with headlines and articles, speaking to racism and oppression that could have been published today.

As I moved through the gallery, I couldn’t help but feel the outright sense of loss communicated in the works by Africville’s former residents and descendants. They spoke of stolen identity, estrangement from the past, and imposed indignity. Many of the works, however, also embodied joy

The underlying message across the entire exhibition was grounded in cultural pride and resilience. Irvine Carvey proudly states that when asked where he is from, he always answers “Africville.”

Projected on the far wall of the gallery were three short films by Cyrus Sundar Singh, highlighting the yearly Africville Reunion in connection to the yearly Owen Sound Emancipation Festival. His documentaries highlight many people working to preserve the story and legacy of where they came from

Coinciding with this exhibition in the MSVU Mezzanine Gallery was a solo painting exhibition by award-winning emerging artist Letitia Fraser. Fraser spoke on the panel of How We Build: On Craft and Blackness, one of this exhibition’s official events presented by MSVU Art Gallery, Visual Arts News, and Nocturne: Art at Night. Interdisciplinary artist NAT chantel, who also took part in the panel discussion, performed in the exhibition space in November

How We Build: On Craft and Blackness panel discussion. Left to right: Sobaz Benjamin, Letitia Fraser, Juanita Peters, NAT Chantel, moderated by Francesca Ekwuyasi

As a visitor, I found myself very moved by this exhibition. My own experiences with racism as a mixed-race African Nova Scotian were brought to the forefront of my mind. I encountered my biological surname on the list of Africville families, and I was left to wonder if there might have been a community for me there if Africville still existed.

How we Build: On Craft and Blackness

A panel discussion featuring four Black artists discussing craft and collaboration.

Juanita Peters, Letitia Fraser, NAT chantel, and Sobaz Benjamin
Facilitated by Francesca Ekwuyasi
Friday, October 18, 2019, 7 – 9pm
Art Bar + Projects, 1893 Granville Street, Halifax

(K’jipuktuk/Halifax) Visual Arts News, in partnership with Nocturne: Art at Night and MSVU Art Gallery, presents the panel discussion How We Build: On Craft and Blackness. Based on curator Pamela Edmond’s quote “I am no longer interested in a seat at the table. I now want to build my own table” this panel will focus on the concept of Black artists creating work for a Black audience.

With the purpose of illuminating ideas on intergenerational knowledge and craft sharing as a means of fostering solidarity and resistance within and between the various Black communities in Nova Scotia, this panel will engage in ideas on locating pleasure, joy, and celebration as a survival tool while navigating structural oppression.

Join panelists Juanita Peters, Letitia Fraser, NAT chantel, and Sobaz Benjamin in a discussion facilitated by Francesca Ekwuyasi on Friday, October 18, 7 – 9pm at the Art Bar + Projects when we will also be launching the Fall 2019 issue of Visual Arts News magazine.

Refreshments will be served and all are welcome. Gender neutral washrooms on site. ASL interpretation available upon request, please contact us in advance to book. Code of Conduct available here. 

Meet the panelists:

Sobaz Benjamin, first and foremost a storyteller, is the Founder and Executive Director of an innovative, arts-based, youth and adult engagement, empowerment and reintegration not-for-profit in Halifax, called In My Own Voice (iMOVe) Arts Association, (2007).  Sobaz is a documentary film-maker, as well as a community developer, advocate, youth mentor, program director, facilitator and public speaker.  His work has been screened across Canada and in venues and Festivals in New Zealand, Bermuda and New York.  He has completed documentaries for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Sobaz uses his experience as an independent filmmaker in his community- based work with marginalized youth, adults and community.

NAT chantel is a primarily self-taught interdisciplinary artist who engages subtle movement and repetitive processes to revisit memory and personal history as way to reclaim the body and voice. Language, lineal disruption and displacement from land and home claim permanence in her art.  She has participated in Canadian Art Festivals Ignite the Night, Afterglow, and was chosen as a beacon artist for Nocturne (2019) and the first Indigenous curated Nocturne festival (2018.) She has voiced in Annie Wong’s A Choir on Desires and Demand on Repeat (2019), performed with Black Rabbit (2019), and released sound through a nature-based installation during her White Rabbit Residency (2019). NAT was selected into the 2017-2018 VANS Mentorship Program, the Summer Professional Development Residency with NSCCD (2018) and the Centre For Art Tapes Media Scholarship Program (2018-2019.) Her poem Beauty was published in the first print-edition of Understorey Magazine: African Women Writers (2018.) She was a Nova Scotia Talent Trust scholarship recipient (2017 & 2018) and is a member of Visual Arts Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Basketry Guild, and Black Artists Network of Nova Scotia. NAT has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English Literature and is a Certified Yoga Instructor. 

Letitia Fraser is an Interdisciplinary artist, recently graduating with a BFA from NSCAD University. Fraser’s work centers around her experience as an African Nova Scotian woman growing up in the province’s black communities. As a painter, Letitia draws inspiration from her family and community’s history of quilting. Fraser has participated in several group shows and has recently shown her work in a solo exhibition at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, titled Mommay’s Patches: Traditions & Superstitions, and currently has a solo show at MSVU Art Gallery. She has also received numerous awards for her work including the Nova Scotia Talent Trust RBC Emerging Artist Award. Most recently, Fraser participated in the residency Ground Rules at the Cape Breton Centre for Crafts and Design, NS. Fraser continues her practice in Halifax, NS.

Juanita Peters is a playwright, actor and film director. Peters has over 35 years of media experience. Her early career included radio and television host/reporter for various networks including CBC NB and AVR. A member of ACTRA, Writers Guild of Canada (WGC), Actors Equity (CAEA), Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre (PARC) and a founding member of Women In Film & Television Atlantic (WIFT-AT), Peters is the Executive Director at The Africville Museum and teaches Playwrighting in the Theatre at Dalhousie University.

Panel facilitator:
francesca omolara ekwuyasi is a writer, filmmaker, and visual artist from Lagos, Nigeria. Her work explores themes of faith, family, queerness, consumption, loneliness and belonging. You may find her writing in Winter Tangerine Review, Brittle Paper, Transition Magazine, the Malahat Review, Visual Art News and GUTS Magazine. Her short documentary Black + Belonging screened at the Halifax Black Film Festival and Festival International du Film Black de Montréal this year. During her upcoming residency at the Khyber Centre for the Arts, she will be producing work which interrogates the intersections of queerness and faith.

For more information, contact:

Becky Welter-Nolan
Publisher
Visual Arts News
publisher@visualartsnews.ca
t: 902-423-4694, 1-866-225-8267

Poet and artist Sylvia D. Hamilton’s multimedia installation of images, objects, and sound is heard and carried throughout the powerful exhibition Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, which inspired the title of the group show.

The creation of this exhibit occurred within a specific socio-cultural context that involved the Royal Ontario Museum and the Black communities of Toronto in the wake of some controversy. The exhibit’s three curators Dr. Julie Crooks, assistant curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Montreal-based independent curator, Dominique Fontaine, and Dr. Silvia Forni, Curator of African Arts and Culture at the ROM, came together in 2015 to develop a three year project with the aim of repairing the relationship between the ROM and Toronto’s Black communities. Their goal was to carve out space for Blackness in a historically colonial and anti-Black museum. Here We Are Here: Black Contemporary Art is the provocative and moving culmination and closing exhibition of the years-long project.

I am moved not only by the subject matter—Hamilton’s installation examines the histories of African Canadians from both a personal and collective lens, from the Transatlantic slave trade to Canadian slavery, to the imposed otherness and anti-Blackness African Canadians experience contemporarily—but also by the visceral experience that it provides.

On three massive swaths of fabric suspended from a wall titled “Naming Names,” is a list of three thousand African descended people, some of whom were enslaved and others free. The effect of this massive list of names is chilling. Hamilton’s voice echoes on a loop, soft with emotion as she reads the names and ages, which evokes both a sense of calm and deep sadness in me.

Saddening, as well as enraging, is the display of racist iconography, “How They See Us,” curated in the nearby display case. ‘Tar Baby’ dolls, The Story of Little Black Sambo, and a bunch of locks tied in a red ribbon which sits beside a pair of small hammered metal child shackles are disturbing. The image of the child shackles stays with me even as I write this. I don’t know that I can ever be desensitized to objects and images that speak to the plight of enslaved people, particularly children. With forthrightness and some tenderness, Hamilton’s work demands that we face this truth of history, that we sit with it.

“In The Passage” shows a poem projected against a video of the ocean, we hear Hamilton’s voice speaking to how the experience of being enslaved and taken away from home and going through the Middle Passage might have felt. As a whole, Hamilton’s piece is graceful and deeply touching. In spite of the harsh subject matter, there is an undeniable and compelling sense of pride and dignity in the manner in which she handles each aspect of this work.

Charmaine Lurch’s large-scale charcoal drawings “Cartography of Being, Belonging, and Grace,” are paper maps of a Black femme figure (her daughter), both familiar and warm. As a Black woman living in the diaspora, themes of belonging are of particular interest to me. These drawings strike an internal chord. The charcoal lines are bold and heavy-handed, and the model depicted moves between fluid and casual. In an excerpt from Katherine McKitrick’s “Dear Science and Other Stories and Demonic Grounds” she writes: “a young girl can legitimately take possession of a street, or an entire city, albeit on different terms than we may be familiar with.” Her poetics embody the bold and casual tones of the drawings and speak to the preciousness and precarity of Black girlhood.

Across from Lurch’s work, taking up the entire length of the wall, is Sandra Brewster’s “Hiking Black Creek,” who describes the larger than life photograph of the artist’s parents on a hike as a “poetic meditation on the emotional labour of belonging.” As a recent immigrant, I am intimately familiar with the emotional labour of belonging and am taken by the intimacy and simplicity of this work. Treading along familial lines, much like Lurch, Brewster subtly, yet sharply conveys a profound idea with this old photograph taken during the couple’s first year in Canada together. The large-scale image is spread over large panels and washed in warm sepia and grey tones. The colours red and yellow across their long-sleeved shirts have been added to the black and white image. The two figures in the photograph smile for the camera. Further ruminating on the theme of belonging, the work shirks ideas of Blackness and Black culture as homogenous, and the sheer size of the image (as well as the smiling faces), give me a sense of being watched over with care.

The sounds of Michèle Pearson Clarke’s video installation, “Suck Teeth Compilation” meets me before I see it, offering a sense of utter glee. The video compilation depicts Black people of varying ages, genders, sizes, and sexes, staring into the camera head-on and sucking their teeth. The familiar hiss indicates disgust, annoyance, anger, and frustration, as their faces are filled with contempt and the void left by patience long lost.

The people in the video are also incredibly beautiful—some are relentlessly cool, and others have an idiosyncratic aesthetic. The hissing sound of teeth sucking and their accompanying sighs create a chorus of dismissive waves, disinterested glares, and bored eye rolls that create a choreographed expression of disdain at the state of anti-Blackness in Canada. These are gestures that I know well—gestures that I and millions of brown people across the globe employ as modest tools of resistance. In the final scene, instead of teeth sucking, a woman kisses the toddler she holds in her arms, as well as the little girl sitting on a stool beside her. She kisses the children and they all smile.

From a distance, Chantal Gibson’s “Souvenir,” which features two walls of spray-painted collector spoons, looks like massive swaths of black eyelet lace, which are elegant and intricately detailed. “Souvenir” illustrates the erasure of the distinct histories and identities of Black people in Canada. At a closer look, it is clear that each spoon is shaped differently and varies in size, yet the artist’s choice to spray paint them all black and arrange them uniformly provides a striking visual representation of forced sameness.

Accompanying Gibson’s “Souvenir” is a video and photobook portraying ghost-like impressions leftover from spray painting 2,000 souvenir spoons. This work provides a sharp juxtaposition between “Souvenir,” and the diversity of Blackness displayed in Michèle Pearson Clarke’s video “Suck Teeth Compilation.”

Bushra Junaid’s “Sweet Childhood” creates a stunning and sophisticated portrait of Black children by overlaying period ads for sugar and molasses on a stereoview of children in a Caribbean sugarcane field from 1903, which draws attention to the trade between Newfoundland and the Caribbean, a history that I only learned of through this piece. Junaid deftly weaves together layers of history that point to the dynamic of producer and consumer—producer being the Global South/historically marginalized peoples, and consumer being the Global North/historically colonizer—that still exists today.

From Gordon Shadrach’s life-size painting depicting the multiple facets and identities of a contemporary Black Canadian woman, to Esmaa Mohamoud’s sculpture titled “Untitled (No Fields),” examining the commodification of Black male bodies in North American sports culture, this exhibit touches on a multitude of aspects of Blackness. It speaks from the history of enslaved people, to slavery’s afterlife of anti-blackness, immigration narratives, and the desire for belonging.

Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art’s scope is far-reaching, ranging from deep sadness to lighthearted. Many pieces share themes of commodification, a longing for belonging, shedding light on history, and resistance against erasure.

This is merely the beginning.

There needs to be more room for Black narratives in the art world. Yes, it’s a great step for the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia to have an entire exhibit dedicated to Black contemporary art, yet this as an exception needs to change. It is imperative that showing the work of BIPOC artists, historic and contemporary, becomes the norm, particularly in a city like Halifax, with its history of Black resilience.

I have been researching all things related to the 1998 seminal exhibition of works by Black Nova Scotian artists In this Place… for weeks, trying to uncover more about the history of Black artists in the Halifax art world—a history which is buried too deeply in our archives. Case in point: when Jade Peek graced the cover of The Coast in February to talk about curating her exhibition The Griots, the article heralded it as “the first exhibition of solely Afro-Indigenous artists in Halifax since the 1990s.” This got me wondering why I hadn’t heard more about exhibitions by Black Nova Scotian artists in the past two decades and sent me digging through the archives to learn more. As a student of Art History and Visual Arts News’ research intern, I was eager to find out whether there were other significant exhibitions or dialogues regarding African Nova Scotians’ culture that had fallen through the cracks of the canon I studied at the NSCAD.

“Rapids in the Backwater: A History of the Exhibition In This Place.” Found in the NSCAD archives.

In my previous post, I looked back at the milestone exhibition In this Place…, and spoke with curator David Woods, but I couldn’t stop researching there. For one, it took a while to get to a hold of materials and actually see things—like, for instance, the archives of the Anna Leonowens Gallery, where In This Place was exhibited. When I finally got to look through the archives, I stumbled across the work of another researcher, Meril Rasmussen, who spoke out to me straight from 1998 through a 62-page unpublished thesis paper (which we’ve now put online here, with help from NSCAD head librarian Rebecca Young) that detailed the history and context of In This Place. To my surprise and amazement, the paper contains more history of African Nova Scotian art and artists in Halifax (up to 1998) than I’ve been able to track down anywhere else to date.

“Powerful legacies, both individual and collective, were unveiled, forever changing the expectations of Black artists in this province,” writes Rasmussen, highlighting the significance of In this Place. “It was a grand entrance into the spotlighted arena of the public art gallery.” But more than that, Rasmussen’s paper examines the racial tensions that existed in 90’s Halifax within the white and Black art worlds.

After Melanie Colosimo—the current Anna Leonowens Gallery Director and protector of the archives—and I washed our hands (cleaner and safer than gloves, she explained), I poured over five large manila folders for In This Place (full disclosure, I have never looked at any archives ever; it’s very cool). Towards the end of the first folder, there was a thick document titled “Rapids in the Backwater: A history of the Exhibition In This Place…” by Rasmussen, dated Sept 15^th 1998. The document had this note on the bottom:

“I am enroute to New York for the winter months. Pamela Edmonds (###-####) and Rudi Meyer (###-####) have agreed to help respond to any questions inquires.  Also, you can send any response to merilr@hotmail.com (note the hotmail does not take attachments. I will arrange another address from New York, so please make contact and I will provide an updated and more useful address.)

These very ‘90’s technology issues made me laugh. I felt that this mystery document in my hands must have been a lost attachment in ‘the hotmail’ that didn’t make it into today’s online research materials. I flipped through the 60 plus double-spaced white pages, and stumbled across a quote by Peter Dykhuis (now the curator of the Dalhousie Art Gallery) regarding the exhibition that gave me goose bumps: “I hope that twenty years from now some archivist might find Anna Leonowens’ name attached to it; that’s nice. But ultimately I hope that BANNS [Black Artists Network of Nova Scotia] is completely affiliated with this thing … That’s what I want.” I almost fell over—I am a researcher (or archivist if you will) and next year is the 20^th anniversary of the exhibition. If this isn’t a sign I don’t know what is.

“No Laughing Matter” 1993 exhibition catalog from the Dalhousie Archives

I dive into Rasmussen’s accessible, conversational-style thesis, and learn that he happened to be the gallery intern during the exhibition of In this Place and a student at NSCAD at the time, and toured with curator David Woods as the exhibition traveled around the province. Having read Rasmussen’s Rapids in the Backwater: A History of the Exhibition a few times now, I want to explain why I find it so significant. It tells the stories that no one else has. It reads like an insider’s perspective, a fly on the wall to some very uncomfortable but relevant discussions of the often not talked about race relations in Halifax’s major art institutions like NSCAD, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Dalhousie Art Gallery and Mount Saint Vincent University Gallery during the 1990’s.

For instance, he draws attention to one of the least talked about group exhibitions today, but very controversial at the time, No Laughing Matter—which included works by celebrated African American artist, Carrie Mae Weems in 1992 at the Dalhousie Art Gallery. I went to the Dalhousie gallery archives to find out even more about this particular exhibition because it caused such unprecedented social turmoil in Halifax—even inspiring Black students from Dalhousie University to stage a sit-in protesting the exhibition in the gallery. Gallery goers interpreted the exhibition as completely racist, despite the fact that Weems’ intention was to convey a very anti-racist message. In the exhibition catalogue, Weems explains that her work “attempts to get at the racism of whites and internalized racism of Blacks.”

“This work, like the other in the series, reminds us that it is appropriate to ask not ‘Is it funny?’ but rather ‘Funny to whom? And why?”

Weems struck a nerve by pairing photography of African Americans and monkeys with racist jokes: “She confronts the whole psychology of racism by confronting people with their own racism,” Rasmussen quotes Woods explaining in his unpublished thesis. “So there were a number of pieces, like they’d have a picture of a Black man and a gorilla and they’d say things like ‘Which one’s smarter?’ The whole idea being that what you are thinking—since everybody knows the answers to these things—it challenges you. It is sort of like, ‘Well, why do you actually know the answer to this?’ So that’s her methodology.”

Nina Felshin, from New York’s Independent Curators Incorporated, further explains Weems’ work in the show’s exhibition catalogue: “This work, like the other in the series, reminds us that it is appropriate to ask not ‘Is it funny?’ but rather ‘Funny to whom? And why?” As there was not much precedent for this type of racially focused art work in the city’s art scene yet, and no previous dialogue with any Black student or community organizations when the show was booked almost two years prior to its opening, it came as a sucker punch to many.

Rasmussen also critically explores the influence of artist Jim Shirley (an American-born Cape Breton transplant) and his connections to the Black civil rights movement, the cultural impact of first Black student to graduate from NSCAD in 1951, Audrey Dear, and author/curator Barry Lord’s spotlight on Lawren Harris’ (of the Group of Seven) paintings of Black communities in Nova Scotia—amongst other things. And he unpacks exhibitions like Africville: A Spirit That Lives On from 1989 at The Mount Saint Vincent Art Gallery.

Who is Rasmussen?

But who was this Rasmussen character? I was so taken by this story of the fly on the wall researcher that I immediately Googled “Meril Rasmussen” and tried to figure out how I could get a hold of him. Did that old hotmail address still work? After a quick search, a website for someone with that name came up right away (www.merilrasmussen.com/)! The website homepage showed some text about math that my eyes glazed over, and his bio showed a picture of a white guy in probably his 40’s who described himself as “raised in a remote fishing village on the northern tip of Cape Breton Island in Atlantic Canada.” He writes: “I attended university in Halifax and have subsequently lived for extended periods in Cape Breton, Johannesburg, and New Delhi. I currently live in Rio de Janeiro.” Brazil? Could this be our guy?

Author of “The History of In this Place…” Meril Rasmussen, now living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

He continues: “I have degrees in Art, Art History and Film, and I’ve worked in film and television as a director and producer.” This sounds like the person! I immediately sent him a message asking if he had been a gallery intern at Anna Leonowens in 1998. Within moments, I received a reply.

Meril: Chris! I have been secretly waiting for this email for decades! Talk to me.

I got goose bumps over my whole body and my eyes watered a bit. What are the chances? Our first couple emails looked like this:

Chris: Meril! I’m literally sitting here with the archives. My mind is blown on all of your research and how well this work was put together. Why wasn’t this published or at least taken out of the gallery archives? It’s amazing. Who did you write this for? I have so many questions…

Meril: Thanks! I assume that you are looking at the catalogue for Skin that I produced along with Pamela Edmonds (who is now a curator in TO). I also wrote a sort of a thesis at that time linked with the In This Place show that looked at the history of race at NSCAD. I can’t remember if I managed to time-capsule that one into an archives somewhere.

I explained that I was looking at the thesis on In this Place. But I also quickly checked the aforementioned Skin. (The full name is Skin: a Political Boundary. It was an exhibition at the Anna Leonowens Gallery in 1998, co-curated by Meril Rasmussen and Pamela Edmonds.)

“Skin: a Political Boundary”. Co-curated Meril Rasmussen and Pamela Edmonds in 1998

Meril: I wrote that paper as part of an independent study for Rudi Meyer (Now the director of the Master Design Program at NSCAD) … There was a legitimate question about who would get to tell that story … My suggestion that my piece should be included in the catalogue was not really taken seriously and I had the sense that it would not be constructive to push.

Some of Meril’s work did make it into the exhibition catalogue for In This Place, as it was used extensively for Dr. Harold Pearse’s curatorial statement, at the end of which he says he is “indebted to Meril Rasmussen, the curatorial intern of Anna Leonowens for sharing his research.”

“I learned so much from David about community-building. He was the driving force behind that show. He went door to door around the province and found the art.”

He reflected on his relationships with David Woods, who he traveled around with in a cube van installing the exhibition:

Meril: I learned so much from David about community-building. He was the driving force behind that show. He went door to door around the province and found the art. He found Jim Shirley and convinced him to come for the opening … I remember the artistic intensity that David put into hanging the shows. It went to CBU (Cape Breton University) in Cape Breton, to the Museum of Industry in Stellarton and a tiny little museum in Shelburne, where the red dust from the Scarlet Letter years earlier still got in all the display cases. 

[Side note: I look up this reference and discovered that historical drama The Scarlet Letter staring Demi Moore and Gary Oldman, was indeed filmed in Shelburne in 1995. You can see the red dirt roads in the trailer.]

Catalogue cover for “In This Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia”

Rasmussen was an undergraduate student when he wrote his unpublished thesis, and felt compelled to look deeply into In this Place…, which included racial inclusion and exclusion at NSCAD. In so many ways I feel that the change he was hoping for has been very slow in the last 20 years. For example Rasmussen cites a group called MOSAIC, lead by NSCAD faculty member Letti Beals, which formed at NSCAD in the early 1990’s. MOSAIC was for international and Canadian students of colour. The group had laid out eight goals of the club that included proposals to expand the European dominant Art History department, establishing a file cabinet that collected books, videos, articles and slides relevant to the group, and a group exhibition of the people in MOSIAC. Only one goal was achieved in the form of a 17-person group show in the Anna’s galleries I and II in the fall of 1993. Rasmussen writes in his thesis: “These goals however, were cut short when organizer, Lettie Beals was dismissed from her administrative position at NSCAD.” In the last couple years, almost 24 years after MOSIAC, the students have established a POC (people of colour) collective. I cannot help but wonder how having MOSIAC and Beals at NSCAD for the past two decades might have changed the representation of the faculty and student body, as NSCAD’s feminist collective has done for women over the years: the university now has a female president and high numbers of celebrated female alumni, students and faculty.

Discovering this document and connecting with Meril, has changed my view of Halifax’s art scene. My ignorance to the quiet history of racialized tension and the rich history of African Nova Scotians in visual art has been revealed to me, and I have begun to feel more educated on more of Nova Scotia’s art history. In our final emails Meril and I started making plans to discuss the whole situation of finding his paper and the lasting impact of In this Place… during a panel discussion this summer hosted by Visual Arts Nova Scotia (Stay tuned!). He signs off with “But as you see, this material is a potential tool for needed transformation and if you can connect it with the right people, it could all have legs.” I am filled with his contagious inspiration to share information.

In this time, when Canadians continue to be more and more aware of the ongoing oppression facing people of colour within the larger societal institutions such as justice and law enforcement, we within the art community must look to our own institutions. I believe that first step comes in knowing our histories and critically examining our own past of exclusion and white supremacy as a way to make sure we are not continuing it. In researching the exhibition In this Place, it was difficult to find written information around the histories of Black exhibitions, artists and curators in Nova Scotia—even about one of it’s most famous. So, inspired by Meril’s paper and his desire to share information, I’m working to make more of this information available online (such as Meril’s thesis which is online here now).

And for anyone looking to learn more about exhibitions featuring black artists in Nova Scotia in the past 20 years, I’ve starting compiling an incomplete list below—Let us know what I’ve missed in the comments!

Skin: A Political Boundary (1998), Curated by Pamela Edmonds and Meril Rasmussen

SisterVisions III: Through Our Eyes (2000), Curated by Pamela Edmonds

Cultural Memory (2000), Curated by Pamela Edmonds

Home: The Art of Preston (2000), Curated by David Woods and Dr. Harold Pearse

Black body: Race, Resistance, Response (2001), Curated by Pamela Edmonds

Lucie Chan : Something to Carry (2002) Curated by Ingrid Jenkner

Secret Codes Quilt Exhibition (2012), Curated by David Woods

The Hair Show: Honouring Our Roots: Viola Desmond  (2016)

Inspire (2014), Curated by David Woods

Stitched Stories:The Family Quilts (2016), Curated by Shauntay Grant

Check out these other blog posts from our researcher as she digs through our archives:

Get to know our research intern

In this Place: The lasting impact of Nova Scotia’s first major exhibition of Black artists’ work

Looking back: Our version of “women in the arts”in the 70s

Detail of exhibition catalogue cover for “In This Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia”

The exhibition We are the Griots—curated by Jade Peek—may have opened to the biggest snowstorm all season this past February at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, but it still saw a lot of press coverage. Jade was on the cover of The Coast weekly paper. The article billed We are the Griots as the first exhibition of “solely Black Nova Scotian artists in Halifax since the 1990s.” I was stunned — Had there really not been another exhibition dedicated to Black Nova Scotian art since the 90’s?

So I went digging, looking up the late 90’s in the Visual Arts Nova Scotia archives, and low and behold, it was on the cover of the Spring 1998 issue, Volume 20 Number 1: In this Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia. The cover image is bold, graphic and visually striking. It features a painting of three figures in simple, but expressive white lines on a black thickly textured background. Inside, there’s an article by curator/artist Pamela Edmonds, stressing the historical importance of the exhibition. “In this Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia represents the first-ever attempt to represent and contextualize the tradition of Black Nova Scotian art making in the province,” she writes. In my research since, I have learned that David Woods—who co-curated the show with Harold Pearse—represents just one individual out of just a handful of Black curators who have been working in Halifax to this day, continuing the push for the self representation of Black Nova Scotians in visual art.

“A great void existed for me as an artist in Nova Scotia … of knowing that most people assume that no art of significance had been created by the Black community.” —David Woods

Volume 20 / Issue 1 / Spring 1998 / “In this Place” cover

Edmonds describes the exhibition as a “groundbreaking effort to provide a comprehensive overview of a sector of the art making community rarely shown or acknowledged.” She points to a history of exclusion and segregation in Nova Scotia. In the article she interviews the co-curators David Woods, a local artist and community organizer, and Dr. Harold Pearse, the academic dean at NSCAD, about their inspiration for the exhibit, their relationship and the project. As Woods explains, the title of the exhibition originates from his poem Abode, which references the experience of the early Black settlers and the land the government allotted them in Nova Scotia—described as
“barren, rocky soil or swampland.” For Pearse, MSVU Art Gallery’s 1983 show The Past in focus: a community album before 1918 : photographs from the Notman Studio served as his inspiration for the exhibition, as well as providing him with his first exposure to the depth of art created by Nova Scotia’s Black communities.

Pearse explains that even though many Black kids from the community spaces are very interested in visual art, their enrollment at NSCAD has always been very low. In the article, Pearse points to Woods, a self taught multi-disciplinary artist and an active community member, as the perfect link to try to bridge the two worlds of the Black art communities and the institutionalized White art world.

Installation view from the catalogue of “In This Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia” 

Pearse and Woods discuss how surprised they all were by the amount of Black Nova Scotian artists that they uncovered in their interview with Edmonds. When they began planning their exhibition, they were thinking about featuring only a few artists—but that all changed by the end of Wood’s research, which  consisted of his unorthodox, but essential curatorial method of driving to several rural Black communities around Nova Scotia and literally knocking on doors and asking questions. Woods brought back over 200 images of work, which they narrowed down to 100 pieces to show by 45 artists. As the exhibition grew, the curatorial team realized it deserved more than just a two-week show at the gallery. They decided to take the exhibition beyond Halifax, touring to three other galleries in the province.

In Halifax they planned several special events, connecting Black artists to the larger art community. These events included a panel discussion and performance event with guests including: Jim Shirley, one of the first Black artists to exhibit in Nova Scotia; Audrey Dear Hesson, the first Black graduate of NSCAD in 1951; local photographer and filmmaker Silvia Hamilton; and painter Crystal Clements. They also screened a film about celebrated African American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, gave youth workshops and tours of NSCAD, and provided a funding information session with the Canada Council and the Nova Scotia Arts Council (all made possible by $40 000 of grants obtained from the Nova Scotia Arts Council, Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts by Black Artist Network Nova Scotia (BANNS) and Peter Dykhuis, who was the director of the Anna Leonowens Gallery at the time). After the tour concluded, they were able to produce a full size catalogue from the NSCAD Press.

Installation view from the catalogue of “In This Place: Black Art In Nova Scotia”

Pearse’s curatorial statement in the catalogue includes well-researched tidbits of information about the experience of Black artists in Halifax, such as the fact that Hesson received the Lieutenant-Governor’s prize and “taught for the school’s Saturday morning children’s art classes, at the YMCA’s boys club and to an adult education group in Africville.” But he points out that due to a shortage of employment opportunities, Hessen could never obtain steady employment in the public school system. Pearse continues with a sparse, but steady history of Black exhibitions and artists in Halifax in the 80’s and 90’s, a time when NSCAD grads and Black artists like Donna James were showing black and white photographs (Eight Men in a Big House, 1989), Buseje Baily was making videos about the female black body (Body Politic, 1992) and Derril Robinson showed his pottery in a joint exhibition with Andrea Arbour (Facades, 1995).

Woods’ statement provides a much more sobering reflection on the presence of Black artists in Nova Scotia. He notes that “a great void existed for me as an artist in Nova Scotia …the void of knowing that there were no exhibitions of local Black artists featured in the provinces’ major galleries; of knowing that Black artists were unfamiliar with each other’s work; of knowing that most people assume that no art of significance had been created by the Black community.” He wanted to challenge himself to try and fill that void with an exhibition that could change the status quo.

 Beverly Bowden’s “Picking Strawberries” (1997), oil on canvas

When I spoke with Woods, I asked him what he thought, almost twenty years later, about the impact that In this Place had made. He talked a lot about an increase of visibility. “All of the establishment galleries offered shows to the NSCAD people for the next four or five years,” he pointed out. Woods himself has continued curating and one of his longest touring exhibitions has been The Secret Codes, which started touring 2012, where he featured narrative and pictorial quilts exhibited quilts made by African Nova Scotian quilt makers. These quilts are the result of a collaboration of Woods’ drawings and the talent of quilt makers like Myla Borden of the Vale Quilters, a group from New Glasgow, who have been working together since In this Place showed the pictorial quilt Passages. As well,  he recalled MSVU Art Gallery invited Shirley back to the Mount to have a retrospective called Jim Shirley Returns: The Art of James R. Shirley (2000). Woods himself also worked as an Associate Curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia from 2006-2007, where he helped to develop the AGNS’ African Canadian Art Initiative. During his short time there he helped to bring Mary Bendolph: Gees Bend Quilts and Beyond to the gallery in 2007 and worked on acquiring work by early Black Atlantic painter Edward Mitchel Banister. He confidently states after all of this work things can “no longer go back to the status quo.”

I’d like to believe that the status quo has changed in the 19 years since In this Place opened. Researching this historically seminal exhibition in Halifax’s art history has opened my eyes to the work and struggle of Black visual artists and curators in the very White dominated art world of Halifax. A staggering number of galleries in Canada still almost exclusively give solo shows to white artists (according to statistics from a 2015 Canadian Art study). We are the Griots represents one in just a small fraction of Black artists and curators living and working in our province. In this Place blew the door open in terms of self-representation for Black artists in Nova Scotia, but that door is still there and it’s primed to be blown away completely.

In the next two parts of this series, I will be looking closer at the history and context of Black exhibitions in Halifax previous to In this Place, and report the prolific work of the author of the VANS article that started me on this journey, writer, artists, art administrator and curator, Pamela Edmonds in the years following In this Place.

More: Looking Back: Our version of “women in the arts” in the 70s

More: Get to know our research intern