The first thing you notice is the music, spilling out into the stairway and pulling visitors into a world shaped by movement. That sense of movement runs throughout It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900–1970 and Now, a nationally touring exhibition at the Dalhousie Art Gallery from January to April 2026.

Curated by scholar, artist, and educator Seika Boye, It’s About Time is an archival exhibition that showcases the rich dance histories of Canada’s Black population. Using findings from recorded historical events and new research, Boye explores the power of dance as a form of expression, resistance, sacrifice, and cultural identity. 

“To date, the history of dance within Canada’s Black population is significantly underdocumented,” writes Boye in their artist statement. “Without it, we miss out on so much joy, agency, peaceful gathering en masse, resistance, artistic brilliance, and individual expression. Without it, we are incomplete in our self-knowledge, and so, our potential.”

PREPARATION AS DANCE

The dulcet tones of artists past and present pull you through the door and straight into a space reminiscent of a young adult’s bedroom. 

Clothes pile up in a corner—T-shirts, jackets, skirts, and other fabrics—seemingly tossed aside in the aftermath of a fashion montage you might see in a ’90s rom-com. Some bear Black Panther insignia, others are African kente; some fabrics are soft and diaphanous, others are black and metallic.

Beside the pile of clothes is a crisp white vanity, ready to serve the room’s occupant. A long black do-rag sits on a mannequin head, gemstones sparkling like the stars on the night out the occupant is preparing for. A tower of varied speakers sits in the other corner, filling the space with feel-good music as they get ready. A disco ball spins above, seeding its light across the textured ceiling. 

The three mixed media installations by kay macdonald, titled in this room—at the beginning of the night/at the end of the world, transport viewers into an intimate space where preparation becomes a ritual and the bedroom becomes a liminal space of expression and safety. Here, the act of getting ready becomes a dance of “what it takes to show up, and to be seen,” macdonald writes. 

Over the course of the exhibition, macdonald will periodically activate the space with a live performance, transforming the installation from still life to living ceremony. 

BLACKNESS AS PERFORMANCE

Stepping out of that bedroom, your attention is immediately captured by a bright red curtain to the right. 

Thick, red theatre curtains with carefully—almost reverently—placed pleats frame a painting, like curtains drawing closed after a show. In the centre, a dark-skinned Black woman rests after a dance of some kind. She is visibly tired, eyes downcast as she leans against her dressing table. Her red dancing shoes stand out in a sea of black, browns, and navy backstage. 

By Preston Pavlis and titled when the jig is up, when the act is finished, when the curtain descends, the link between Blackness and performance in this piece feels unavoidable. The dancer’s red shoes are a reference to a 1948 British film The Red Shoes, where a ballerina must choose between her love for dance and her life beyond the stage.  

For me, a Black viewer, the red shoes in the painting symbolize a lack of choice. Just like the protagonist in the film couldn’t remove the shoes, Pavlis’s dancer cannot shed her Blackness. She is forced to perform every day on the stage we call life, eyes critiquing her every move. In the mirror behind her, the reflection stares at the viewer in an accusatory gaze, full of both helplessness and quiet rage. 

Beside the dancer, a bunch of dried flowers rest on the table—a testament to how she has been unable to care for them, and herself. Tenderness, rest, the soft aspects of her life come second to the performance she must put on for the world. The painting is a moment of vulnerability, and the stage becomes a space where “endings, pressure and self-belief must be continually negotiated,” writes Pavlis. 

CELEBRATION AS LIBERATION

As you venture deeper into the exhibition, a spread of black-and-white photographs lines the walls on either side of the room.

On the right side is Allen D. Crooks’s Lose yourself to dance,most of which was photographed during a fiftieth-anniversary family celebration and vow renewal at the East Preston Recreation Centre. The photos pull you into a room full of joy, laughter, and celebration. Glistening suits and well-worn floors set the scene, as family members—old and young, anonymous and identified—strut their stuff, skirts swaying with the music, arms raised in jubilation. 

On the left side, a series of photographs that catch your eye are the Grange Road Dances. The photos depict scenes from social dances, house parties, concerts, and recitals in 1950s Canada. The black-and-white photos do nothing to dull the liveliness of the party. 

In one of the photographs, a crowd of Black youth dance together, happily moving to the beat of musicians, while at the perimeter, a group of white attendees look on, seemingly out of place. I couldn’t help but smile at the sight of unapologetic Black joy existing despite white discomfort. 

While both sides of the aisle depict different events, the theme is clear: Dance like no one’s watching. 

In a world where Blackness puts a target on your back, dance becomes a radical form of liberation. This was especially true in the 1950s, when social dances were one of the few sources for “positive images of Canada’s Black population,” the exhibition text explains.  

BLACK DANCE, DARK HISTORY

Moving through the gallery, it becomes clear that celebration is only one part of the story. Behind glass, objects from nineteenth-century minstrel shows sit uncomfortably still. A book on stage makeup is opened to instructions for racial caricature; beside it, a small tin of “Negro Black” face paint, with a detailed visual guide and colour palette to achieve the desired “ethnic complexions.”

A visitor’s voice cuts through the gallery: “People used to buy this?”

The answer, painfully, is yes.

These materials remind viewers that dance has also been used as a tool for ridicule and exclusion—a distortion of Black and racialized bodies designed to entertain through dehumanization. That this history exists alongside scenes of joy, ceremony, and resistance is not a contradiction but part of the exhibition’s insistence on telling the whole story. 

STILL BLACK, STILL DANCING

Just beyond this display, a small projection room offers another kind of history: short films and testimonials from dancers, neighbours, and students speaking about what dance has meant in their lives. 

As archival footage and interviews flicker across the screen, the exhibition feels less like recorded history and more like something alive—an immortal rhythm carried forward through memory.

I sink into the cushions, the tension I carried from earlier leaving my body, as I watch Ethel Bruneau merrily “hoofing” along to the beat. 

Indeed, it’s about time we had a show like this. 

I was initially attracted to visiting the exhibition based on prior interest in the work of Theaster Gates. I had first heard about his work with the Stony Island Arts Bank. The bank was built in 1923 on the South Side of Chicago and operated as such until the 1980s. After sitting vacant for decades, it was reopened in 2015 as a hybrid gallery, media archive, library, and community centre. The building houses multiple archival collections such as personal vinyls in the collection of Frankie Knuckles, known as the godfather of house music, and the Edward J. Williams Collection of “negrobilia,” approximately four thousand objects that make use of stereotypical images of Black people, now out of public circulation but available as a reminder of history and the need for ongoing analysis. I approached the exhibition with notions of archival agency hovering in the back of my mind. 

The first work I encountered was Souvenir by Chantal Gibson, part of Down Home: Portraits of Resilience curated by Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa. This work explores the “collective historical experience of Blackness” through souvenir spoons and the act of reproduction of an image. Souvenir spoons tend to bear imagery of constructed statehood and reify colonial narratives. Gibson has blacked out the spoons, evoking a myriad of different readings for the work. White’s outlines of the painted spoons, presented in an artist’s book, hover like ghosts, referring back to the colonial imagery revealed in the texture of the blacked-out spoons. The installation is neighboured by a video in which Gibson spotlights the notion of the “Black wench.” The term originated in The Stepsure Letters (1821–1823) by Thomas McCulloch, a book that is widely considered to be a cornerstone of Canadian satire. Gibson calls into question the “distortions that become entrenched in culture over time.” 

Walking through the gallery, I pass by the library tucked away in the corner of the space. I am greeted by images of splintwood basketry from Nova Scotia and Gee’s Bend quilts from Alabama, craft techniques, traditions, and objects as archives of the communities that made them. From the library I walk to another space containing tools of memory. 

Oluseye: By Faith and Grit, curated by Pamela Edmonds, weaves “a tapestry of Blackness in Canada” with objects that the artist refers to as “diasporic debris.” Through objects tied to labour, Oluseye, a Nigerian-Canadian artist, highlights stories of Black rurality. By bringing forth the basketry of Edith Clayton from the twentieth century and photographs of contemporary Black farmers from the twenty-first, Oluseye bridges narratives of “endurance and legacy.” As calluses on a labourer’s hands tell a story, so do the tools that made them. 

Meandering through the gallery space, I have arrived back to Down Home: Portraits of Resilience and its works that harness “alternative archival forms.” Nylon stockings and school photos are used in Rebecca Fisk’s work Confessions of an Invisible Sister to bring forth complexities of race, identity, and colourism in the Black community. By using an array of shades of nylon stockings, ranging from eggshell to deep ebony, Fisk calls into question the arbitrariness of damaging prejudices experienced by Afro-diasporic people. Fisk uses her childhood school photos, material from her personal archive, to invite the audience to reflect on the pressures to conform and the emotional toll of discrimination. 

The painting The Faith Catchers by Justin Augustine shows two young men in front of New Horizons Baptist Church in the North End of Halifax. Augustine’s paintings often depict figures in landscapes reminiscent of Dominica, where the artist was born, and Nova Scotia, where he emigrated in his youth. His work explores how surroundings influence identities and the depiction of local landmarks works to sustain “diasporic knowledge, sentiment, and cultural legacy.”

I then enter a dark screening room. I am lulled by the familiar tune of “Amazing Grace,” but it’s different from any other time I’ve heard it. Theaster Gates: Billy Sings Amazing Grace is a hypnotic meditation on “one of the most enduring hymns in the English-speaking world.” Vibrating riffs draw me in, stretched out and chopped apart. Baring teeth, sounding out every single micro vocal, and trying out words in every possible way. Repeating words, rhythms, sounds as if searching for hidden meanings whilst also uncovering new translations of the lyrics, almost threadbare from years of wear. Steely drum clangs, liquid saxophone trills, and clacking sticks fill the room with hypnotic energy like an ecstatic dance. Every last drop is squeezed from the song. 

In the video work, Theaster Gates and his musical ensemble The Black Monks rehearse the song with soul singer Billy Furston. The song, as an archival document of Black redemption and emancipation, is reappropriated as a meditation through drawn-out riffs and repeated rhythms, feeling out every single note and story that each word contains. Forston’s voice “reimagines grace as a continual, evolving process—realized through collective effort, community, and the pursuit of redemption.” 

The three-part exhibition Mapping Black Resilience: Three Perspectives at Dalhousie Art Gallery offers alternate practices to archiving and documenting history. Most histories are embedded into daily lives, and the exhibition reveals stories that have always been there but haven’t always been recognized in colonial structures. The exhibition becomes an archive of its own, an archive of resilience.