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.

Commissioned by the Bonavista Biennale, Will Gill’s Green Chair was a solid steel, powder-coated, 130-pound replica of a mass-produced wooden chair that can still be found in many Newfoundland kitchens. With the help of local fisherman Ivan Russell and assistant Flo Nitzinger, it was lowered over the cliff where Gill and the team could reach it by boat and anchor it into place. Green Chair withstood months of hurricane-force winds, and winter blizzards that struck Bonavista, a small town on the Bonavista peninsula (three and a half hours northwest of St. John’s). 

The Green Chair was covered in frozen ocean spray before the sea ice tore it away in spring, but it remains the iconic image of 2017’s Bonavista Biennale.

Since then I’ve been trying to determine why my experience of the first Bonavista Biennale has stuck with me for so long. I remember telling a friend the following week that it actually worked. 

The Biennale could have looked as if the projects had been dropped in from a distant planet called Contemporary Art, but it didn’t. It could have felt as if a group of outsiders took it upon themselves to tell the story of the place to its own inhabitants, but it didn’t. The event could have pandered to its viewers by explaining the basics of performance or installation art, but it didn’t do that either. 

Instead, the Bonavista Biennale seemed, at least from my perspective as an Alberta-born, Ontario-raised, UK-educated arts writer (who has been living in St. John’s for six years), to strike a complicated balance. 

I never once overheard anyone ask why a person would want to build a steel chair in the North Atlantic or dismiss Green Chair in any way. Instead, its poetic logic seemed clear and necessary to everyone who talked about it in pubs and shops around the peninsula over that weekend, or in subsequent social media posts and newspaper coverage. The rarity of that sort of reaction to public art only dawned on me after the initial adventure of the event.

Meaningful engagement was not limited to Green Chair, but seemed to extend to the festival as a whole. A remarkable feat considering the 2017 event comprised 24 sites spanning a 100 km loop around the tip of the peninsula, ranging from provincial historic sites and public buildings to dark root cellars and open fields. Many locations were staffed by people from the communities nearby. In some cases, the attendants were able to speak to the artists about their work as they installed it, and this, in turn, led to revealing multi-layered conversations with viewers making their way around the Biennale route. 

For instance, in Keels, population 51, at the end of the road off the far side of the loop, a young man talked about parties and scout meetings he attended in a refurbished community hall where the portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth still hangs over the communal kitchen. Pages from Pam Hall’s ongoing Towards An Encyclopaedia of Local Knowledge lined the walls of the main room, and the attendant made sure to point out tables set with maps, pens and sticky notes for people to contribute their knowledge to the next volume of the project, noting some valuable points about nearby fishing spots.

Thankfully, the 2019 edition of the Biennale will include many of the same sites and a number of new locations. Again, attendants will be from local communities, and given the success of the discourses created in 2017, co-curator Catherine Beaudette wants to improve what the Biennale provides in order to create a more equitable exchange between the organization and those acting as ambassadors for it, and their own communities. Offering guided tours with more opportunities for communication between the attendants and the exhibiting artists, “making sure that we give to them as much as they give to us.”

In terms of artists, the 2019 list is an intriguing mix of Inuit, Indigenous, Newfoundland and Labrador-based, national and international, established, mid-career and emerging artists, indicating more potential for discourse. Artists like Jordan Bennett, Meagan Musseau, Camille Turner, D’Arcy Wilson, Thaddeus Holowina, Wanda Koop, Mark Igloliorte, Meghan Price, Kym Greeley, Barb Hunt and Jane Walker, and many others will expand the conversation during 2019’s Bonavista Biennale, running between August 17 – September 15, 2019.

Mark Igloliorte, an Inuk artist from the Nunatsiavut area of Labrador, will present a multi-disciplinary body of work that travels directly from the Ramp Gallery in Hamilton, New Zealand, to Bonavista. Traverse is a collection of past and present pieces that trace Igloliorte’s ongoing exploration of his culture and language through the lens of contemporary travel, recreation, geography, and the process of decolonization. In the video of a performance called Eskimo Roll, Igloliorte is in a kayak surrounded by oil tankers and container ships in English Bay, near Vancouver, attempting to complete the troublingly-titled manoeuvre. A painting called Kayak is Inuktituk for Seal Hunting Boat reveals the linguistic origins of his vessel, often perceived as mere recreational equipment. Seal Skin Neck Pillow, on the other hand, directly challenges international restrictions on sealskin products and the associated ignorance of Inuit economic realities and cultural practices through Igloliorte’s own variation on the ubiquitous piece of travel gear.  

In an intriguing pairing, Barb Hunt, an established fibre artist living in British Columbia and professor at Memorial University’s Corner Brook campus, is collaborating with Jane Walker, her former student and an emerging artist and administrator who helped organize the 2017 Biennale, and is a driving force behind the Bonavista Peninsula’s brand-new art space, Union House Arts. Hunt describes Walker as “one of the best students of my entire (23 year) career teaching visual art.” Hunt was familiar with Walker’s research on art in rural contexts in Newfoundland and the Shetland Islands and wanted to work with her on a project about loss in this province. 

“There is a way we react to gradual loss in our small communities, in towns where there are more deaths than births – more funerals than christenings,” says Walker to a local junior high art class. 

Text will be spelled out in Morse code using artificial flowers collected from outside cemeteries in the province. Housed in St. Mary’s Anglican Church in Elliston, near the Sealers’ Memorial and the Home From the Sea Interpretation Centre, there are also connections to sudden, large-scale losses like a1914 sealing disaster that took the lives of 251 people from communities nearby and prompted significant changes to regulation of the industry.

St. John’s artist Kym Greeley will present a new series of paintings based on the visual elements of driving along the Bonavista Peninsula. Eschewing the usual tropes of Newfoundland landscapes like boats, icebergs, and ocean, Greeley investigates the ways most visitors and residents actually see the places around them – through the windshield of a car. Using this fixed perspective as a frame, and images taken with the professional camera she mounts to her dashboard, paintings will play with colour, atmosphere, and subtle changes in landscape from painting to painting, recalling the slow-moving imagery of a long roadtrip. 

Toronto-based artist Meghan Price will install two projects and lead a boulder kite workshop and geo walk in conjunction with Suzanne Nacha. The two met on Fogo Island, NL when Nacha was Geologist-in-Residence with the Shorefast Foundation and Price was Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of the Flat Earth. 

In Price’s Body Rock, paper is covered with graphite rubbings that record subtle geological textures, then stitched into floating “boulders” to remind us that rock, viewed in its own timescale, is not the sedentary material we imagine, but something always in motion. 

New Balance, on the other hand, implicates consumer culture and waste in geologic time by recreating upper layers of the earth’s crust in high-tech textiles, and the foams and rubbers of athletic shoes. Price and Nacha will also participate in a GEOart symposium on August 22 and 23, organized by Discovery Aspiring Geopark Inc. – a group dedicated to securing UNESCO Global Geopark designation for the upper half of the Bonavista Peninsula.

Additional programming was recently announced and the schedule includes panel discussions, a curators’ tour, workshops in photography and natural dyes, an outdoor kiln firing, a pop-up food truck, and film screening.

The Bonavista Peninsula is a locus of regeneration with new businesses opening and young people moving to the area, despite its relatively recent decimation by the cod moratorium in 1992. Buzzwords tend to fly around coverage of new initiatives in the province – cultural tourism, sustainability, diversification – terms that often seem disconnected from the people who live the theory. 

When considering the context of the Biennale, Beaudette wonders “How do you create these new economies without destroying what’s there? How do you do it by building on what’s there and be sensitive to the area without imposing some kind of Disneyland impression? You can build on what’s there – the culture, the history, the geology – and use art as an economic stimulator and a force for social change. It’s a whole other function of art that I’m really excited about, and it’s resonating in other, similar communities.” 

Beaudette laughs when asked about the lasting effects of the 2017 Biennale, as there had once been serious discussion about whether people on the peninsula would even attempt to pronounce the word biennale. Now, she says, “it just rolls off the tongue” among her neighbours. 

Someone in the local paint shop mentioned recently that he’d visited all 25 of the 2017 sites. “That makes it meaningful. So many of these things were so fun and engaging that it inadvertently made fans of cutting-edge contemporary art. That feels productive,” says Beaudette. The fact that many local viewers had personal connections to the sites where the art was displayed meant “there was ownership there.” 

My experience as a visitor to the Bonavista Peninsula during the last Biennale felt like the best kind of road trip. I discovered places I might never have encountered and had discussions that would never have occurred otherwise. I saw and learned something new at every turn.

Image: Visual Arts News’ Research Coordinator Chris Shapones, Moving Forward, Looking B(l)ack panelists Jade Peek, Lucie Chan, Pamela Edmonds and Bria Miller, and panel facilitator Sylvia Hamilton. Photo credit: Susie Shapones

We no longer want a seat at the table. Pamela Edmonds was clear when she expressed the feeling that she and others in the black artist community are full.

Through time, black artists have played the role of guest at an intimate dinner party. They have made it onto the eclectic “invite list” sent out by those that inhabit the mainstream framework. They have been welcomed at the door. A card reading “reserved” has even been placed at the head of their dinner plate. They have been forced to mingle and make small talk – to endure the prying questions and to speak as an authority on the recent race issue in the news. All the while, black artists are aware that their presence has made some of the other guests uncomfortable.

In October, Edmonds sat with with fellow panelists Lucie Chan, Bria Miller, and Jade Byard Peek at the North Memorial Library in Halifax. These black and Afro-indigenous women are visual and performance artists, as well as curators. They are preparing their own table, a space where black Nova Scotians can create and explore the complexities of their existence through art. The name of the event, “Moving Forward, Looking B(l)ack,” comes from Pamela Edmonds’ exhibit of the same title. It speaks to the progression of black art in Canada set against a historical backdrop. Sylvia Hamilton, acclaimed documentarian, facilitates the discussion.

The movement forward for black contemporary artists is one of self-definition. “It’s an ask,” says Chan.

Black artists are asking to be trusted with their own narrative and to not have to respond to the one created for them. Contemporary art is considered self-referential, Edmonds suggests; however, black contemporary artists constantly have to explain themselves to be accepted into the dominant framework. Their work is often defined as activism, without their consent — as Miller adds, merely because it is presented from their own worldview. Black existence in itself is perceived as an act of resistance to the mainstream. The tension between integration and intervention for black artists is at the centre of this discussion.

“Art is one of those spaces that we’ve been kept out of,” Edmonds says. “We’re not supposed to be there: it’s classist, it’s elitist, yet it is bible to our survival.”

“Don’t tell us we’re not here, because we’ve always been here,” remarks Hamilton.

“It’s about connecting with the diaspora and our own histories as black Nova Scotians” — Jade Peek

Jade Peek graduated from the art history program at NSCAD University, an experience she recognizes as a privilege, but also a source of frustration. The absence of black contemporary artists, especially black femme and black queer artistry, in educational institutions is jarring. To that end, her work in community focuses on healing, pedagogy, space and representation. Like Bria Miller, who is a native of Yarmouth and organizer of art workshops for black youth, accessibility of art education is essential to her.

As a black and Mi’kmaq woman of transgender experience, Peek uses her body in live performance to explore themes of racism and trauma. Her piece Fried, performed at Queer Acts in Halifax, indicates the manipulation of the black femme body to be accepted by western standards. Sitting before an audience, Peek straightens her hair in front of a mirror while an audio soundtrack of harassment and racist commentary plays in the background. Her collaborative projects, We are the Griots and SankoFest, are spaces where black artists can exist without explaining themselves — their own table. They present a dialogue between the then and now, the past context to contemporary black art and existence.

“It’s about connecting with the diaspora and our own histories as black Nova Scotians,” says Peek.

To mark the progression of contemporary black artistry is to witness the move from a focus on making black pain visible to white audiences to an exploration of black aesthetic and stylization; moving outside the confines of slavery narratives to the possibilities of Afropunk and Afrofuturism, the recognition that black survival is art and creation in itself.At the same time, it is necessary to recognize as James Baldwin did, that “history is not the past,” but a conversation in the present. Homage is due to black artists that played their given role so that those now would not have to.

The way forward is by going places where black artists have not gone before and that means respectfully, (or not so respectfully), excusing oneself from the table to begin planning one’s own dinner party.