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. 

By Geoffrey Webster

Sackville-based artist Graeme Patterson’s third thematic exhibition Strange Birds at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, September 6 to November 10, 2024, showcased his limitless talent and ability to provide a wide range of viewers with a cutting-edge yet accessible art-viewing experience. 

From sculpture to virtual reality, Strange Birds ticked off all the boxes of an interactive and deeply engaging exhibition. As the primary art educator for Strange Birds, I found the thematic generosity of the work made my job easy. The artist’s major theme for Strange Birds explores eco-anxiety, a potent fear surrounding the planet’s unforeseeable future due to climate change. Instead of promoting panic, Patterson transforms the alarming topic into an approachable investigation of two protagonists, the heron and the Space Disco starlings. 

These two central characters are portrayed as behaviourally oppositional: the heron stoically reflected the ever-changing Tantramar Marshes, while the starlings were depicted as the frantic executors of these changes. The different interactions between the characters reveal representations of our shared experience with the world around us. As viewers, we study the landscape and try to understand the changes we have made within it, like the heron. But we’re also the dancing Space Disco starlings, coping with our day-to-day, reaping what we’ve sown.

Both complex and technical, Patterson’s Strange Birds depicts the elegance of the Tantramar Marshes while also showcasing its changing nature. Viewers can first see both central figures in conceptual conversation through Patterson’s central film, Strange Birds. The film features a stop-motion animated heron, as well as costumed live-action performances of the starlings. The film is projected on a wall in the exhibition space and acts as a portal to a new yet familiar world. Additionally, the sonic composition featured in the film acts as an ambient accompaniment throughout the exhibition space.   

Patterson presents another place, a smaller yet equally intricate one: a 1:10-scale model of his Sackville home. This artwork feels in no way a constructed miniature of the artist’s home but a shrunken-down version. It looks incredibly realistic and functional. During my time touring Strange Birds, Patterson’s miniature model generated a lot of dialogue with gallery goers, who primarily commented on how immersive it was despite its size. The carefully crafted details in every room are paired with components like flickering lights and rotating doors, which feel as though you are in the starling’s house of imagination.

The Tree is a sculpture partly made from an actual fallen tree, but it also has an important role as a character representing monoculture tree planting in the Strange Birds film. Diane Langevin, Dalhousie Art Gallery’s Indigenous consultant, explained to me the negative impact this form of tree planting has had on numerous Indigenous communities. Langevin shared how these actions have been part of how the government has made communities non-self-sufficient. 

Langevin’s attention was also struck by another sculpture, The House Core. This crisp yet stark model was a cut-out cylindrical section of Patterson’s miniature home but treated as a whole and not a part. It resembles a 3-D blueprint of what a home could look like in the future. While my tour groups and I focused on the distant possibilities of this new technology, Langevin shared that 3-D digital printing technology is currently being used in northern Indigenous communities to build home parts. As a result, Patterson’s sculptures The Tree and The House Core serve as personal and cross-cultural instruments for vibrant dialogue.

The highlight of Strange Birds was the virtual reality room. Set up in the media gallery, VR “Island” transported visitors into the world of the starlings and the heron, which enabled a more interpersonal relationship with the protagonists. I feared that the virtual reality component would detract from the narrative’s ethos, as this sort of technology has proven distractingly theatrical and forced in my past experiences. But with the already introduced and pre-existing world of Strange Birds, Patterson’s use of VR channels the spirit of the exhibition and facilitates an immersive yet appropriate viewing experience. The artist also considered accessibility; if guests were not comfortable with virtual reality or were eagerly waiting to try it out, a clever inclusion of a montage containing key aspects of VR “Island” was projected in the adjacent room. VR “Island” also brought viewers back to the gallery’s entrance, where they could revisit the pivotal Strange Birds short film. 

Patterson’s work was thoughtfully considered, but so was the choice of the Dalhousie Art Gallery as a host venue. The space’s circular nature supplemented the cyclical relationship between both principal characters and fostered a strong narrative flow. It was equally remarkable to see how all of the artworks (distinctly the media-based ones) lived within the brutalist exhibition space. Patterson is at his creative peak, and wherever he lands next, it is definite that his artistic brilliance will carry on.

Geoffrey Webster is an artist and writer based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). Currently in the last year of his BFA in Expanded Media at NSCAD University, his ongoing artistic endeavours surround researching digital media, focusing on its interpretation, practices of preservation, and its educational properties and opportunities. Geoffrey has been part of the Dalhousie Art Gallery for almost two years, most recently working as an art educator with the goal of broadening art’s reception through critical yet accessible discussion. He has also been working as a research

It is incredibly fitting, then, that As We Rise, a photography exhibition I had the pleasure of seeing at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, has the subtitle: Photography from the Black Atlantic. The exhibition is made up of selections from the Wedge Collection. Established in Toronto in 1997 by Dr. Kenneth Montague, this collection gathers art from across the Black world and champions Black artists. By invoking Gilroy’s famous formulation, the exhibition foregrounds the diversity and the connections that characterize the African diaspora, as well as the powerful drive among Black artists to take control of how Black people, their bodies, their practices, and their identities are represented in visual media.

As We Rise contains pieces by over seventy artists, includes works by internationally known figures like Kehinde Wiley, famously the portrait maker of the Obamas, and celebrated African American photographer Carrie Mae Weems. It also includes more locally known and up-and-coming photographers, including a delightful number of Toronto-based artists such as Anique Jordan and Jalani Morgan. The youngest photographer whose work is featured was born in 1996, a full 110 years after the birth of the eldest in 1886. In this more-than-century scope, there are photographs from West, South, North, and Central Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil, Canada, the United States, and Europe, a veritable encircling of the Black Atlantic.

I was thrilled by this bringing together of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Still mesmerized by a beautifully executed photo by Malick Sidibé of a woman and man dancing politely in Mali, I was shocked and delighted to turn to a series of party photos that I immediately recognized as home. I was proven right when I saw that the playful and outrageous images by Tayo Yannick Anton were taken at Yes Yes Y’all, a series of queer hip hop parties that my friends and I used to attend in the mid-2010s.

Within the necessary limits of a single exhibition, As We Rise does a breathtaking job of gathering together diverse visions of Blackness across time and space. While the images themselves are deeply compelling, the work of the curator, Elliott Ramsey of the Polygon Gallery, adds additional layers of meaning and connection through the pieces’ placement in relation to one another. This curatorial practice is what allows the overarching theme of Black art as an avenue of self-determination to emerge.

The way that As We Rise demonstrates this will toward self-definition and self-representation is, for me, what makes this exhibition not merely pleasurable but electric, inspiring, and resonant. In the wake of the transatlantic slave trade, the inciting incident of the Black Atlantic, Black bodies have been subject to the representational whims of systems built decidedly against Black people’s best interest. Black artists respond to this context in myriad ways and are often consciously making aesthetic choices to resist it. The sheer range and creativity of this resistance is part of what makes this exhibition so powerful.

Many of the photographs play with intimacy, some revealing and others withholding. A young man full of swagger on a New York street looks directly into the camera, demanding that the viewer acknowledge his flyness; an artist photographs themself sitting naked and curled up on their apartment floor, arms covering their face. Some of the photos invite the viewer into intimacy with them while others keep the viewer at arm’s length. A father holds his son tenderly in their home; a face and body are blurry from movement, impossible to pin down. Several photos are decidedly defiant. In “Moffie in Irma’s Garden” by Jody Brand, the gender nonconforming subject lies languidly and proudly amidst nature; in a photograph by Jalani Morgan, Black Lives Matter protestors stage a die-in at Yonge-Dundas Square in downtown Toronto. The layout of the exhibition also facilitates moments of beautiful confluence across space and time: on one wall, three photos depicting images of glamour drawing together Bamako, London, and Vancouver. On another wall, a gorgeous photo of two Malian women astride a scooter hangs next to a charming Mississippi couple poised to take off on a motorcycle. It is both the sameness and the difference in these images that makes their proximity so compelling.

As We Rise is an incredible achievement. As both a representation of creativity as wide and as deep as the Atlantic and a source of inspiration for viewers, whether or not they are artists, to celebrate and insist on Black self-definition, this exhibition is a triumph.

Gut Feeling showcases a roster of artists who, in Halifax, are nothing short of beloved. Even on a snowy night in a busy week of exhibition openings, Dalhousie Art Gallery was packed with friends and community members who are deeply devoted to the artists featured. Many artists have practices that intersect with their roles as community organizers and activists, such as Elise Boudreau Graham who co-runs Friends and Neighbours Gallery in a Montréal apartment and Shaya Ishaq who is a co-creator of Black Lit and, as an individual artist, creates libraries of Black literature. The atmosphere at the opening was palpable, supportive, and high-energy. The exhibition’s online description spoke of gut biomes and bacterial interactions between bodies that exchange, collaborate, and change one another. It promised a curatorial paradigm that put communal artistic practice under the microscope to examine how it is intuitive, innate, or embodied on a cellular level. By contrast, the exhibition description on the gallery wall seemed like an apology for not meeting this vision, or an attempt at curatorial modesty. The new description read:

There is no ‘theme’ in this exhibition linking the artists or works together. Instead we chose to work with artists we felt would respond well to our vague notion of a group exhibition and access the Gallery and its resources. In the development of our process, we noted that we were working intuitively, from our gut: / Gut biome, more bacteria than body; if we touch, our biomes change. Biomes exchange, collaborate, and change one another, intuiting needs through intricate communication.

At the opening and the artist talk, there was no mention of gut biomes, and by writing about their own framework as “vague,” Glanzmann and Johnston undersold the nuanced connections that developed naturally between the works. The overwhelming community support for this exhibition shows that the curators should not have lost faith in their original vision. Some artists who may have been considered “emerging” when the exhibition was proposed have, by my standards, surpassed that category today. Perhaps by some curators’ standards these artists— many nationally-exhibiting, and one longlisted for the Sobey Art Award—could fall into this inflated label. Dobbin called into question this category which framed the exhibition by presenting a “retrospective” of their own work created at age eleven. Dobbin’s tongue-in-cheek response to the exhibition exposed what many of us were thinking: that the slow turnaround of exhibitions in major art galleries cannot possibly keep its finger on the pulse of emergent practices. While group exhibitions have the potential to launch the careers of emerging artists, they can also expose the systems that hold them back.

Several artists responded to the architectural and institutional structure of their surroundings in Dalhousie Art Gallery, including Lou Sheppard, who mapped every path that one could take in the building without a key. Elise Boudreau Graham created an installation that celebrated her father Russel Graham, who worked as an electrician at Dalhousie. By painting a line where the electrical conduit runs between two outlets, Boudreau Graham highlighted the technical labour of her NSCAD-trained father in the space of the gallery. Emily Davison and Elyse Moir replayed the script of a past artwork by renowned conceptual artist Gerald Ferguson, which is housed in Dalhousie Art Gallery’s permanent collection. In 1984, Ferguson hired an assistant to create landscape paintings based on Nova Scotia postcards, and the resulting work was mainly accredited to Ferguson. In response, Davison hired Moir to produce 60 postcards (which doubled as time cards to clock in and out of work) based on the four original paintings. It’s as though Moir played broken telephone, by reinterpreting the four repeated images over the course of her shifts as a contracted worker. Scribbled on one of Moir’s sketches it read, “I hadn’t been thinking of the pedagogical implications of the Assistant / Artist relationship.” Davison and Moir jointly share credit, copyright, and future exhibition fees for the work, calling into question the systems of apprenticeship that have traditionally defined emerging artists.

Stephanie Yee’s sweet and sour sauce fountain created a sticky aroma at the entrance of the gallery. Using this common motif found in many Chinese North American restaurants, Yee used the water feature to expose the racial prejudice behind the concept of tackiness and to interrogate the dual meaning of the word taste. In José Andrés Mora’s motorized installation, a screen loudly swung back and forth along a structural beam, displaying a statement in all-caps that was reminiscent of a scrolling news ticker. With each pendulum swing, the message on the screen reflected the movement as though to say “this, but also this, but also this.” The narrative arc of the text waffled with indecision as it scrolled back and forth, forgiving, congratulating, and apologizing to an anonymous reader.

Several artists took intuitive approaches to making, appropriately following the logic of the exhibition’s title. Lou Sheppard’s graphic compositions translated data into dance notation and audio scores, which were then interpreted by dancers. The dancers negotiated space, testing out new postures as they tentatively explored the contours of Sheppard’s notation. Though Sheppard’s work appears to follow a rigid, linear process of translation, it frays the hard disciplinary seams of traditional research by operating in an exploratory manner. Adjacent to Sheppard’s work, the walls around Ishaq’s weavings were plastered with an Octavia E. Butler quote from Parable of the Sower, “ALL THAT YOU TOUCH / YOU CHANGE / ALL THAT YOU CHANGE / CHANGES YOU / THE ONLY LASTING TRUTH IS CHANGE / GOD IS CHANGE.” Ishaq followed Butler’s tenants of change while weaving, shifting techniques each time that a consistent pattern emerged in her fibre works. While the resulting weavings follow winding narrative paths, they are far more balanced than they are spontaneous. The meticulous bands of colour often mirror one another, and Ishaq demonstrates the regularity of change as a consistent inevitability.

The tenuous relationships between the works in the show demonstrate that the curators had the right instincts when drawing together these artists. They certainly followed a clear methodology by relinquishing curatorial authority in order to offer agency to artists with communally-driven practices. Granted, their modesty bordered on self-deprecation, as though it was meant to shield them from criticism. In the past, I have heard Atlantic-based curators talk about a sense of inferiority that follows east coast artists, one that stops them from valuing their own statements, stories, and testimonies. It takes gall to draw a circle around a group of artists, claim a truth about them, and expose them to the eye of the critic. Though this risk of exposure can come at a price for a curator, the calibre of the work in this exhibition deserves and demands such a risk.