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across the work of another researcher, Meril Rasmussen, who spoke out to me straight from 1998 through a 62-page unpublished thesis paper (which we’ve now put online here, with help from NSCAD head librarian Rebecca Young) that detailed the history and context of In This Place.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

Photo from “Growing Up Female,” a personal photo journal by Abigail Heyman published in 1974, and in the NSCAD library ever since.

I decided it’s best to start my exploration of the archive at the very first issue of Visual Arts Nova Scotia from 1976. The very first issue is filled with opinions, opportunities and resources — like tips on taking slides, exhibition listings, reviews and some advice on how to get grants from Canada Council for the arts. It’s clear to me that there was lots of energy being put into the new publication, as a way to support the budding visual arts scene in Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada. This strong foundation of support clearly continues 40 years later. But in the second issue, I came across a very interesting article entitled “Women in the Arts.” It is an annotated bibliographic record of 52 publications that catalog women in the arts, in fields including film, photography, writing, painting and sculpture, compiled by Chery Homes from Montreal’s PowerHouse Gallery, that offers a great historical reference and a poignant reflection of society at the time by a young Canadian feminist of settler heritage.

The list mainly contains books about historical and contemporary (at the time) female artists from America, Canada, Europe, Egypt and Colombia. It is also peppered with a mix of well known feminist authors like Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex , 1952) and lesser known surrealist fiction/nonfiction works such as Down Below by Leonora Carrington (1972). There are some hidden gem artists’ books, such as the photo journal Growing Up Female by Abigail Heyman (1974), a pamphlet from the West Coast Women’s artist Conference at the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California (1972), and some great 1970’s feminist titles such as Rooms with No View (Media Association, no date), Popcorn Venus (Rosen, 1973), Not in God’s Image (O’Failain, Martines, 1970) and Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (Chicago,1975). Also included is a memoir of Elizabeth Vigér-Lebrun from 1903 where Homes writes “The Queen picked up her paints when Elizabeth was too far in pregnancy to stoop. These memoirs include many clever anecdotes of the guerrilla tactics to feminine feminists and artists.” I’m not exactly sure what this means, but it is alluring to find out what guerrilla tactics the portrait painter of Marie Antoinette knew for “feminine feminists and artists.”

Excerpts from “Women — The Visual Arts Bibliography”

The list also includes an “unprecedented survey” called “Sex Differences in Art Exhibition Reviews: A Statistical Study” from 1972 by June Wayne, that looked at “systematic sex discrimination toward women artists by US media… with scrupulously accurate charts to delineate the facts,” notes Homes. Most publications highlight the achievements of women that have been mainly ignored by the mainstream art world except for one noted:  “Extremely sexist” (Mathey,1951) and another from The Vanguard Artist: Portrait and Self Portrait (Rosenburg, Norris, 1965) where it’s noted “Rosenburg confines the women artist and the black artist to separate ghettos, stressing in his chapter on women artists, male chauvinism and role conflicts; and omitting women’s problems elsewhere.” Now, the word ‘ghettos’ would not be used today, but it’s a great look at a feminist critique of the time.

Homes told me, through email, that it took her six months to make the list with the help of her community. “Feminist artists were enthusiastic about helping one another and promoting the art work and activities of like-minded groups and women. Word of mouth, the mail and the telephone — that was what we had to work with.” In 1973 she was a founding member of PowerHouse Gallery or La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse. It is one of Quebec’s oldest artist run-centres and has a mandate to “expand on a history of feminist art practices and aims to provide a platform for contemporary art that is informed by feminist and gender theory, as well as intercultural and trans-disciplinary practices.”

Homes doesn’t remember the exact connection she had to Halifax or to VANS, but emphasized how strong the network of women was how word must have got to her fast (after just one publication remember) that VANS would happily publish her compiled list. On making the list she said: “I had been building my own personal collection of books that featured women artists and it occurred to me that there was no one place where all these books were listed for those of us who were interested in the history of art by women.” When I asked her about diversity of representation on the list she said “Women artists from other cultures were only found in articles or group exhibitions and were probably not ‘popular’ enough to publish books on at the time. We discovered them on our own and through artists exhibition exchanges with other galleries. Montreal (and Canada) was not as diverse as it certainly is now.” She adds: “As well as Frida Kahlo, there was Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold and René Cox that were admired at that time.”

To understand the context of this time and analyze the list more, I needed an expert. Luckily we have one of the top PH.D’s in feminist Art History at NSCAD, and my faculty advisor for this internship, Jayne Wark.

When I met with Dr. Wark, she patiently listened to my concerns and then explained to me that I need to understand the context of what the Art World was like in the 1970’s. One of the first things she said to me was “It was a desert for women! Let alone any person of colour!”

She explained that the art world was almost exclusively a place of the elite. To become an artist or an art historian, you had to come up through an institution and institutions were full of old white men supporting the establishment of the art industry, which was a place only for investment and blue chip artists. The racism and sexism were very institutionalized and heavily entrenched. No one was interested in talking about or supporting women artists because they were not considered good investments, even if the art was good. It was not unusual to be denied entry to an exhibition solely based on the fact of being a woman or a person of colour. And galleries could and would literally say it to your face that bluntly. There was no hiding the sexism and racism in the more subtle ways that still exist today. Today, the law is supposed to protect people from being discriminated against based on gender, race or sexual identity. But in the 1970’s, that was not the case. Basically, anyone not a white man was considered “insignificant.” It was indeed, a desert.

The spread of information about feminism and women’s art was new. Dr. Wark says that NSCAD offered its first Art History Class in 1976 called “Women in Image, Women as Image Maker.”

Looking at the list, Dr. Wark immediately noticed one book of huge significance missing; American Lucy Lippard’s From the Center: Feminist Essay’s on Women’s Art from 1976. There is a good chance, though, that Homes may not have heard about it by that time, but it is of particular importance as it may have been one of the first times the word “feminist” appeared in a publication. Lippard received an honorary degree from NSCAD in 2007.

We talked about other artists, particularly women of colour, who were significant during and before that time, but most likely not have had anything published about them. Such as the Harlem based painter, sculptor and quilter Faith Ringgold. Ringgold’s quilts at that time told the stories of African American women and portrayed their lived experiences. Another artist whose work I particularly enjoy is, Adrian Piper. Her performance work in the early 1970’s — such as her Catalysts lll, where she stuffs a large white towel into her mouth and rides around on a bus — explores race and gender and the feelings of public othering. Both artists have talked about not being able to get their own stories published and used their work to communicate their experiences.

Thanks to my chat with Dr. Wark, and my emails with Homes, I came away appreciating the reality of the situation for women in the Arts during the 1970’s. Homes’ initiative in gathering this feminist content for the second issue of Visual Arts Nova Scotia fed into the network of artists’ resources and publications of the 1970’s in Atlantic Canada.

More: Meet Visual Arts News’ research intern Chris Shapones