Respectability will not save you

We are on a journey¹

Inside the $276 million upside down boat, I try to situate myself among the visible walkways, extensive use of glass, and views of the city.² I’m looking for the entrance to the show, moving through crowds towards a possible opening, but the guard stops me. He thinks I’m trying to get into Picasso: Painting the Blue Period ³ ahead of everyone else. “What are you trying to find, ma’am?” I point to my ticket, silent behind my mask.

Moko Jumbie by the British-Trinidadian artist Zak Ové (2021) towers above the security guard, illuminated by sunlight. Historically, Moko Jumbie was a Carnival god who lived in the hearts of enslaved Africans to eventually walk the streets celebrating freedom, performing acts unfathomable to the human eye.⁴ Ové’s Moko, a modern interpretation, is gold and turquoise, decked out in cowbells, feathers, and Air Jordans, brash and drawing instant attention, one hand open, one hand raised in a fist. Behind him, a long line for Picasso and then a gallery of gold-framed European art and then an elevator, where, four floors up, there’s Fragments of Epic Memory. It feels apt to have to pass under the shadow of the moko and through the hallways of classical and modern European art to reach the first major exhibition of Caribbean works in Canada.

“We are on a journey,” reads the AGO’s statement on Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Accessibility. Passing under Moko Jumbie, I realize how visible Caribbean culture and art are becoming in this exhibition, displayed in the boat built by institutional and colonial powers, where anyone (who could manage the price of admission) can access it.

We recognize our opportunity⁵

The exhibition takes its name from Derek Walcott’s The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory, an excerpt of the lecture he delivered in 1992 when receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. Antilles comes from the Spanish translation for “mysterious lands,”⁶ and Walcott’s speech pulls apart the fragmented, seemingly otherworldly representations of the Antilles in colonial literature and art. He describes the experience of watching preparations for the performance of a Hindu epic in a village in Trinidad, witnessing a panoply of histories as they unfold in real time. For Walcott, it’s a moment where the complexities of identity in the Caribbean are made visible.

“Jamaican isn’t really a culture on its own,” my aunty told me once, and I wasn’t sure at the time what she meant. Walcott puts it another way: trying to gather the pieces of a broken vase. Through enslavement and a series of migrations across thousands of years, the seven hundred islands of the Antilles have come to be shaped by the presence of Indigenous, Spanish, African, Chinese, Indian, and British peoples; from seemingly disparate pieces, the inhabitants became one culture, one people.⁷ “Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories,” notes Walcott, “our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original container.”⁸

Walcott is wary of appealing to a postcard version of the Caribbean as he accepts the Nobel, the highest prize in literature by Western-European standards, particularly one that risks glossing over the deeper meaning of “shattered histories.” These histories are not simply ruined, not simply damaged. But the Eurocentric understanding of the Antilles has always lacked depth and imaginative complexity. “A culture based in joy,” Walcott says, “is bound to be shallow.”

Fragments of Epic Memory feels hyper aware of the trap of performing for white tourist consumption, rejecting the romanticism of “mysterious islands” for a more nuanced, layered presentation. The newly appointed Curator, Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora, Dr. Julie Crooks, places the works of twenty-seven modern and contemporary artists alongside two hundred photographs from the Montgomery Collection. The photographs were collected by New York-based photographer Patrick Montgomery, who uncovered the images over ten years of scouring online auction catalogs and contacting photo dealers in France and the U.K., uncovering images far from the former colonial islands they came from.⁹

The first image you see when you enter the space is a photograph from 1895, entitled Emancipation Day, Jamaica. As Crooks notes in the exhibition text, she was drawn to the image not only for how it demonstrates the ways Caribbean people presented themselves to the colonial camera’s gaze, wearing clean, starched-white dresses and wide brimmed hats, surrounded by palm leaves and dark forest, but also for how that gaze is returned by the people. Though they are being subjected to the gaze of the photographer, on closer inspection, I recognized knowing smiles on their faces. I see you seeing me, they seem to be saying, especially on our day of emancipation.

This knowing gaze permeates the rest of the show. Crooks places rows of photographs under glass in the center of each room, allowing the viewer to move back and forth between historical photographs and works of contemporary art. Many of the photographs, attributed to unknown photographers, show people posing stoically or playing freely, caught between moments, relaxing ever so briefly in front of the camera. The photographs, like the artworks in the show, do not sit on a definitive timeline. Images of women and men posing in traditional clothing during the colonial era, for example, reflect the same neutral faces you might see in a collection of contemporary passport photos. Many of the images feel anthropological, capturing the everyday mundanity of street photography, along with the problematic gaze it entails, with image titles like “Domestics with Yams and Cocoanuts,” “Coffee Plantation,” “Festival, Trinidad.” Some of the names of the photographs had to be changed to reflect racial awareness and sensitivity – as a viewer, you’re left to speculate which. This exhibition note makes it clear how the people in these photographs were initially meant to be framed.

I lean closer to the images, much like a tourist would. As someone who grew up in Canada and the U.S., with a Chinese-Jamaican background who has visited Jamaica a handful of times to see family, I’m both moved and unsettled by the images. With the ongoing loss of records and personal histories—the shattered histories Walcott refers to—the photographs are a link to historical memory, proof that Caribbeans had rich, complicated lives during the post-enslavement period and beyond. But the images also treat people as objects to be looked at and considered at a distance, whose visibility depended on how the photographer, often an unknown person behind the camera, decided to frame them.

Several of the contemporary artworks in the show play with the visibility of faces, contrasting the historical documentation of a photograph with the complexity of representation. Kelly Sinnapah Mary’s Notebook of No Return (2018) depicts a Caribbean woman looking over her shoulder at the viewer, yellow spikes dotting her face and hair, an earring adorning her ear. Mary draws on personal photographs of her ancestors, who were likely Tamils brought to Guadeloupe in the 1800s as indentured servants. Through painting, she reframes them, giving them a monstrous, haunted appearance, covered in spikes similar to sea urchins, a common creature in the oceans of the Caribbean. By connecting the women in her paintings to the natural world, Mary pushes visibility beyond simple representation; she creates an uncanny image of women linked to the landscape of the islands, women who were often ignored, hidden, or forgotten in Caribbean history.

Leasho Johnson’s Jaw bone (man looking back at the cane fields) (2019) deconstructs the image of a man in a sugar cane field, a scene synonymous with life on the plantation. From a whirl of bright rainbow hues, a head emerges, the teeth skewed to one side, a shoulder and neck twisted among a riot of yellows, pinks, and oranges. Johnson makes it hard for a viewer to recognize parts of the face, skewing the portrait with streaks of colour that seem to emerge out of the man’s mouth. Like Mary, Johnson isn’t afraid to make the portrait startling and difficult to recognize, highlighting the queerness just under the skin, making us look as it spills out, no longer hidden away.

Drawing on the connection between body and nature, Nadia Huggins‘ Transformations (2014-2016) series melds underwater photographs of the artist with sea creatures and plant life, including the spikes of a sea urchin and the rough, round shapes of coral. In each image, the artist appears to be morphing into an ocean creature, freed from the confines of race or gender, turning into a being difficult to identify or pin down. As soon as I get swept away by the imaginative possibilities of these works, of embracing opacity in all its forms, I return to the photographs in the display cases, to the faces frozen forever by some unknown hand.

“In a hostile environment, respectability will not save you”¹²

Hazy blue water bubbles around the arms of a Black boy as he swims, the kind of water I remember diving into in the Caribbean. The image is from Huggins’ Circa No Future (2014-ongoing), a video work that follows a group of young Black men as they swim at a local watering hole. The title is taken from the words on one of the boys’ shirts, who is filmed diving into the water and then shown in reverse, pulled back out of the waves. I’m reminded of my father’s childhood stories of trips to the blue hole in Ocho Rios, where the water was so blue it looked fake. Some of my father’s childhood friends made it out of Jamaica, towards a future, and others didn’t. Huggins’ film, shown in the near dark, gives the boys a mythical quality, carefree and loose, caught in the loop of diving and coming up for air.

In the exhibition catalog, Crooks places stills from Huggins’ film next to photographs from the Montgomery Collection of men diving off the edge of canoes for coins in St. Lucia and Barbados in the 1800s; their bodies become blurs as they hit the surface of the water. Like an echo, Huggins’ film is haunted by the bodies of men who blur and become water, the same water that carried their ancestors over to what the Spanish called “the Antillies.”

Alberta Whittle’s business as usual: hostile environment (2021) looks at bodies of water as a means of control, rather than a source of freedom. Whittle is interested in how water is used to facilitate the voluntary and involuntary movement of people. Her piece opens with footage of the Forth and Clyde canal in Scotland. She shows a group of Black people floating down the canal, singing spirit songs, images that are later contrasted with historical documentation of the 2018 Windrush scandal, in which people from Caribbean countries were wrongly detained, deported, and harassed by the UK police. In a voice over, she reads the “Lessons Learned” review published by the committee, highlighting how “a lack of institutional memory” and “a poor understanding of Britain’s colonial history” allowed the Windrush scandal to happen.¹³ The treatment of Black Britons during SARS and now COVID-19 is an extension of this hostile environment, where, Whittle notes, “respectability will not save you.”¹⁴

Perhaps the most cathartic moment in Whittle’s piece appears at the end of the film. A woman chants to the beat of a drum to her mirrored image, a chant that turns into a series of howls, her mouth opening so wide it almost feels like she’s going to swallow up the room. Rather than a scream of fear, she seems in complete control of her voice, even when it threatens to break into chaos, howling at an image of herself until she suddenly stops, letting us know the performance is done. It is a culmination of Whittle’s careful examination of anti-blackness and colonial violence, and how it can all flow together like water being directed through a channel.

She made a list¹⁵

Running through the back of my mind as I walk through Fragments of Epic Memory is the history of the boat I’m in, the institution of the AGO. That a show of this caliber even exists in the space feels like an extension of the knowing gaze, of visibility and invisibility happening at the same time. Within the 122 year history of the gallery, funded almost exclusively by white wealth, moments of racial violence emerge on a timeline like pinpricks. In 2018, the AGO apologized for racist depictions of Asian culture (rice hats, kimonos) at their fundraiser gala.¹⁶ In 2020, a Black AGO employee was told her hair could ‘scare’ customers and wasn’t allowed to leave her hair down, despite non-Black servers being allowed to do so. She quit the position and lodged an official complaint. When the institution asked how they could remedy the situation, she made a list of suggestions. As of 2020, she was still waiting for any action to be taken.¹⁷ In a 2020 feature for Canadian Art, titled “A Crisis of Whiteness in Canada’s Art Museums,” journalist Sean O’Neill reported on the AGO’s long history of whiteness in powerful positions within the institution, with an overwhelmingly white board and a lack of diversity and inclusion in their programming.¹⁸

This list likely includes a very small number of reported incidents in the history of the AGO, and the undocumented racist experiences likely outweigh the reported. This history of racism unfolds in the same space as Fragments of Epic Memory, a show that makes visible vital artistic traditions that have existed long before it was captured by the colonial gaze. The diverse artistic approaches, the cultural references, the historical memories within the works, and the historical photographs all underscore just how much these art movements and cultural practices, hidden for too long by choice or by force, have functioned on their own, within their communities, and in their own language for generations. Even now, they continue to.

Like many art institutions, the AGO responded to the death of Eric Garner in 2014 and George Floyd in 2020, as well as the protests supporting the BLM movement in summer 2020, with black squares on Instagram. It also quickly stated it was “moving forward with intention” by hiring a Diversity and Inclusion Manager, posing the question, “How do we, as a leading Canadian museum, pledge to accurately reflect the diversity of our community through our internal culture, exhibitions, collections and programming?”¹⁹ These decisions were seemingly motivated by the public call to action for art institutions in Canada to do better, particularly ones with access to incredible capital and power like the AGO. Without these demands, too loud and bold to ignore, I likely wouldn’t be able to witness Fragments of Epic Memory, an exhibition that finally presents contemporary Caribbean artists with nuance, depth, and historical context.

Brought to life by the resources only available at a well-funded institution, as well as the brilliant curation of Dr. Julie Crooks, it’s an important moment in the long timeline of white supremacy that has occupied, and continues to occupy, the building and its walls. A show like this is a brief but hopeful shift in the waterway, a smirk at the gaze of institutional power, reclaiming it for just a moment, before the image is captured.

Steph Wong Ken is a Chinese-Jamaican writer currently based in Tkaronto. Find more of her work at stephwongken.com.

1. “AGO for all,” About the Art Gallery of Ontario,
2. “Transformation AGO: Project Fact Sheet,” Art Gallery of Ontario,
3. For more on Picasso, see: Delistraty, Cody. “How Picasso Bled the Women in His Life for Art.” The Paris Review. The Paris Review Foundation, November 9, 2017.
4. Footage of the evolution of Moko Jumbie as a Carnival character can be found on Know Your Caribbean’s Instagram: Know Your Caribbean (@knowyourcaribbean), “What is a Moko Jumbie?,” Instagram video, January 22, 2022,
5. Art Gallery of Ontario, “AGO for all,”
6. “The term Antilles dates traditionally from before Europeans reached the New World, when Antilia referred to semi-mythical lands located somewhere west of Europe across the Atlantic.” Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Antilles.” Encyclopedia Britannica
7. “Out of many, one people” appears on the coat of arms for Jamaica.
8. Derek Walcott’s Nobel Lecture, 1992
9. Price, Neil, “Reclaiming Caribbean history one photo at a time,” Now Toronto, 2019
10. Steph Wong Ken
11. Steph Wong Ken
12. From Alberta Whitte’s business as usual: hostile environment. The line is likely also a reference to Shannon M. Houston’s op-ed for Salon where she advocates for the rejection of the “decorum and dignity” approach for the #BLM movement.  Houston writes: “Allow this to be one more voice crying out into the wilderness: Respectability will not save us.” Houston, Shannon M. “Respectability Will Not Save Us: Black Lives Matter Is Right to Reject the ‘Dignity and Decorum’ Mandate Handed down to Us from Slavery.” Salon. Salon.com, August 25, 2015.
13. Direct quote taken from “Windrush Lessons Learned Review: independent review by Wendy Williams“, March 2020
14. Whittle, business as usual
15. From Francis, Angelyn. “A Black Ago Worker Was Told Her Hair Could ‘Scare’ Customers. the Gallery Agreed That Was Discrimination and Promised to Do Better. A Year Later, She’s Still Fighting for Justice.” thestar.com, July 30, 2020.
16. News Staff, “AGO apologizes for ‘racist costumes’ at fundraising party.” CityNews, Apr 21, 2018. From “AGO apologizes for ‘racist costumes’ at fundraising party”
17. This quote in particular struck me: “With regards to her training suggestions, Doyle-Merrick was told the AGO had plans underway, so her specific asks wouldn’t be met. Doyle-Merrick still questions, if training was sufficient, why did she experience racial discrimination? Why didn’t her own work training in 2019 feel tailored to human rights?” Francis, “A Black AGO worker.”
18. Stephen Jost, Director and CEO of the AGO, had this to share: “…Jost described his approach to diversifying the institution as one of “relentless incrementalism,” and said that his trajectory for the AGO’s staff, board, membership and audience to reflect Toronto’s diversity was “a 25-year goal.” He continued, “Simultaneously, I think that we need to really make sure we’re focusing on excellence. This isn’t just about inclusion. Inclusion is part of that conversation, but it doesn’t do anybody a service to lower standards or change standards, basically, to reach that goal.” Sean O’Neill, “A Crisis of Whiteness in Canada’s Art Museums.” Canadian Art, June 23, 2020.
19. “Moving forward with intention.” Art Gallery of Ontario, January 27, 2021.