Writing Black Canadian Art

Part One

For her 2021 exhibition “Blackity,” curator and art historian Joana Joachim gathered the materials and ephemera of black Canadian cultural production from across the ten thousand documents housed in the Artexte Information Centre fonds. Nestled in downtown Montreal, the centre has a modest exhibition space surrounded by boardrooms, offices, worktables and an enormous row of hand-crank rolling shelves. These shelves hold entire collections of magazines, active and defunct (think FUSE Magazine or Parachute), artist-run centre administration documents and artist files, as well as books, pamphlets, media and other ephemera related to Canadian art from 1965 to the present. “This exhibition begins to trace a temporal cartography of Black Canadian art history,” Joachim declared in her curatorial statement. Along with the presented documents, she translated her findings into a data visualization on the gallery walls. The striated, floor-to-ceiling lines charted the ebbs and flows of attention to, and the presence of, these practices over the decades. 

During the time Joachim was building her exhibition at Artexte, I was a researcher in residence there, also looking for documentation of black Canadian cultural practices in the collection. I concluded two things during this period: (1) art writing is indispensable to creating a healthy art history, and (2) there already exists enough documentation, however diffuse and unattended to, to create a black Canadian art history. Buseje Bailey: Reasons We Have to Disappear Every Once in a While: a Black Art History Project was the chapbook I made based on my research at Artexte.¹ My aim was to reproduce some of the critical discourse that had formed around the work of a black woman artist whose prolific career in the ‘80s and ‘90s had been promptly written out of art history. I placed reprinted interviews and essays by and about Bailey’s work from the Artexte fonds with new reflections and conversations with the artist. “I’m looking for Buseje Bailey,” artist Sandra Brewster wrote in a 2016 letter to Theaster Gates. Commenting on being taught a feminist approach to art history, she notes, “there did not seem to be any acknowledgement of Black artists and artists of colour practicing within the same time periods as their white counterparts.”² Gathering the existing documentation into a chapbook was my way of suggesting that this kind of art writing and critical engagement are the matter from which we can form a collective memory of black Canadian art.

For some time now, I have been dedicated to writing about black Canadian art, and as I have done this—seeing exhibitions, doing archival research, and talking to artists and art workers—I have learned that art writing, in particular the practice of writing about black Canadian art, is a complicated business. A cyclical vacillation, instigated by funding bodies and reinforced by the art world’s gatekeepers, has led to a hyper attention to identity and representation being taken up with urgency, dropped, and then again renewed by those same arts institutions. To remain legible, artists are encouraged to make work that aligns with representation mandates. This often overdetermines how artists approach making, and how Canadian critics and curators present and write about black art practices. 

The irony is that this emphasis on identity was itself once a hard-won corrective, until it calcified into an expectation imposed on any artist who was not white. How do you justify the significance and technical merit of your identity work? was replaced by Why aren’t you making identity work?

For black Canadians, the question of identity is complicated, though for a long time, a simple narrative of escape to freedom through the underground railroad was the only history we were allowed. As a nation founded on settler colonialism and sustained through strategic immigration, the African diasporic people who have ended up here since the arrival of the first European settlers have been diverse. There is no single black identity or black history in Canada, even while black Canada has been shown by curators, critics, and theorists such as Andrea Fatona, Peter Hudson, Katherine Mckittrick, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Rinaldo Walcott to be a distinct experience within the black diaspora. This poses a problem for ‘black Canadian art,’ if one expects those practices and the writing around them to focus on a simple story about identity. Black Canadian art has a long and intricate history across the country, and it exceeds the bounds of a singular narrative.

Part Two

Last fall, I visited Edmonton for the first time. I stayed north of the river, midtown, in a neighbourhood where multi-lane roadways criss-crossed residential streets, and which, when I mentioned it, everyone said was great, and very central. The tree-lined streets reminded me of the suburbs where we would visit family when I was a kid. I learned that Edmonton is rapidly developing, thanks to money brought in by work further north in the oil fields. I was there to give a keynote at MacEwen University and attend the opening of the group exhibition of local artists Elsa Robinson, Raneece Buddan, AJA Louden, and Garfield Morgan, curated by Carolyn Jervais at the Mitchell Art Gallery. Jervais had brought me on at the start of the project to spend time with the artists and write about their work. 

Over the year leading up to the exhibition, I met with the artists regularly, bringing in guests and texts that helped us think through their practices. I suggested we read Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, which had helped me find a sense of belonging as a black girl from Quebec. We talked about Brand’s door of no return as both a metaphor and a real place that connects all people in the African diaspora by our proximity or distance to it. A feeling of familiarity, of home, exists in the unrootedness of diaspora. Though it was their home, the artists shared, they felt a difficult sense of belonging to Edmonton. The book helped to identify and name this difficulty, and also revealed its relation to elsewhere (an ongoing effect of empire) that gives it definition. Brand’s Map, we agreed, gave us permission as black people in Canada not to prove our origins, nor to defend our belonging. 

I invited curator Alyssa Fearon to talk to us about her recent exhibition “Black Prairies,” for which she paired glass plate negatives of early homesteading life in Manitoba’s Swan River Valley (taken by photographer William “Billy” Beale between 1915 and 1925) with images from the Frank B. Jamerson fonds documenting early black migrants to Amber Valley, Alberta and works by contemporary black artists based in the prairies. Together, these documents and artworks tell a story about the longstanding presence of black people in the prairies. Still, even within this region, the local experience is different from other parts of the area. Artist, curator, programmer, and organizer Christina Battle explained how Edmonton is distinct from the rest of the prairies. The treaties overlap, but Edmonton is in Aspen parkland, a very different geography than places further east in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, or even Calgary, just a few hours away, near the Rocky Mountain foothills. It feels like an isolated place: there aren’t many opportunities for exhibiting locally, and artists rarely show outside of the city. The more I learn, the more I understand Jervais’ reasoning for bringing me in to get to know the four artists’ work and write about the exhibition. I also see why Elsa, who was the artist initially approached by Jervais to show at the Mitchell Art Gallery, had wanted to open up the opportunity and invite other artists in. 

Part Three

Elsa, Raneece, AJA, and Garfield eventually called their exhibition “New Routes: threads across space and time” (2025). During our conversation about Brand’s book, the artists emphasized the importance of charting an Afro-imaginary, of developing a cognitive schema for the experience of being black. In many ways, the exhibition, for which they collaborated on a new installation and each contributed several artworks, delivered on this aim. Their visual storytelling was charged with Afrofuturism, as well as African symbols, folktales, and spirituality, all of which seemed to reach towards an Africanist past or future. At first, I struggled to write about the show because these themes kept me returning to identity: I could not divorce the stories the artists were telling in their work from the significance of their experiences of blackness. Maybe because I was unfamiliar with Edmonton, I was having a hard time situating their work within a Canadian context. The black Canadian art I am most familiar with draws attention to and troubles the tensions and contradictions within official versions of Canadian history and identity. Deanna Bowen’s Invisible Empires (2013), 1911 Anti Creek-Negro Petition (2013) and Black Drones in the Hive (2023), Charles Campbell’s Breath Archives (2025), Stan Douglas’s Hogan’s Alley (2013), Sylvia D. Hamilton’s Here We Are Here (2013-2017), Camille Turner’s Miss Canadiana (2001-2019) and “Otherworld” (2025), to name a few. These weren’t the only artists or practices I was interested in (and many of them often make work outside this thematic), but, as I described, projects like these fit snugly into discussions of what black Canadian art is and could be. 

One of the guests who met with the group and me was textile artist Stina Baudin. During our session together, she advised that artists were never under obligation. She told us: “As artists, it’s kind of our job to refuse.” At her suggestion, we read Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, and this led to a discussion about glitch, technology, and refusal. Elsa told us it had taken years for her to understand the complexities of racism in Edmonton: “We are always being interpolated,” she said. “And then we get conscious of how to maneuver.” The glitch that Russell offers in her book is an aesthetics of refusal, particularly made by black artists. Baudin concluded the session with a question: “What is the importance of the specific materials you seek out to realize your ideas?” 

Thinking again about “New Routes” and my difficulty writing about the exhibition, something shifted for me. It was subtle but significant: I realized the artists were telling their stories about African ancestry (or future relations) through their materials. Instead of focusing on history or identity, I could look to how they used textiles to think through their ideas. AJA tufted afrofuturist scenes full of symbols that looked like gonzo still lifes. Garfield used the texture and colour patterns of traditional African fabrics to create portraits. Raneece, with her embroidery, and Elsa, with her costumes, did slow, precise, and deliberate technical work based on African myth and spirituality. They all explored materials in terms of identity. I had initially gotten hung up on the identity part, but actually, the fact that they were all working in textile was the common thread that allowed me to situate their work more broadly. This perspective helped me locate their work within a national and transitional context. 

With textiles as my entry point, I began thinking about black art through medium rather than identity, which led me to the quilting practices of early black settlers in Alberta. I took the technology as a starting point and grounded my essay in the material practice of textile. I read about quilts made by black people in the prairies that echoed the work of the Gee’s Bend quilters in the southern United States. What was once considered humble “craft” was later pulled into the realm of fine art and exhibited in museums, their symbols, colours, and techniques closely analyzed. Turning back to Canada, I located quilt-making practices by black communities across the country. Curator David Woods recently mounted a touring exhibition of such quilts from Halifax and the East Coast, while Southern Ontario has its own local black quilting history. This history of quilting practices from different eras and communities across the country reflected the storytelling methods that each of the Edmonton artists used in the 2025 exhibition. I looked at this artistic practice—quilting—as building an aesthetic. The Edmonton artists in “New Roots” applied different understandings of black cultural, spiritual, and material histories to how they shape matter. Textile technology as a perspective allowed me to read and analyze their work within multiple contexts, across borders, temporalities, and cultures. 

Part Four

Since last year, I have been working with curator Nya Lewis on her upcoming project, an edited collection of essays and artworks from what she is calling the Black Pacific, after a 1996 essay by Peter Hudson entitled “Disappearing Histories of the Black Pacific: Contemporary Black Art in Vancouver.” As I read through the contributions on unique black coastal aesthetics, I noticed an echo of the constellation Joachim outlined in her exhibition: the network of connections routed between these different material practices, in theme and in method, is abundant. For a long time, black curators have done much of the heavy lifting that has allowed for the presentation of black art in institutional spaces in Canada. Before critics can write about them, black curators often undertake the research, fundraising, and organizing that make exhibitions possible. Without these efforts, a lot of black art would go unseen. It is time for writers to pick up the baton and create rich discourses around local black art practices across the country. It is our role to mindfully and rigorously attend to the differences and specificities of black culture. As we analyze how black artists make work and what materials they use, their methods will become the aperture through which we discuss their ideas.

Yaniya Lee is a writer, researcher, and teacher whose work draws on narratives of liberation to develop new methodologies for art criticism, art history, and archival practice. Recent projects include Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art (2024), a collection of her writing, and the Black Canadian Art History Scholarship Database (blackartstudy.ca), a searchable catalogue of theses and dissertations on Black art in Canada.

1. A shoutout to Joana Joachim, Mojeanne Behzadi, Kaysie Hawke, Mayra Rodriquez Castro, Jayne Wilkinson, and the entire team at House9 design, and of course Buseje Bailey. 
2. Sandra Brewster, “Letters of Negro Progress,” letter to Theaster Gates, in Theaster Gates: How to Build a House Museum, ed. Kitty Scott (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2018), 134–35, quoted in Buseje Bailey: Reasons We Have to Disappear Every Once in a While.

This article is published in issue 43.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue