Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art

Sandra Brewster

Brewster is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist based in Toronto. Her work has been exhibited nationally and abroad, engaging many themes that grapple with notions of identity, representation and memory. Sandra is a recent Masters of Visual Studies graduate from University of Toronto. Her thesis exhibition A Trace | Evidence of time past was exhibited at Art Museum: University of Toronto Art Centre. Her most recent solo exhibition It's all a blur, Georgia Scherman Projects, received the Gattuso Prize for outstanding featured exhibition in CONTACT Photography Festival 2017.

Michèle Pearson Clarke 

Michèle Pearson Clarke is a Trinidad-born artist who works in photography, film, video and installation. Using archival, performative and process-oriented strategies, her work explores the personal and political possibilities afforded by considering experiences of emotions related to longing and loss. Her work has been exhibited and screened across Canada, the United States, and Europe, including Ryerson Image Centre (Toronto), Studio XX (Montreal), Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), Ann Arbor Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning (London, UK), International Film Festival Rotterdam and International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

Chantal Gibson

Chantal Gibson is an artist-educator living in Vancouver with ancestral roots in Nova Scotia. Her work explores power, exploiting colonial mechanisms of oppression—myths, tropes, metaphors—persistent across writings and representations of African Canadian history and the Black Diasporic Experience. Her work aims to create new spaces — to use historic silences and omissions—to include alternative voices.  Chantal uses her artistic practice to promote discussion and critical inquiry in public forums, academic conferences and community facilitated workshops.

Sylvia D. Hamilton

Sylvia D. Hamilton is a Nova Scotian filmmaker, writer and artist raised in Beechville, a community established in Nova Scotia, by free Black Refugees from the War of 1812.  Her body of work—film, writing and installations— focuses on the history, contributions and life experiences of African Canadians. The work stands in opposition to the erasure of Black Canadians from traditional representations of Canada. She draws on archival sources and collective oral stories to create a counter-memory. Her installations have been shown at the Dalhousie Art Gallery (2013), the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic (2014), The Thames Art Gallery in Chatham, Ontario (2015), and Dalhousie's Schulich School of Law in Halifax (2016).

Bushra Junaid

Junaid is a Toronto-based artist and arts administrator. Born in Montreal to Jamaican and Nigerian parents and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Junaid primarily works in mixed media collage, drawing and painting. She is interested in history, memory, identity and representation; in particular the arts, culture and histories of the African diaspora. Junaid has shown work in artist-run, community-based, not-profit and commercial gallery settings. She recently initiated and co-curated (with Pamela Edmonds), the multidisciplinary group show New-Found-Lands: An Art Project Exploring Historical and Contemporary Connections Between Newfoundland and the Caribbean Diaspora at Eastern Edge Gallery in St. John’s.

Charmaine Lurch

Charmaine Lurch connects race, time, and space in her work. She portrays the agency and boundless persistence of racially marked subjects to be and belong in spaces they inhabit. Engaging the audience through story, and with opportunities for participatory action is integral to this work. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues including the Royal Ontario Museum, the art Gallery of Ontario, Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, The University of British Columbia, and the National Gallery of Jamaica.

Esmaa Mohamoud

Mohamoud an African-Canadian artist based in Toronto who investigates the intangibility of Blackness through the realm of athletics—specifically, basketball and football. Mohamoud is interested in the ways in which Black bodies navigate spaces as bodies that are both visible, and invisible at times. With the use of industrial materials, Mohamoud aims to re-examine our contemporary understanding of Blackness and challenge the relationship of blackness as a colour and shade, and Blackness as a societal or cultural construction of a group of people. She has recently shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario, YYZ Artist Outlet, Manifesto Festival, the Gladstone Gallery and Drake Devonshire Gallery.

Dawit L. Petros

Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist who investigates boundaries in artistic, geographical and cultural contexts. Working with installations, photography, research and extensive travels, his practice centers around a critical rereading of the relationship between African histories and European modernism. By drawing upon forms rooted in diverse histories, Petros' artistic language enables a metaphorically rich articulation of the fluidity of contemporary transnational experiences and attendant issues of place-making, and cultural negotiation. His work has been exhibited in North America, Europe and Africa. Most recently he had solo exhibitions at the Kansas City Art Institute, Tiwani Contemporary and the Museum of Fine Arts and participated in the Dak’art Biennial, the Bamako Biennale and Prospect 4.

Gordon Shadrach

Shadrach was born and raised in Brampton, Ontario and has lived in Toronto for over 25 years. His parents immigrated to Canada from Trinidad and Dominica in 1965. He works in sculpture, fashion, visual display, marketing, industrial design, and painting. Gordon rediscovered his love for painting five years ago and has been exhibiting almost as soon as he started painting. He has participated numerous group exhibitions including the Artist Project Toronto, the Riverdale Art Walk, and the Queen West Art Crawl.  His most recent solo show was at Black Artist Network and Dialogue (BAND) in Toronto.