This February, African Heritage Month, let the Dalhousie Art Gallery be a beacon for community power, intergenerational knowledge sharing and creative resistance. Let it be a salve for the isolating chill of not winter but the racist, fascist and systematic efforts to scapegoat, divide and erase communities, cultures and histories.
From Feb 4 through Apr 27, the DAG is hosting three synchronous art shows to celebrate the communities of African Nova Scotians—their histories, artists, poets, teachers, families, heroes and bonds of faith.
Together, the multidisciplinary artworks in Down Home: Portraits of Resilience, Oluseye: by Faith and Grit, and Theaster Gates: Billy Sings Amazing Grace celebrate Black resilience, artistry, innovation and community teachers through evocative portraits, crafted tributes and objects reclaimed in praise.
As curator and director of the gallery, Pamela Edmonds was interested in seeing how she could shift the space to embolden a relationship between these three exhibitions and, in doing so, strengthen their collective message of solidarity by “mapping Black spaces and Black resilience through inter-relational and geographic conversations about Blackness.”
The result is an unmissable, unified show whose sound is a moving, meditative improvisation of “Amazing Grace,” drifting through a soft curtain beside a painting of the New Horizons Baptist Church. The movement circles around quilted portraits of community members and traces vertically along artist Oluseye’s “diasporic debris” on wires above suspended boxing gloves. The portraits glow. The murals are of family. The photos, tools and crafts weave living records of Black labour, community and migration into monuments of power.
Embrace the artists and art workers who are as steadfast as those who came before them in bringing deep, enduring expressions of Black resilience, pride, resistance and faith into public spaces.
“What I hope that the gallery can be for this time with these shows is a space for reflection, communion, community and unity, especially in a moment where there’s increasing division,” says Edmonds. “All of the artists, the curators, have a focus on art and activism—not in the activism of placards and such, but in celebrating how far we’ve come, of remembering the past and honouring the future, and relying on our faith and our resilience to keep going.”
This is what connects all three shows. “There’s this saying, which was also in [the previous DAG show] As We Rise, which is this idea that if we have an opportunity, we pass on our knowledge: that we lift as we climb, as we rise,” says Edmonds.
This happens through Gates honouring singer Forston as an elder musician, Edmonds mentoring Down Home curator Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa and Oluseye dedicating his show to Myrna Provo from North Preston, who taught him about the community. It happens through a celebration of the people.
Visit. Reflect. Bring friends. Repeat.
Down Home: Portraits of Resilience, curated by Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa, features portraits and personal narratives from nine artists: Justin Augustine, Saba Blyden-Taylor, Chrystal Clements, Kayza DeGraff-Ford, Rebecca Fisk, Letitia Fraser, Chantal Gibson, Preston Pavlis and Vanessa Thomas. Together, the exhibition celebrates the enduring strength of African Nova Scotian and Black Canadian communities through bright, celebratory imaginings of faith, labour, family ties and the learning that comes from conceptualizing identity in new geographies.
Germain-Bajowa is from Guelph, Ontario and moved to Nova Scotia in August 2023. “Pretty immediately, I was faced with the reality that there’s a very deep and long history of Black communities, of African Nova Scotians and Black folks all over Nova Scotia and the East Coast,” she says. “I had to find my place within conversations around Blackness that were centering African Nova Scotian voices—rightfully so—and that negotiation of finding myself, but also making space for other people’s experiences very different from mine, was the formative basis for Down Home.”
She says that many of the artists featured in Down Home “are dealing with the same feelings: of being so connected to Nova Scotia as a Black person, even though they’re not African Nova Scotian—and to how African Nova Scotian histories, cultures and communities are affecting our understanding of our identities. They all have such deep ties to the land and the histories here.”
The exhibition’s nine artists are African Nova Scotian, African Canadian and African American artists. Some of their works have shown before, like Chantal Gibson’s “Souvenir,” which was last shown at the AGNS in 2021. Other works, like three monumental, quilted portraits from artist Preston Pavlis, were made this year and have never been shown.
The first work on the right when entering the DAG is Pavlis’ biggest work, “Christa, Trystin and James.” It’s hung from the ceiling and can—and should—be circled to see its quilted backing from pieces of clothing that reach to the front to border his portraits. Pavlis has three works in Down Home that are part of a series inspired by photographs he took of community members.
“It’s so interesting to me that Pavlis, [fellow Down Home artist, DeGraff-Ford] and many others are doing work with very specific quilting traditions that, maybe, they were exposed to outside of Nova Scotia, but also have such a deep presence here,” says Germain-Bajowa.
This connects with Down Home artist Letitia Fraser’s work, too, who does many of her portraits “on quilted backgrounds and quilted canvases in a way that she learned from her family. It’s fascinating how these works and artists are interconnected and in deep conversation with each other, even though they might not all be from Nova Scotia.”
Pavlis is an African American from California, born in 1999—the year another artist in the show, Justin Augustine, was fresh out of NSCAD with a BFA and exploding onto the art scene.
In Down Home, Augustine’s painting “The Faith Catchers” depicts a warm scene of two young Black men leaning on each other and eating fruit in front of the New Horizons Baptist Church in Halifax’s north end. This scene echoes an important thread of Down Home: the cultural and historical importance of sites of faith within African Nova Scotian communities and the creativity that springs from forming new relationships with these sites as time passes.
When planning Down Home, Germain-Bajowa says she let the work dictate what the show would be. The result is a visual representation of who folks are: “the things they feel connected to, the communities they’re in conversation with and the histories of faith, textiles and oral histories.”
And it’s juicy.
“I want people to come to celebrate their community and have a good time,” she says. “I’ve been calling the show juicy because it’s really vibrant. So, I want people to come have a good, juicy time.”
Down Home is itself an act of intergenerational knowledge sharing and relating because it’s the culmination of the DAG’s one-year curatorial mentorship program between Germain-Bajowa and Edmonds.
Although Germain-Bajowa has wrapped her time with DAG with the show’s opening, she’ll be visiting and enjoying the show over the coming months—even possibly offering tours—while she steps into her new role as assistant curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
The show’s title, “Down Home,” was inspired by the phrase’s evocative power in the works of celebrated Black Nova Scotian poets, including George Elliott Clarke and Maxine Tynes. In Tynes’ 1990 poetry collection, Woman Talking Woman, it appears in lines of the poem “Africville spirit,” which is about the immediate feeling of connection between Africville and Black Nova Scotian culture:
“I am Maxine Tynes.
I am not from Africville, born and bred.
But Tynes is a Black Community name
and I am from this community;
this Maritime, Halifax, down home Nova Scotia Black community…”
Clarke’s poem “North is freedom” is etched into a monument outside the Halifax North Memorial Public Library on Gottingen Street, “which is my library that I go to all the time,” says Germain-Bajowa. It includes the phrase like this:
“North is freedom—
Uptown, down-home:
Each book a drum;
Each life a poem.”
Says Germain-Bajowa, “I saw that poem, and something about it really resonated with me. I was like, ‘Oh, yes, ‘down home.’ That just feels like I’m going to my grandma’s place–it feels so comfortable and familiar.” She chose to title the exhibition after this phrase, this resonance, because “it felt like a place that I was connected to and that the artists were connected to—even if it doesn’t actually exist in physical form.”
Oluseye: by Faith and Grit is an exhibition curated by Edmonds. It features works by Nigerian-Canadian artist Oluseye and offers a reflection on the African diasporic experience as seen through African Nova Scotian communities, their land and histories.
His installations transform salvaged materials into evocative works of praise and craft that interweave narratives of self-determination, innovation and strength. For example, a series within the show merges tools of Black farmers with references to the Coloured Hockey League of the Maritimes—which also connects to faith and spirituality.
Edmonds has known Oluseye for several years and knows “how important the African Nova Scotian community is to him as an artist and as a person,” she says. Oluseye travelled to Nova Scotia several years ago and visited North Preston—the largest historic Black community in Canada. His practice has been informed by that visit and the connections he formed ever since. The title, “by Faith and Grit,” comes from the moniker of North Preston, says Edmonds: “We’ve come this far by faith,” which is the sign you pass as you enter the community.
Oluseye dedicated the show to his friend and teacher from North Preston, “Ms. Mryna Provo (née Cain), whose playful and generous spirit is all around us.”
Says Edmonds, “it’s always been important for me as a curator—personally and professionally—to highlight the contributions of African Nova Scotians, and to do that in partnership with an artist who has so much respect for the community (who’s not from the community, but learned about Blackness in Canada through coming to Nova Scotia and to North Preston) to shine a light on the community, to shine a light on Africville to take stories of challenge and strife and turn them around—to shine a light on our heroes.”
The works in Oluseye’s exhibition celebrate “everyday heroes like Edith Clayton through a basket work that he made and also through recognizing sports heroes like Muhammad Ali, who was a Black Muslim and an activist who broke barriers for sports.” Oluseye’s piece “Muhammad Had A Dream” connects Ali to the history of Black boxing in Nova Scotia, through people like George Dixon, Sam Langford, Kirk Johnson and Buddy Daye—through trails of rubber objects Oluseye has dubbed “diasporic debris.”
“These are objects that he finds in his travels that leave a trace of Blackness or histories of the Black community and Black migration,” says Germain-Bajowa. “He collects them from all over, and this work is constantly being added to and getting longer and longer.”
Another piece, “Subject to the tide (After David Hammons),” shows a Pan-African flag overlaid with the Canadian flag, and merged with a piece of a warped chainlink fence salvaged from Africville Park.
The title is a reference to the tide of the Bedford Basin, but the phrase “subject to the tide” is a reference to “the idea of being subject to—like Africaville was—an incident without precedent,” says Edmonds. “The community was moved without precedent.” The bracketed title is in reference to the African American artist David Hammons, whose “African-American Flag” merged the Pan-African flag with the American flag and has been flown outside many cultural and artistic sites across the US.
Says Edmonds, “to see Oluseye’s Pan-African flag with a remnant from Africville says so much—it’s a very powerful work. It speaks to what all the works are doing and saying about the unity of who we are and how we survived—the creativity, the innovation, the music, the art, the poetry, the craft, the quilt-making.”
Oluseye’s show, as well as Down Home and Billy Sings the Blues, is “about creating monuments, which aren’t the ones made of bronze and in parks,” says Edmonds.
“They’re in their own space and they’re at home. They recognize the importance of what we learned at home, in church and the land.
Bringing that into a space like a university, to put it into that context and lift it up and say, ‘This is us,’ it’s very powerful.” It’s an important time to remember and reflect during African Heritage Month, says Edmonds. “With all the division going on in the world, it’s nice to be in a space about unity.”
Theaster Gates: Billy Sings Amazing Grace is a 12 minute and 24 second video work set up in the DAG’s media gallery, located just past the midway point within Down Home. Theaster Gates is a visual artist, archivist, curator and musician based in Chicago who investigates Black identity and histories through objects and gestures of labour, spirituality and the inhabiting of space.
Billy Sings Amazing Grace “documents a performance by Gates’ ensemble, The Black Monks, featuring soul singer and musical elder Billy Forston,” Edmonds writes of the work. “Rooted in blues, gospel, and the meditative practice of sacred chanting, this powerful film explores diverse elements of spirituality in an improvised rendition of the beloved hymn.” Alongside Down Home: Portraits of Resilience and Oluseye: by Faith and Grit, Gates’ piece “bridges generations and geographies, weaving stories of resistance, reclamation, hope and honour,” she writes.
When Edmonds was researching the hymn, she learned it was written by an English Anglican clergyman who was a reformed slaveship captain. “It was really about his repentance of dealing with enslaved Africans and how he was in a storm at sea. He wrote the song about wanting to reckon with and redeem his past.”
Edmonds grew up in the church. Her dad was a gospel singer. She says that Gates’ work recognizes Forston, the musician, but that the song “Amazing Grace” is also “one of the most revered songs or hymns in the English language—and has also been used quite often in the Civil Rights Movement as a song about change and to inspire the community.”
This is a repeated grouping of themes that she says runs throughout all three shows and their works—faith and resilience—and how these connect to “the idea of home and belonging and thinking about those things, not just for Black folks but for, ‘how do we belong to a space?’
“I think we’re thinking about that now in this global environment, about what it means to be in Canada. Not to say that I’m focused on nationalism, but it’s about how we unify and build our communities when there’s so much fractured individuality and loneliness is an epidemic.”
Says Edmonds, “sometimes relying on something as simple as faith and hope is an important message to remember that ‘we’ve gone through hard times, but we can get through.’ We just have to rely on each other and return to some of the basic things that kept us going. We’ve been through difficulties, but we also have our faith, family, communities, resources, and creativity. That’s what gets us through.”
The DAG is located on Level 1 of the Dalhousie Arts Centre at 6101 University Avenue.
Its hours are Wednesdays to Fridays, 11am to 5pm; Thursday until 8pm and Saturdays and Sundays, 12pm to 5pm. Admission is always free.
Accessibility information from the DAG:
There is a permanent ramp at the Arts Centre’s front entrance on University Avenue and automatic doors to assist with entry into the building. The lobby is carpeted, and there are wide pathways throughout the building. An elevator on the main floor has access to all floors, including the art gallery. There is a gender-neutral, single-occupancy washroom with an automatic door and accessible stalls in the women’s and men’s washrooms on the second floor, which can be reached via the elevator. There are two accessible parking meters located on Seymour Street by the side entrance of the Arts Centre. The gallery’s floors are smooth, hard surfaces. There are masks available at the gallery’s entrance.
Guided tours of the exhibitions are always free and can be adapted to suit an individual’s or group’s needs. Tours can be arranged outside of gallery hours if there are special considerations requiring modifications, for example a low-sensory experience, or extra support staff. For more information, contact the gallery at 902-494-2403 or email art.gallery@dal.ca.
This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2025.