Exhibition History

MY POSITION - DR. KENNETH MONTAGUE

My parents emigrated from Jamaica to Canada in the 1950s, arriving well before the great explosion of Caribbean and African immigrants of the subsequent “Pierre Trudeau” years. Born and raised in Windsor, in a neighbourhood where we were the only Black family, I felt like an island: the only external signifiers of my Black identity came in the form of the visual culture that I mostly experienced on tv and at the movies—and across the border, at cultural institutions such as the Detroit Institute of Arts. There, as a ten-year-old, I first encountered Harlem Renaissance artist James VanDerZee’s bold and sophisticated images of his vibrant New York City neighbourhood, and later, African American masters like Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava. As a high school student, while working as a volunteer tour guide at the North American Black Historical Museum (now the Amherstburg Freedom Museum) I learned that we, too, have a rich cultural heritage—one that I certainly wasn’t being taught in my Canadian History class.

Years later, I began exploring contemporary art that spoke to me about my own experience. Issues around race, gender, memory, migration, community, and even personal style became important themes in my growing Wedge Collection. From the start, I recognized the importance of creating a space for emerging African Canadian artists—hence the name, and the mission: a deliberate attempt to “wedge” these artists into the mainstream of contemporary art.

Position As Desired: Exploring African Canadian Identity | Photographs from the Wedge Collection is the first major exhibition to examine the history, movement and experiences of Black Canadians through contemporary photography. This touring show was co-organized with the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto) where it first opened in 2010, before travelling to the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 (Halifax) in 2013 and the Art Gallery of Windsor in 2017. It is a collection of photographs, video works and memorabilia from my personal archive—ranging from rare vintage portraits of the first African immigrants to Canada, to contemporary works by established artists. 

The partnership with Canada House in London, UK will feature a new iteration of Position As Desired: photographs by Black British artists in dialogue with Black Canadian lens-based work, both drawn from the Wedge Collection. There are many stories to be told, and my hope is that this highly subjective selection of works will promote further discussion around how we see ourselves and how we are seen, and what similarities might exist across the Diaspora.

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The main essay from the original catalogue for Position As Desired (2010) by African Canadian curator and historian Julie Crooks sums up the Canada-UK connections:

“Cultural identity…is a matter of becoming as well as being.  It belongs to the future as much as to the past.  It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. …. like everything which is historical, [identities] undergo constant transformation…Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.”    

—Stuart Hall (Black British cultural theorist)

“How do I resist the dermatology of Canadian culture imbued in me over all these years, and have the racial forwardness to regard myself as African?  And why should I? Merely to give my protest a sharper context?  Or more bluntly to evade the wounding of being called.. “coloured”, "Negro,” “blasted Jamaican” or “West Indian”? Do I look more African than Canadian? If I permit this am I saying Canadians are white and Africans are Black?  And if one is Black one cannot have been born here, one cannot be Canadian.”

—Austin Clarke (Black Canadian novelist)

The above epigraphs indicate that identities, particularly those associated with the African Diaspora, are always slippery and in flux. As Austin Clarke suggests, the experience of someone with African heritage “becoming” a Canadian or the development of a knowable “African Canadian” identity is stymied by an emphatic insistence upon visible difference.  Clarke’s thoughts then, highlight the complexities ingrained in hyphenated identities such as “African-Canadian.” As Clarke suggests, the “African” Canadian is viewed as constantly on the margins –as having a static cultural practice located in a past and elsewhere”, or as a perpetual new-comer. How then do Black subjects strategize and jostle for a meaningful position within the mainstream Canadian social and cultural narrative?

 
Dr. Kenneth Montague, Position As Desired: Exploring African Canadian Identity at the Art Gallery of Windsor, February 10, 2017. © Dr Kenneth Montague | The Wedge Collection. Photo: Yannick Anton

Dr. Kenneth Montague, Position As Desired: Exploring African Canadian Identity at the Art Gallery of Windsor, February 10, 2017. 

© Dr Kenneth Montague | The Wedge Collection. Photo: Yannick Anton

 
Position As Desired: Exploring African Canadian Identity at the Art Gallery of Windsor, February 10, 2017.© Dr Kenneth Montague | The Wedge Collection. Photo: Yannick Anton

Position As Desired: Exploring African Canadian Identity at the Art Gallery of Windsor, February 10, 2017.

© Dr Kenneth Montague | The Wedge Collection. Photo: Yannick Anton