Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes

Brief Overview of Black Archives and Heritage Museum Exhibits

Over the past decade, many scholars have interrogated the structural issues in the field of archival studies. In Refiguring the Archive (Hamilton, Harris, and Reid 2022), the authors observe that "the [archival] record is widely recognised by researchers, but a great deal of work remains to develop our understanding of the circumstances of the creation of the archival record in general, and of specific collections in particular" (9). Ann Laura Stoler (2002) notes further that a focus on history as narrative "has made the thinking about archives no longer the pedestrian preoccupation of 'spade-work' historians or flat-footed archivists, nor the entry requirements of fledgling initiates compelled to show mastery of the tools of their trade" (93); instead, the archive "has been elevated to new theoretical status, with enough cachet to warrant distinct billing, worthy of scrutiny on its own" (92). [End Page 456] Diana Taylor's (2003) work on colonial archives in the Americas has also pinpointed myths that surround it, such as "that it is unmediated, that objects located there might mean something outside the framing of the archival impetus itself," and "that the archive resists change, corruptibility, and political manipulation" but if "what makes an object archival is the process whereby it is selected, classified, and presented for analysis" (19), the question to ask is, What can be said about Black people in Canada's archival record?

To address the challenges of missing or unidentified records in institutional archives in Canada, many Toronto-based Black community-led initiatives have begun to build their own archives.² DJ, scholar, and curator Mark Campbell, for example, created Northside Hip Hop Archive (https://www.nshharchive.ca/), a digital archive of Canadian hip hop culture from the 1980s and 1990s. In 2020, Phil Vassell and Donna McCurvin also co-founded Canada Black Music Archives (https://thecbma.com/), a digital archive that aims to research, preserve, and amplify the rich, largely untold music history of Black Canadian musicians and music venues. Charmaine Gooden, beauty and fashion editor, founded Black Fashion Canada (https://blackfashioncanada.ca/database/) in 2022, the first digital collection of designers, models, and garment professionals. Other community-based Black archives include the Legacy Voices Canada 150 project (https://www.blackcanadianveterans.com/), spearheaded by public historian Kathy Grant, which aims to raise awareness of the contributions of Black men who served in the Canadian military during conflict and in peacetime. These individuals have created accessible, open-access archives which are different to institutional archives which have historically held documents, images, objects, ephemera, and other collections related to Black people(s) that are not discoverable or easily searchable to those interested in Black records.

In addition, Cheryl Thompson (2018) has made the Black archive in Canada a specific area of inquiry by asking questions related to the archival content, as well as gaps, erasures, and underrepresentation in the historical record. In 2021, her Mapping Ontario's Black Archives (MOBA, www.mobaprojects.ca) was created as a direct response to the issues outlined earlier. One theme that emerged from this public engagement is that of visibility in the archive. In 2023, MOBA circulated a digital survey open to artists and academics who work with, or have used, Black archival collections in Ontario, and we asked 17 questions to 46 respondents in film, library and information sciences, and the heritage and curatorial sectors, as well as academic research (faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students). MOBA subsequently engaged in semi-structured interviews with nine survey participants, including filmmakers, curators, artists, archivists, librarians, and historians.

MOBA's quantitative and qualitative research has revealed that archives hold significant cultural value beyond their stewardship of records; they are holders of collective memory about people and communities. One of MOBA's interviewees said, "They're hugely significant because it tells another story that has been left out of how we tell the story about ourselves" (participant; MOBA 2023). Another interviewee mentioned: [End Page 457]

Well, [archives are] crucial. They place Black people on this landscape at different points in time, and so it really helps to capture their experience, their presence, their voices, their aspirations … and they are an integral window into understanding who Black people were … just as you know a community as individuals, but also their relationship to their spaces, whether it's a city or a town, or the province, or the country it.

(MOBA 2023)

By surveying the province's archives, MOBA located thousands of records of significant cultural value, which led us to ask why this historical record regarding Black history is not represented in museums. Over the years, Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) have featured Black Canadian exhibitions, but these have been few and far between and they have over prioritized a few narratives—Black belonging/dis-belonging to the nation, the colonial gaze and Black objectification, or the nineteenth-century Underground Railroad and freedom-seeking Black Americans and their descendants.

In 2010–11, Position as Desired: Exploring African-Canadian Identity/Photographs from the Wedge Collection, appeared at the ROM.³ This was one of the first exhibitions, curated by Dr. Kenneth Montague, to feature contemporary (and some historical) photographic representations of Black/Caribbean diasporic experiences in Canada. The most circulated photograph from the exhibit, Dawit L. Petros's Sign—a large portrait of a young Black man dressed in a Black Canadian fur-lined parka—aimed to work against historical Western visual culture and representations of race and identity. In the photograph, the subject dons a hooded parka, alluding to both hip-hop culture and the Canadian landscape. He also wears a cross around his neck, referencing Albrecht Dürer's fifteenth-century Christ-like portraits, while holding his hand in a mimicked gesture. Sign not only challenged the visuality of the landscape and Blackness as embodied in the signature Canadian apparel—a parka—but it also reinforced the notion of an individual Black man confronting the cold, seemingly on his own.

The portraits and photographic representations of Black Canadians taken by Black Canadians in Position as Desired was a breakthrough moment in that it reimagined the white gaze while challenging the dialectical relationship between artist, museum, and nation, especially regarding the ROM, which has had a troubling history of representing Black people and their cultures since the 1989 exhibition Into the Heart of Africa. Curated by cultural anthropologist Jeanne Cannizzo, Into the Heart of Africa included items acquired by Canadian soldiers who participated in Britain's colonial rampage in late nineteenth-century Africa. (The mementos and treasures were pillaged from Nigeria, Ghana, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and most of the items dated between 1875 and 1925).⁴ The ROM has since engaged in some restorative work to atone for its institutional racism. In 2016, it publicly apologized for Into the Heart. Subsequently, from January to April 2018, the ROM staged Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art, featuring nine Black artists, and co-curated by Julie Crooks, assistant [End Page 458] curator, photography at the AGO, the ROM's African collector and curator Silvia Forni, and Haitian-born independent curator and researcher Dominique Fontaine. This was a direct attempt to rewrite the narrative of Black Canadians at the museum to demonstrate that they not only exist but that there was also a desire for their visuality.⁵

As an example of what can happen when the archive, heritage museum, and Black history collide, in May 2017, a photographic exhibition at the AGO, curated by Crooks, called "Free Black North" featured 27 tintype photographic portraits of Black Canadians—men, women, and children—who lived in southwestern Ontario (then called Canada West) in the 1860s through 1890s. The exhibit did more than perform as a heritage museum. Its objects, sourced from the Alvin McCurdy fonds at the Archives of Ontario and the Rick Bell Collection located in the special collections at Brock University in St. Catharines, represented a form of vernacular photography, which has the ability to function as a "politicized element of everyday life to help us understand … contested daily social, political and personal interactions" (Thompson and Crooks 2022, 450; see also Wallis 2006, 18). As Crooks describes, "[b]oth the Alvin McCurdy and Rick Bell collections constitute fugitive archives built in willful defiance of the threat of erasure … 'Free Black North" assisted in recuperating 'absent subjects,' histories, and photographic objects on both sides of the border" (cited in Thompson and Crooks 2022, 450).

Another example appeared from August 2024 to January 2025 and was curated by acclaimed poet and Black history scholar Afua Cooper in partnership with the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia. Titled A History Exposed: The Enslavement of Black People in Canada, this exhibit was held at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax, and like Free, it relied on the Black archive to reinscribe Black histories onto the Canadian narrative (Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, n.d.). If public art, like a museum exhibition, can take many forms from landscaping to architecture, as it relates to Black public art—plaques, monuments, and sculptures—how have Black histories been commemorated in Canada? In this regard, as a form of cultural heritage, public artworks, especially in the form of plaques, have been linked to "place-based development," as part of historic districts or more intangibly as "place-based crafts or traditional artistic forms" (Ashley 2022, 69), but they have not typically been thought of as an area of scholarly inquiry in Black histories. Given the number of Black public artworks that have been commissioned in Toronto and elsewhere over the last few years, it is time to critically assess what these works are, and are not, doing in terms of cultural heritage.

Public Art, Plaques, and the Black Excellence Trope

The City of Toronto has a heritage division known as Heritage Toronto (HT). It is an arm's-length charitable agency formed in 1969 by the Toronto Historical Board that [End Page 459] has produced more than 750 plaques on permanent public display within the city. Each year, HT completes approximately 40 to 50 new plaques, and these commemorative plaques depict people, places, and events that pertain to Toronto's history (Heritage Toronto, n.d.). Ontario's heritage preservation in the form of plaques, statues, busts, or murals falls under the Ontario Heritage Trust (OHT, n.d.), founded in 1955 as the provincial agency mandated to conserve, interpret, and promote "stories of the people, places and events that have helped to shape the province." Its Provincial Plaque Program—OHT's oldest initiative—is responsible for thousands of blue-and-gold plaques identifying landmarks and figures of historical significance throughout the province. Until the 1980s, the program focused on themes like nation building, fur trade, exploration, settlement, transportation, and military history. However, as OHT chief executive officer Beth Hanna said in an interview with TVO Today in 2022, "where it focused on the life and work of influential individuals, it focused predominantly on [white] men." From 1980 to 2000, the focus shifted to education, arts and culture, architecture, science, and technology, and since then, OHT has pivoted to "underrepresented themes, such as women's history, social justice, Black and Indigenous history, LGBTQ2+, and Franco-Ontarians" (Anderson 2022). In 2021, Beverly Mascoll (1947–2001) born in Fall River, Nova Scotia, was one of the first Black persons born in Canada to receive an HT plaque. It sits outside the Toronto Bathurst subway station in a community that is now remembered as "Blackhurst" for the innumerable number of Black-owned businesses that lined its streets in the 1970s and 1980s, including her trailblazing store, Mascoll Beauty Supply, which sold and distributed Black beauty supplies across Canada (A Different Booklist Cultural Centre, n.d.). The following year, HT (2022) erected a plaque commemorating Contrast, and its founder, Edmonton, Alberta-born Alfred Hamilton, who launched the newspaper in 1969 at offices located at 28 Lennox Street until its last print run in 1991. The plaque features an iconic photograph of Hamilton, a cover-page group photograph from the newspaper's 6 September 1979 edition of a 2,000-person march against police violence in response to the shooting death of Albert Johnson by Toronto police, and a heritage description that reads in part, "[t]he paper nurtured many emerging Black writers. … The newspaper's office was also a meeting place for activists and community advocates. Its classified section was an important source of community information."

These plaques are a great achievement, especially Hamilton's, given that Black Canadian newspapers were, for a long time, not counted as part of the Canadian print-culture history. But if the paper dubbed itself as "The eyes, ears, and voice of the community," and as author Cecil Foster (2017), who worked as an editor at Contrast in the 1970s once recalled, "None of the banks, the car and insurance companies, the government agencies, media houses, and so forth, would take out an ad with the newspaper that prided itself as the voice of the Canadian black community," why did HT choose a story about Black death [End Page 460] and protests against anti-Black racism as the commemorative story from the paper's entire 22-year run? The plaque's description highlights its importance to Black communities, but viewers of the plaque's images are left with a jarring juxtaposition between Hamilton—as an exalted individual—and Contrast as a representation of collective struggle (see Thompson 2019b, 92–124).⁶ While the importance of these historical figures is undeniable, we argue that such public commemoration as both public art and heritage fall prey to exalting Black exceptionalism as embodied in an individual Black figure, which does not place them within larger Black communities or shared lived experiences with other Black Canadians.

In a 2021 article for Forbes, Janice Gassam Asare explained that the idea that "exceptionalism" will shield Black people from discrimination and racism is a fallacy, and often Black people who are deemed "excellent" are hyper-scrutinized and penalized for their "excellence." As she writes further, "Black excellence is not just the firsts, who accomplish the unimaginable. … [It] is not just those who achieve accolades and awards. Black excellence is simply existing in a world that so desperately wants to destroy you." We are not suggesting that Black public art or monuments reinforce colonial tropes of domination, but if the process of commissioning public art were connected with the Black archive as a source of storytelling, more diverse and varied stories about Black Canadians could appear in public spaces, which would serve as a way to combat the lack of diversity at the heritage museum.

In their introduction to RACAR's thematic issue, "'Revised Commemoration' in Public Art: What Future for the Monument?", Analays Alvarez Hernandez and Marie-Blanche Fourcade (2021) write, "The period from 2015 to 2020 saw not only various interventions upon monuments but also a broader societal reflection that reached out to academic and governmental circles" (14). The issue of RACAR included eight multidisciplinary articles on the topic of commemorative art practices, past and present, toward articulating new approaches to public art. Brandon Vickerd's (2021) piece on monuments in Canada's public spaces is particularly relevant to our article. He writes that "historically, the role of the monument has been to perpetuate a monoculture, where the repetition of a story through monumental depiction fixes it as a truth" (95). While Vickerd is referring to reinforcing and celebrating Canada's colonial past by depicting "white European men in stoic or heroic poses that are meant to reinforce the mythology and inevitability of a historical truth tied to colonialism," (95) Black subjects of public artworks have also been depicted as individuals within a dominant historical narrative. Too often, these works extend the heritage museum's valorization of passive looking while also reinforcing the trope of Black Excellence.

For example, in 2024, VerCetty sculpted a bust of Toronto-born Lincoln Alexander (1922–2012) that sits at the province's provincial building, Queen's Park. Alexander was Canada's first Black member of parliament (from 1968 to 1980) for a Hamilton, Ontario, [End Page 461] riding, and a former lieutenant governor of Ontario. The bust was not commissioned by OHT or HT but by the Black Opportunity Fund (BOF), a community-led registered Canadian charitable organization, that supports and responds to long-standing underinvestment in Black communities by investing in projects (Williams 2024). BOF (n.d.) aims to assist Black communities by disrupting what it calls "ineffective and disempowering contemporary funding practices," which is an important mission. Commemorations like this serve an important role in the public acknowledgement of key figures in Black Canadian history and local Toronto Black history; however, as Alexander was born within a community of elders, mentors, and people who nurtured his tremendous achievements, why does his commemorative bust not allow the public to think about the community shoulders on which someone like Alexander stood?

In 2021, VerCetty (2024), who was born and raised in Etobicoke in Toronto's west end, also completed work on an HT bust of Black abolitionist Joshua Glover (1811–88), which sits in an Etobicoke Park that bears his name. Glover, who came to Canada via the Underground Railroad from his birthplace in St. Louis, Missouri, likely arrived first in Collingwood or Owen Sound, Ontario, and then journeyed to Etobicoke, settling in the Islington community, where he joined 39 other Black residents in the population of 2,900. Soon after his arrival, Glover began working for Thomas Montgomery, a local landowner and savvy businessman, at Montgomery's Inn, which was built in 1830 (Verdon 2021).⁷ VerCetty's sculpture depicts Glover as an enslaved freedom seeker with chains on his wrists, wearing a suit and hat, clutching his freedom papers and books. The HT plague, however, includes a photograph of Montgomery's Inn, a map of where Glover likely lived, and a telegram reporting on Glover's death in 1888. This public artwork received significant media attention. In addition to then City of Toronto mayor John Tory and the Etobicoke Historical Society, the Honourable Jean Augustine—the first Black Canadian woman to serve as a member of parliament for the riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore—attended the ceremony and posted images on her Instagram account (see Geneau 2021; Augustin 2021).

It is, of course, important that Black people whose existences are woven into the fabric of this country see themselves represented in its public spaces. Glover's commemoration is important and it marks one of the first acknowledgements of Etobicoke's connection to chattel slavery, but if Glover lived in a community of Black people and the plaque speaks to that community, as well as the two "Irish women" that he married, why is little known (or shared) about the 39 other Black residents who lived among/with Glover? As Thompson and Loppie (2024) opined for Spacing, "We need to be extremely intentional about who we commemorate, the ways in which we commemorate those individuals, and how we situate them in time and space.… The memorials to Lincoln Alexander and Joshua Glover represent a start. But we would be naive to accept them as a final form of restorative justice." Restorative justice would look like resisting the exalted individual [End Page 462] narrative of monuments and busts and moving toward artworks that challenge us to think about how we use the public space for artwork that depicts Black people—seeing them as members of a community and not singularly the individual subject depicted. In this regard, the public artworks of Jordan, Price, and Gabriel discussed later represent salient examples of how Black commemoration can move beyond Black Excellence and toward a reflective restorative public art that functions like what art historian and queer activist David Deitcher (1998) writes regarding resistance in visual art, where artists are compelled to "unearth precious traces of the past. Through such acts of recuperation … [we can] ensure the continued availability of that past as a source of validation" (31). These traces of the past are not only corporeal but also ephemeral, spatial, and temporal.

Black Archives Can Disrupt the Exalted Individual in Heritage/Public Art Commemoration

Jordan is an artist, writer, and curator who works at the intersections of community, art, and memory, and through her work, she aims to reinterpret the archive as both a place of history and a canvas for creating speculative futures. She has produced two noteworthy public artworks that exemplify how an art installation situated in public space can diverge from depictions of singular Black historical figures and instead situate Black people within geographies of space and place. In 2016, 94 Chestnut at the Crossroads, as part of the Wedge Curatorial Projects collection, was a portrait series at the site in front of the barricade of an old church ground. As described by Jordan (2025a), the art featured a woman dressed in mourning, creating a literal crossroad with her body where viewers were asked to imagine a centre point where the visible and the invisible might meet: "Here a young Black woman in Victorian mourning dress is barred entry to a site of profound and sacred ancestral significance to Toronto's Black community. Blocked by a hoarding that encloses the site of the former British Methodist Episcopal Church at 94 Chestnut Street, the woman rotates clockwise to the four cardinal points. Beneath her feet and on the wall behind her, diagrams in chalk, based on West African and Haitian symbols, call the spirits to gather and be acknowledged and witness her creation of a crossroad." In 2020, Jordan's We Have Done Enough was a banner placed on the side of a high-rise building that read in part,

We have protested, we have rallied, we have cried, we have grieved, we have made art and have offered you models of difference, we have begged and held arms, we have shown love and kindness, we have been angry, we have taught our children they are beautiful, to try and offer themselves to the world in spite of it. … We are tired, so tired. We have done enough."

(Jordan 2025b)

This banner drastically broke from the individualistic, exalted model of Black public art—as it has no figuration, no authorial sign, and instead speaks in the collective "we" [End Page 463] against the demands so often placed upon Black people, even (or perhaps especially) in contexts of supposed diversity.

Jordan's art speaks directly to the theorizations that post-colonial scholars espoused nearly 30 years ago, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who extended and intervened in deconstructive models of theory by white European scholars like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Spivak (1994) questioned how the subaltern—those groups who are socially, politically, and spatially outside the dominant power structures and who are positioned by and within hegemonic discourses of the nation as Other—failed to factor into many of the social theories being produced in Western cultures, meaning that Western conceptions of experience and of the self, in particular, resulted in a disavowal and silencing of entire groups of people and, as such, what was called "radical criticism" was in essence only interested in conserving the subject of the West, "or the West as Subject" (66). Similarly, because Jordan's art is so intentionally about entire groups of Black people, it offers the kind of radical criticism that is disruptive.

Since 2005, Price, a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on large-scale figurative sculptures that are in conversation with different aesthetic fields such as performance, film, photography, animation and public art, has focused on creating what he terms "psychological portraits" in sculpture. Ranging in size from small busts to monumental bronze statues, these sculptures depict the bodies, clothing, and characteristics typically associated with Black men. However, these works are not representations of actual people; instead, they combine facial expressions drawn from ancient, classical, and neoclassical sculpture with stereotypes represented in contemporary news media and observed individuals—some of whom Price knows personally and others whom he has witnessed in public spaces (Plant, n.d.). Price's 2019 exhibit at Toronto's The Power Plant called Ordinary Men, his first in Canada, featured a series of sculptures in varying sizes. In 2021, these sculptures could be seen across the city—one sculpture was exhibited outside Humber College's Lakeshore campus, and another was located outside the AGO (see Yard 2021; AGO 2021). In Cover Up (The Reveal), Price's sculpture depicts a Black man in the act of clasping the edges of his hooded sweatshirt, also known as a "hoodie," the same piece of clothing that young Black men have been criminalized for wearing, notably 17-year-old Travyon Martin, who was shot and killed in Florida in 2012 in part because his hoodie looked threatening. As Price describes the work,

[these] sculptures … look at statuary and the idea of a monumentalism within society and who is represented and how monumental statues, sculptures in this case, are used to propagate images of power and who we look up to in society.… I take images of Black men to look at how we view these types of people as almost archetypes in society, as a microcosm for how we structure power systems in societies.… The fact that there's a nine-foot large-scale sculpture out in the public realm is about really … forcing people to confront the [End Page 464] image of the type of person they tend to either ignore, avoid, or be told negative things about.

(Harbourfront Centre 2019, 0:17–⁠1:12)

It could be argued that some of Price's sculptures in the series play on the trope of the exalted historical individual in commemorative practices, like Numen (Votive Two), which is a series of heads on a stand that appear alone, but as the Power Plant Art Gallery (n.d.) describes,

Price's sculptures project a feeling of the inherent loneliness of black men, who have to deal with constant stereotypes being cast on their personas. Regardless, they also invoke a quiet contemplation—those tentative moments that sometimes flash across the faces of marginalized individuals as they navigate white-dominated spaces. The perceived vulnerability is made more complex by the sculptures' oblique gaze—a nod to ancient Egyptian statuary in which looking straight ahead represents gazing into eternity.

In many ways, Price's work is in conversation with Toronto-trained artist Michael Chambers, who, as part of Position as Desire, exhibited an image of a nude Black man whose upper body and face were covered by a huge sunflower, an act that illuminates how the naked realities of Black maleness remain obscured within dominant North American cultures. While Price is not Canadian, his sculptures, as a public art in Toronto, speak to a diasporic recognition of disrupting normative commemorative practices that have, on one hand, preserved Black histories for public display but, on the other hand, projected an image of Black excellence that does not necessarily address the realities of Black people's lives, as experienced in the city spaces and geographies we do not immediately associate with Black cultures, such as the waterfront. Price's work, like Chambers's, reflects the duality of Black masculinity that is at once both hyper-visible and invisible. This is a shared experience of Blackness (and maleness) that resonates beyond the individual narrative or exalted person; it is a collective experience.

Finally, there is the work of Gabriel, who exhibited Meskel – መስቀል between 21 October and 14 December 2024, as part of Black Artists' Networks in Dialogue's (BAND) offsite project. Gabriel was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, but he now lives and works in Milan, Italy; his work directly engages with colonial archives and questions of marginalization, visibility, and memory. BAND (n.d.), a charitable organization dedicated to supporting, documenting and showcasing the artistic and cultural contributions of Black artists and cultural workers in Canada and internationally, said of Gabriel's work, "This project represents the first collaboration between BAND and The Recovery Plan, a research center and cultural incubator in Florence, Italy dedicated to recovering black histories while cultivating the culture of the future through support and mentorship for young cultural practitioners." In Meskel – መስቀል, photographs, printed on translucent silks, are draped between posts that suggest boundaries or structural supports. The structure reframes family images, sourced from Italian vintage and antique markets, and is shaped by Gabriel's [End Page 465] own personal narrative that is informed by Italy's colonial imagery in Eritrea and Ethiopia. Spanning generations, these once-cherished, now discarded images reveal the fragility of collective memory and the precarious stewardship of cultural history. They also evoke an archive of dynamic potential, with the floor layered with charcoal—a substance that nourishes the soil while also bearing the weight of destruction (BAND, n.d.).

According to Kassahun Tassie et al. (2021, 2), charcoal consumption in most sub-Saharan African (SSA) nations is expected to double by 2030, and yet, there are concerning socioeconomic and environmental impacts of charcoal production in rural households in countries like Ethiopia. Although not a Canadian citizen, Gabriel's work is in conversation with Black diasporic cultures in Toronto, especially those from SSA countries. Meskel – መስቀል is in conversation with Somali Cultural and Recreation Centre (SCCR), approved by the council in 2022 to "be a hub to preserve and celebrate the rich contribution and histories of Toronto's Somali communities" that will be housed in the west-end suburb of Etobicoke.⁸ While on the surface Meskel – መስቀል and SCCR have little in common and represent different forms of cultural heritage, by placing stories of SSA, especially Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia—whose diasporic communities are underrepresented in Canada—into the public realm, both are developing new ways to archive—as living places of memory—that span across geographies of space and place.

By using the descriptive "living," this form of archive, as Stuart Hall (2001) once described, represents a "present, ongoing, continuing, unfinished, open-ended" (89) form of archiving which affords the opportunity to practically and theoretically comprehend "how heterogeneous a practice collecting and archiving is" (91), as opposed to a heritage plaque or commemorative bust that is in many ways an extension of the traditional heritage museum—there only to be on display, to be seen and to be looked at but without any sense of futurity. As articulated by Tina Campt (2017), futurity "[is] not a question of 'hope'—though it is certainly inescapably intertwined with the idea of aspiration" (17). Rather, thinking about futurity through a notion of "tense" (17) is crucial. What, therefore, is the "tense" of a Black future and of a Black public art? In this regard, we see much potential in thinking about Black heritage commemoration not singularly as about a figure from the past who is memorialized to be remembered in the present but, instead, as a fluid timeline that considers past, present, and future as a means to disrupt normative timelines that seek to flatten the political act of placing groups of Black people—through art—into public spaces.

Ekow Eshun's (2022) concept of the Black Fantastic asks us to consider how it is less about focusing on a genre or a movement but more so "a way of seeing, shared by artists who grapple with the legacy of slavery and the inequities of racialized contemporary society by conjuring new narratives of Black possibility" (12). Public art that rethinks heritagization as less about individual commemoration and more so about new visions, as the work of Price, Gabriel, and Jordan asks us to conjure up about Black Canadian [End Page 466] (and diasporic) cultures and identities, do more to contribute to Black belonging than any museum exhibit could ever do. Similarly, Black archival collections in Ontario have revealed an untapped reservoir of photographs, audio files, and other ephemera that could be fodder for constituting public art that is reflexive; the kind of art that constitutes what Michael Warner (2002) has called

[a] counterpublic … [that] comes into being through an address to indefinite strangers … counterpublic discourse also addresses those strangers as being not just anybody. Addressees are socially marked by their participation in this kind of discourse; ordinary people are presumed to not want to be mistaken for the kind of person who would participate in this kind of talk or be present in this kind of scene.

(86)

While there are multiple institutional archives that hold collections related to Black people, communities, and buildings across the province of Ontario, within the CTA, as an example, MOBA has located 230 Black history items. We have chosen two CTA photographic records to illustrate what a counter-public public art based on the living archive could accomplish.

Using CTA's Black Archival Collection to Disrupt Narratives

The Globe and Mail fonds at the CTA holds the photograph titled Black veterans' home – Reverend Dr. C.A. Stewart, F.N. Richard, L. McCurtis, H.T. Shepherd, dated May 31, 1946 (City of Toronto Archives; Figure 1). The image features four Black men who, while we know their names, are not described in any other detail to fully understand their connection to Toronto, the Second World War (other than being veterans), or the setting of the photograph. The image is meta-tagged as "World War, 1939–1945," "Blacks (People)," and "Armed Forces Personnel." Beyond these tags, all that is publicly available is their image, their first initials/last names, and the date the image was taken. In addition to her Legacy Voices Canada 150, Kathy Grant's Black Canadian Veterans website works to ensure Black Canadian war history is documented and preserved. She has done much to bring the histories of Black war veterans into the public discourse. While Shaw's academic work and Calvin Ruck's (1986) initial book on the topic created a literary record on Black veterans, thanks to Grant's efforts, the visual and textual records of the all-Black No. 2 Construction Battalion are now locatable on the Library and Archives Canada digital site (see Horrall 2021).⁹ On 7 November 2024, HT honoured the legacy of the No. 2 Battalion with a commemorative plaque that will be placed at the corner of King Street West and University Avenue, which is close to the original site of the Battalion's enlistment office at 162 King St. West (DCN-JOC News Services 2024). The No. 2. Battalion is receiving long-overdue recognition not only in Toronto but also in the Town of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, where a plaque in their honour, as Canada's only all-Black military unit, was erected in 2021.¹⁰ [End Page 467]

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Figure 1.

Black veterans' home – Reverend Dr. C.A. Stewart, F.N. Richard, L. McCurtis, H.T. Shepherd.

Source: City of Toronto Archives, Globe and Mail fonds, Fonds 1266, Item 104988, 31 May 1946.

We are not suggesting that the No. 2 Battalion does not deserve commemoration. What we are saying is that when we diversify the stories that are told of Black Canadians, using the example of Second World War veterans, we will begin to have a more complex understanding of their contributions across time and space. The Second World War is a particular moment in Canadian history that has often excluded stories of Black veterans. Grant, the daughter of Second World War veteran Owen Rowe, who was born in Barbados and who enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces at Montreal, has said, "By putting these examples and showing we served … [even] after the war, it humanizes the soldiers by showing examples of us and not only showing examples of victims of racism" (Patterson 2022). It is not out of the realm of possibilities to imagine more than a commemorative bust of Reverend Stewart, Richard, McCurtis, and Shepherd placed in the location where men reported for enlistment in 1940s Toronto but instead, a mural with storytelling about Black Canadian Expeditionary Forces history. This kind of commemoration would push the needle on how we remember Black people during the "Great Wars," not through the narrow prism of racism and anti-Blackness but that of Black friendship, camaraderie, community, and service. [End Page 468]

Another example from the CTA, Art Centre – group of Black children, located in Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 2, Item 199, and dated 12 December 1939, is a photograph of fourteen Black children who are unnamed, and the location of the photograph unknown (Figure 2). The photograph forms part of the former City of Toronto fonds, Department of Public Works photographs, and Art Gallery photographs. As Thompson (2019a) once asked in a previous publication, "What should be done when there are unknown subjects or missing information in archival records? What does it mean when we name or do not name someone? Is it because we do not know, or because we are not interested in finding out?" (100). The same questions could be asked of the Art Centre – group of children. Based on the CTA's finding aid record, we know that the photograph was taken at the Art Gallery of Toronto, now AGO, and given its current place within the archive, we also know that the photograph belongs to a series of other photographs that were taken there between 1934 and 1940, so why are the children in this record still unnamed? If we were to imagine this image as a form of public art, it could become a powerful, disruptive catalyst for identifying the children captured in

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Figure 2.

Art Centre – group of Black children.

Source: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 2, Item 199, 12 December 1939.

[End Page 469] the image. It could also raise important questions about Black children's play activities during the Depression years, as well as discussions around the politics of respectability as evidenced by their dress, hair, and deportment. Given that the children are also not looking into the camera, did they know their image was being taken? Was the art gallery only for Black children, or was it a special day when this image was taken? Many questions abound in this image, but what it does answer is the need to rethink the archive. If reimagined as a source for Black public art, how would it create deeper engagement in Black histories, communities, and the everyday? What role could the archive play in public art and the ethics of identity, memory-making, and knowledge sharing?

Public Art and the Ethics of Identity, Memory-Making, and Knowledge Sharing

We wrote this article in the spirit of writer and Black cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, who once opined: "The ethic is the aesthetic" (quoted in McKittrick 2021, 167). Speaking to the vitality of music ("beats and grooves and waveforms") in the "praxis of Black life," Black studies scholar Katherine McKittrick (2021, 167) invoked Wynter in this assertion meant to orient our thinking about archives and public art as bound up with ethical/aesthetic questions. The ethico-aesthetic, in the case of public art and the rethinking of the role of the archive, is a vital locus for resistance and the reassertion of Black life into the public space. Engaging with Black archives in Toronto as a resource for public art and heritage would insist upon deepening the role of cultural production as a key determinant in processes of inclusion and exclusion. This kind of public act would also deepen knowledge of Black people's sociabilities through time and space.

In the introduction to their collection Visual Participatory Arts Based Research in the City: Ontology, Aesthetics and Ethics, editors Laura Trafí-Prats and Aurelio Castro-Varela (2022) identify the locus of the "city as a colonial neoliberal space" rife with violence and erasure of the subaltern, yet they insist on its contingency—wherein the public sphere is at the same time a place where "important aesthetic, ethical and political acts" can be activated in order to enact "experiments with modes of collective life that resist … de-humanizing and abstracting gestures" (2). Given that both archives and museums, like public art, are spaces of meaning-making that reside at the threshold of public and private and are historically (ongoingly) sites of "de-humanizing and abstracting gestures," their meeting place is nonetheless a rich site of inquiry and possibility. They both carry (and reproduce) legacies of colonial and racial violence, of inclusion/exclusion that determine capacities for representation and commemoration, but unlike museums and archives, public art can be engaged with and intervened through the latter in ways that can ethically account for historical violences while serving a larger purpose of enabling [End Page 470] artistic production, public engagement, and resistance. The Black archive is unchartered waters in the field of heritage, and if artists were given opportunities to engage with, and within it, there would be endless possibilities for curating more robust commemorative forms of Black public art.