Working on this exhibition has truly been a blessing, a culmination of a long awaited dream. I would like to thank Dr. Esmeralda Thornhill for her important and tireless work in the development of the symposium Racism and The Black World Response, and the rest of symposium organizers for their advice and support. Special thanks to Sue Gibson Garvey, director of the Dalhousie Art Gallery, for her ongoing encouragement and patience, as well as to gallery staff, Michele Gallant and Sym Corrigan for all their helpful work in bringing this exhibition together.

Thanks to all participating artists for their respective visions and insights, and to Anthony Joyette for his contribution to this publication, and for his work as an advocate for the development of Black Canadian cultural discourse. I am also grateful to my family for their love and support.

Dealing with issues surrounding racism is a challenge to say the very least. I feel most fortunate to have come to a place where we can confront these issues more directly and honestly. For me, and, I suspect, for others, doing so involves moving beyond the history of pain to speak, in order to articulate a clearer story of a people who have always lived creatively despite adversity.

I would like to dedicate this exhibition to the spirit of those courageous souls who put their black bodies in the forefront and on the line in the name of civil rights and political freedom. Finally, as we recognize the enormous challenges before us, let us also note how far we've come.

Love and Respect,

Pamela Edmonds

2001

Black peoples of the African diaspora share a common experience rooted in resistance-the ongoing fight against racism, discrimination and domination. Racism is without question one of the most difficult issues to address and discuss openly, as it affects everyone at a visceral level. It seems that whenever racism and anti-racist strategies are approached and discussed, the interchange usually takes place at one of two levels-either in shouts or in whispers. The shouters are generally seen as so emotional that their arguments get tuned out. The whisperers are so afraid of the sting of truth that they avoid saying much of anything at all. It is enough to throw one back into silence.

Progress has been made. In both academic discourse and popular culture discussions have focused on racial issues, criticizing and dismantling traditional Eurocentric paradigms, in an effort to recognize the diversity of our global culture and to re-think the traditional understanding of racism. The deepest obstacle to understanding the new politics of race is the universal, if unspoken, assumption that we already know how race works in contemporary society. It is recognized that white, European-based culture is in transition - its domination of the social and geographical margins, its exploitation and appropriation of the "other," and its systems of exclusion and ways of exercising control are all being challenged. However, the struggle against racism, especially within the arts, requires an understanding of how white perceptions have purveyed certain cultural representations, and the cost to others of that control. It requires us to see the world differently.

The arts remain one of the powerful, if not the most powerful, realms of cultural resistance and response - a space for awakening critical consciousness and exploring new visions. While a number of contemporary art exhibitions over the past decade have sought to include the work of black artists and other people of colour, many of the major survey shows have not engaged in critical debate about black artists' contributions to mainstream art. Canadian cultural critic Rinaldo Walcott comments on the void of critical debate surrounding black expressive culture in Canada: "What one finds is exuberant celebration or racist denunciation...The result is that many Black Canadian expressive works are discussed only within the contexts of the artists' autobiography or as anti-racism gestures meant to help fix the nation." (Walcott, 14). This oversimplification of the variety and complexity of black artistic production impedes what might be the arts' real impact in a broader context.

This exhibition celebrates the black body as a site of resistance and the place of new subjectivities and perspectives. As curator, I decided to focus on the flesh and blood of this symbol and its reality because we can all identify with the body - as a reality, a symbol and a concept. Despite many long traditions of representing the human figure in visual art, the black body is still rarely represented outside of its "otherness". The material black body is the most immediate site where the effects of race are played out and it is the point at which absolute difference is established. But the socio-political category of the "black body" comes into being only when the body is perceived as being out of place, either from its natural environment or its national boundaries.

Focusing on the issue of the racialized body, my curatorial strategy has been to select a range of contemporary Canadian artists whose work deals with the "black body" in representation. The exhibition features work by Halifax-based artists Rebecca Fisk, Lucie Chan and Chrystal Clements, as well as Toronto-based artists, Michael Chambers, Buseje Bailey and Gomo George. Their works express a multiplicity of experiences and their backgrounds are as diverse as their practices, which range from photography, drawing, and installation to mixed-media sculpture and assemblage. Combining the strategies of 'high" art with popular culture, their works dismantle traditional paradigms, expressing resistance in response to the impact of racism on their social and cultural psyche. Aware of the racial baggage associated with their positions, histories and practices, these artists resist and critique images of blacks within the popular imagination, in an effort to enter into an open-ended dialogue that moves beyond the notion of an essential black practice or subjectivity. Doing this work has taken the form of working on the black body itself. This process often consists of the artists taking their own bodies (or those of others) literally or symbolically as a "canvas", so that the work of translation and re-appropriation of difference or "blackness" is conveyed as a kind of re-writing of the self on the body. These artists are neither shouting nor whispering. They are trying, in a more honest and direct manner than is generally encouraged, to deal with how race consciousness affects their existence as artists. They are bearing witness, and opening new possibilities for face-to-face encounters.

As a curator, I am particularly interested in how the discourses of race, gender and sexuality have shaped contemporary art and visual culture. As an English-speaking black child growing up in a French-speaking Montreal suburb, I became aware of the anger and frustration generated by the language debate. When my parents decided to move out of Quebec in the mid 1970s, along with many other Anglophones, we went back home to Nova Scotia, so that our family could, as they say, "get back to our roots." Nova Scotians make up the largest and oldest indigenous black populations in Canada, and it is here that my familial ties go back several generations.

Far from the satisfaction of rediscovery of roots, I remember my feelings of rage against the racism that I experienced in my new home, a predominately white neighbourhood. I experienced it as one of the few black kids at school throughout my teenage years. As a student of art and art history, I felt similarly frustrated as I searched for reflections of my own presence as black woman, and as a Canadian, in the European art history I was taught in university. I felt my frustration echoed in the writing of bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis and Malcolm X, and I saw it in the works of African American artists, Fred Ward, David Hammons, Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems and Adrian Piper. But when I held up a mirror to my image specifically as a black Canadian artist, I could barely make out its reflection. In this exhibition, I have started to look for it.

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