Provoking the status quo
Decades after an infamous misstep, the ROM returns to Black Canadian issues and history
A sharp, unnerving hiss seeps from a broad upper gallery at the Royal Ontario Museum, penetrating enough that it hits your ears before your eyes can fall on its source.
It’s coming from a three-screen video installation by Michèle Pearson Clarke, and if it grates on the decorous solitude of your museum-going experience, mission accomplished. On screen, a revolving cast of Black Canadians suck their teeth — a culturally shared gesture of disdain among Africans and their broad-ranging diaspora alike — frown disapprovingly, shake their heads and roll their eyes, as if to say: Enough, already.
And they’d be right. For much of our150-ish years as a country, we’ve clung tightly to a national mythology of abiding niceness. Awful things such as slavery, genocide and racism happen somewhere else, we’ve often told ourselves, and among that litany of colonial ills, we’ve been a uniquely gracious nation of tolerance and inclusion.
But in the remarkable reckoning that gathered momentum leading up to the sesquicentennial last year, bloomed in full colour throughout and is now doing its best to dig roots so as not to become a one-off, there’s only one response to that common tale: As if. Clarke’s piece is the ROM’s emblem of just that, as it joins that growing chorus with Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art, which opened Saturday.
“It’s this idea of ‘What were you thinking?’ ” laughs Silvia Forni, the curator of the ROM’s African collections, as well as this show. “It’s very provocative, and I love that.”
Provocation of the status quo here, of all places, marks a significant point on a very long road. Clarke’s work may be directed at Canadian society more broadly, but it’s no stretch to refit it to the museum itself.
The ROM’s relationship to the Black community here has always been fraught. Almost 30 years ago, the museum opened Into the Heart of Africa, an exploration of European colonialism and its litany of ills.
Launched without consulting Black scholars or even the local community, it became a flashpoint of ugly public protest over imagery that many leaders of the Black community took to be blatantly racist. People picketed the ROM for weeks; police were called, skirmishes erupted, arrests were made.
In 1990, the ROM’s John McNeill — forced to take up the director’s role when his boss, Cuyler Young, quit as the furor reached its peak — delivered a defensive statement on its closing. It looked nothing like an apology: The “controversy” around the show, McNeill said at the time, “impinges on the freedom of all museums.”
And then, silence. The ROM treaded lightly around the display of African content for years, wary of opening old wounds. Then, in 2014, Forni began to forge a path back. The museum’s “Of Africa” program, a series of events, performances and lectures began on the 25th anniversary of the Into the Heart of Africa debacle as a way of rehabilitating the broken trust between the museum and the community.
To help steer it, Forni brought in Dominique Fontaine, an AfricanCanadian curator and one of her cocurators on Here We Are Here (Julie Crooks, now at the Art Gallery of Ontario, is the third). “This is what we’re trying to reveal: These issues, these questions were always there,” Fontaine says.
“They may not have been part of the program of big institutions like the ROM, but they’re constant for people in these communities, and throughout Canadian history. We have always been here, whether we have been represented or not.”
The show takes its name from Sylvia Hamilton’s work here, which digs deep into the Black Canadian history. Hamilton puts on view hundreds of names from the original Book of Negroes, emblazoned on long scrolls that drape from the room’s full height. The Book was a listing of some 3,000 Black Loyalists who had escaped the U.S. in the 1770s and 1780s after the revolution against the British, believing fidelity to the Crown would be their passage to freedom.
History, though, tells otherwise, and enslavement takes both explicit subtle forms. The Loyalists found an ingrained culture of slavery in Canada, along with newly arrived white loyalists, who had brought their slaves north with them. Racism was rampant, for enslaved and free Blacks alike.
In a vitrine, Hamilton includes an array of objects from the ROM’s col- lection and her own that show a persistent culture of discrimination across centuries: Newspaper ads for runaway slaves; a Halifax auction whose items include farm equipment and “a stout negro;” and an array of degrading tchotchkes that includes a pencil holder with a cartoonish Black child with bright red lips steering a push cart stamped with the words “Souvenir of Canada.”
“These are the thing that we typically associate with the United States,” Forni says. “In Canada, it’s the Underground Railroad that ends up being the narrative of Black Canada — it’s a feel-good story, versus the evil Americans. And I think these pieces push back against that narrative in really necessary ways.”
Here We Are Here contributes, and vitally, to the idea of history as a selective realm filled with favourable inclusions and exclusions — our collective national ignorance until very recently of the nightmare of Indige- nous residential schools tells you as much as you need to know about that — and adds its own vital annotations.
Chantal Gibson’s Souvenir is an array of hundreds of collectible spoons, all unique and painted in identical flat-black acrylic, speaking both to the erasure of difference in a country lauded for its diversity (and, she told me, “you can’t get away from the fact that they’re all Black hanging bodies”); Bushra Junaid’s big, glowing lightbox of Black children in a sugarcane field is superimposed with classified ads for molasses, sugar and rum from the St. John’s Evening Telegram — a nod to the blithe, brisk trade between Newfoundland and various slave-powered enterprises in the Caribbean well into the 20th century; Sandra Brewster’s Hiking Black Creek, an enlarged family photo of her parents happily exploring nature in the 1970s, shortly after emigrating to Canada from Guyana, pushing back against the cliché of Black immigrants as urban and ghettoized. Esmaa Mohamoud, whose work Heavy Heavy had to be the most-Instagrammed piece of the AGO’s broadly-shared recent show Every. Now .Then, brings us right up to the here and now: An ornately decorated set of football gear displayed on jet-black Astroturf, it nods to the recent NFL protest movement of kneeling for the American national anthem but, like Sylvia Hamilton, states clearly that whatever stories we might tell ourselves, Canada is far from innocent. With its shoulder pads trailing a train of chains, our own ugly history — of slavery, of marginalization, and of a culture made a spectacle of through sports — follows close behind.
Taken together, the show is intensely confrontational, and unfamiliar turf for a museum more accustomed to walking softly. “We’ve been at this since 2014, so it’s been interesting to see how the museum has evolved, how it has positioned itself, and how it’s opened up,” Fontaine says. “You can see this exhibition as an intervention in the museum as a form of protest — we are saying Black Canadians are part of the fabric of society here. It’s a question of audacity, and giving value.”
Forni says the museum has already come a long way. More than 300 people from the city’s Black community came to the opening on Thursday, “and I don’t know, if we’d done the exact same thing five years ago, we would have so many RSVPs.”
“I think the community is finally starting to feel more welcome. We really needed ‘Of Africa’ — it gave us time to think, and to think with different people. Every step of it led us here.” Finally, those steps are in the right direction, with many yet to go.
“In Canada, it’s the Underground Railroad that ends up being the narrative of Black Canada — it’s a feel-good story, versus the evil Americans. And I think these pieces push back against that narrative in really necessary ways.” SILVIA FORNI CURATOR OF THE ROM’S AFRICAN COLLECTIONS AND CO-CURATOR OF HERE WE ARE HERE