In Relation: Black Material Life and Memory on Mi’kma’ki

I had the opportunity to curate In Relation: Black Material Life and Memory on Mi'kma'ki under the mentorship of Pamela Edmonds (Director/Curator of Dalhousie Art Gallery) and Allison Yearwood (Lead Consultant and Advisor at Dalhousie Art Gallery). The show brought together historical and contemporary works of basketry, textiles, ceramics, sculpture, video, and archival materials. Artists include Edith Clayton, Clara Clayton Gough, Sylvia D. Hamilton, Kwame Owusu Brobbey, Tyshan Wright, and Jan Wade.

The exhibition explores how memory, knowledge, and cultural traditions are transmitted through material forms and what it means for Black diasporic communities to hold history in the things they make. Every time a basket is woven, a drum is struck, or a vessel is fired in clay, the knowledge embedded in that act is reactivated.

By placing African Nova Scotian, Ethiopian, and broader African diasporic histories and practices in conversation, the exhibition traces shared approaches to making, gathering, and remembering across geographies and centuries.

The exhibition was built around the premise that material culture resists what capitalism cannot commodify or blindly scale: the memory of exchange, repair, and relation. In an era where generationally passed skills like basket weaving are dismissed as economically unproductive, what gets forgotten is what makers and their objects carry identity, memory, and ways of knowing that no job market can measure. These skills were never meant to be weighed against economic output. They were meant to be held, integrated into daily life, allowed to break by accident, and repaired by the same hands that made them.

Central to my curatorial framework are Édouard Glissant's concept of Relation, where identities don't merge into one but are formed through encounter, crossing, and mutual entanglement, and Homi K. Bhabha's Third Space, a site where cultural difference is neither collapsed nor preserved in purity but negotiated into new forms of meaning that resist the colonial demand for singular identity. Diasporic cultural identity is not a fixed essence to be recovered but a continual production shaped by history, rupture, and repositioning.

I was also drawn to the role of women in transmitting this knowledge, often invisibly, often through the maternal line. The hand that weaves and the hand that guides are not always separate. Embodied memory is the knowledge carried by the repeated movement of hands, passed from mother to daughter across generations, sustaining identity precisely because it was never written down.

Mesob by unknown maker

Handwoven grass with natural and dyed fibers. Courtesy of Aster Cafe, Halifax. Originating in Harar, Eastern Ethiopia, the mesob served in the Battle of Adwa and now reactivates on Treaty Land as an object of gathering, survival, and identity.

Basket Figures by Clara Clayton Gough

Beginning in 1998, Clayton Gough expanded her family's nine-generation basketmaking tradition into figurative sculpture, building life-sized human forms from the same ribbed weaving technique her mother, Edith Clayton, passed down to her. The body is made from the material that sustains it.

Black Mother Black Daughter by Sylvia D. Hamilton

Filmmaker, writer, and documentarian whose work, including Black Mother Black Daughter (1989), traces the maternal transmission of knowledge and racial pride within African Nova Scotian communities.

Bench Drum II by Tyshan Wright

Wood, goat skin, Maroon beads. Wright, from Accompong, Jamaica, responds to the 1796 exile of Trelawney Maroons to Halifax, reimagining their confiscated ceremonial instruments using local Nova Scotian materials, bridging Koromanti Ghana, Jamaica, and Mi'kma'ki.

Akwaaba & The Current Future by Kwame Owusu Brobbey

Stoneware, manganese, red iron oxide. Drawing on Adinkra symbols, the work holds Akan philosophy and Mi'kmaw land teachings beside each other — accountable to both, flattening neither.

Woven Baskets by Edith Clayton

A craft traceable through at least six generations in Nova Scotia, from Louisa Jackson (b. 1806). Clayton learned natural dyeing from Mi'kmaw women; her daughter recalls weaving nine baskets a day as both economic necessity and an act of agency.

Panel Discussion

In conjunction with the exhibition, I was joined in conversation by Sylvia D. Hamilton, moderated by Pamela Edmonds. Together, we reflected on Black cultural memory, African Nova Scotian histories, material culture, archives, and the ways knowledge is carried through objects, images, stories, and relationships. The discussion addressed the significance of presenting the exhibition at Treaty Space Gallery, a space whose name carries its own political and historical weight, and the ethical responsibilities of working with community histories as a curator.

Exhibition Details

Opening Reception: 19 May 2026

Panel Discussion: 28 May 2026

Closing Date: 30 May 2026

Program Context: Pathways to Equity: Black and Indigenous Curatorial Mentorship and Cultural Leadership Initiative, developed with Dalhousie Art Gallery

Team involved: Pamela Edmonds, Allison Yearwood, Frankie Macaulay, Michele Gallant, Sym Corrigan, Pax Romana, Nour El Sabeh, Trina Annand, and Christie Melville

Artists: Edith Clayton, Clara Clayton Gough, Sylvia D. Hamilton, Kwame Owusu Brobbey, Tyshan Wright, and Jan Wade

Lenders: Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, Aster Cafe, Kwestomar Kreations, and National Film Board

In Relation is an act of reclamation and a reminder that material culture and the transference of knowledge require the movement of hands. If the source of agency is forgotten, we surrender ourselves to the systems that replace it. In the material, we hold on, and in relation, we remember.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse