Estuaries
Estuaries
Estuaries form when freshwater rivers meet the ocean and become slightly salty. The Atlantic is the saltiest of the five ocean basins. It is also the body of water across which more than 30,000 ships carried over twelve million abducted Africans into slavery through the lethal crossing known as the Middle Passage. These ships returned laden with goods produced through the forced labour of Black captives. John Owens, eponym of this gallery, was a successful shipbuilder, as was his executor, Robert Reed. Using funds from Owens’ estate, Reed worked with artist John Hammond to develop a teaching collection now housed at the Owens Art Gallery. The Maritimes, like the rest of Canada, profited from shipbuilding and colonial economies linked to transatlantic slavery and trade.[1] The operational years of Owens’ and Reed’s shipbuilding ventures coincide with a rise in demand for Canadian lumber and sailing ships for the express purpose of trade in molasses, sugar, cotton, woollens, and tobacco, largely produced through the forced labour of enslaved Africans. Sackville, Saint John, and Moncton were among the key centres of shipbuilding at the time. This booming business later led to the development of processing facilities in New Brunswick. The countless shipments of products stemming from this violently extractive practice fueled and financed colonial life, expansion, and industry.
John Hammond, Harbour Scene, 1895, oil on canvas, 106.7 x 151.1 cm , Gift of the Artist, Collection of the Owens Art Gallery. Photo: Roger J. Smith
Meanwhile, Black histories in New Brunswick and elsewhere were systematically washed away. The earliest records of Black presence in New Brunswick date back to roughly 1690, when an unnamed Black man (likely enslaved) was captured and displaced to Saint John River by the French. He would later be recaptured and displaced again to Boston by Major Benjamin Church. By the mid-1700s, a small Black population began growing across New Brunswick. It was comprised of enslaved, indentured and free(d) Black people coming from the Caribbean, the United States and other parts of Canada like Halifax. By 1824, there were Black people living in every county of New Brunswick. Black New Brunswickers faced, and continue to face, such severe, ongoing racism and discrimination that many sought safety and opportunity elsewhere. To this day, the histories and contributions of small Black communities in New Brunswick and across Canada are overlooked due to their size, their seemingly limited archival presence, and, in some cases, the common, inaccurate belief that they simply do not exist.
Estuaries floats in the space between these facts, musing on Black diasporic peoples’ relationship to the ocean. The exhibition uses as an anchor the legacies of white settler civic leaders and entrepreneurs like John Owens, Robert Reed, and John Hammond, who, through their involvement in the connected industries of shipbuilding, trade, processing of raw materials and the funds they generated, profited from the stolen labour and disenfranchisement of Black people. This exhibition features artworks by both contemporary and historical artists, archival documents and artifacts, to contend with the tensions that arise once we allow the freshwater river of Canadian history to meet the ocean of Black Atlantic life.
[1] Slavery was legal in Canada from 1629 to 1834 and Canadian-built ships continued to be purchased and used for colonial practices until the late 1860s. Black and Indigenous people in Canada were held as indentured servants for years following the abolition of slavery and they continue to be severly economically exploited to this day.
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About the Artists and Curator
Dr. Joana Joachim
Dr. Joana Joachim is Assistant professor of Black Studies in Art History and Social Justice at Concordia University. Her research and teaching interests include Black feminist art histories, Black diasporic art histories, critical museologies, Black Canadian studies, and Canadian slavery studies. Her curatorial projects include Estuaries presented at the Owens Art Gallery (2024) and Blackity presented at Artexte (2021). Her current book project examines practices of self-preservation and self-care among Black women in contexts of slavery under the French by considering both historical and contemporary artworks. She earned her PhD in the department of Art History and Communication Studies and at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill University. Dr. Joachim obtained her master’s degree in Museology from Université de Montréal and her BFA cum laude from University of Ottawa. In addition to the special issue of RACAR, “salt: For the preservation of Black diasporic visual histories” co-edited with Pamela Edmonds, Dr. Joachim’s writing has appeared in books, journals and magazines including Routledge Companion to African Diaspora Art edited by Eddie Chambers (forthcoming October 2024), History, art and Blackness in Canada, Manuel Mathieu: World Discovered Under Other Skies, Canadian Journal of History and C Magazine.
Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva
The artist and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at the University of New York. Her work artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on themes and questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), The Impagavel Divide (Workshop of Political Imagination and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg / MIT Press, 2022) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her artwork includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020) and Ancestral Claims/Ancestral Clouds (2023) in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational artistic practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has performed shows and lectures in important artistic spaces, such as the Pompidou Centre (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), MASP (São Paulo), Guggenheim (New York) and MoMa (New York). She also wrote and created for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016; 2023 Venice Biennale, 2017 and Documenta 14, São Paulo Biennale, 2023) and published in art spaces such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst and E-Flux
Arjuna Neuman was born on an airplane, that’s why he has so many passports. He is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. Recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthaal Extra City, Antwerp; Munch Museum, Oslo; Kunsthalle Wien; Macba Barcelona; CCA Glasgow and Glasgow International, Scotland; Showroom Gallery, London; Belkin Gallery and Or Gallery, Vancouver; TPW Gallery, Toronto amongst others. Recent biennials include Hacer Noche, Mexico; Ural Industrial Biennial, Russia; Lubumbashi Biennial, DWC; Bergen Assembly, Norway; Sharjah Biennial, UAE; Venice Biennial, Italy and Qalandia Biennial, Palestine. Notable group shows include the Madre Museum, Naples Italy; Ludwig Forum Museum, Germany; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Istanbul Modern, Turkey; MAAT, Portugal; Museum of Image and Sound, Brazil; Whitechapel Gallery, Bold Tendencies and LUX in London amongst many others. Film festivals include Berlinale Forum Expanded, Docslisboa, Third Horizon, Images Festival and many others. His work is held in the Belkin Collection, IAC Lyon, and Platform UK collection. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings, World Records, Umbau and e-flux. He has a forthcoming monograph published by Archive Books. He has mixtapes essays on Dublab, Radio Alhara and NTS. And he is the co-founder of www.archiveofbelonging.org – a resource database for migrants and refugees.
Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s collaboration includes the film Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath//Corpus Infinitum (2020). Their films have been exhibited at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery, The 56th Venice Biennale, The Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (Berlin), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), Julia Stoschek Collection (Dusseldorf), Arnhem Museum (Netherland), and more. Their films have been screened at Berlinale Forum Expanded, Images Festival Toronto, Docslisboa, Pravo Lujdski and more. They were the 2021 feature artists at the Flaherty Seminar and their work is held in the Belkin Museum Collection. In 2023, they have shown the ensemble of their films at the MACBA (Barcelona) and they premiered their new film Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Ghosts at Kunsthalle Wien. In Februrary 2024, they opened a retrospective of their work at the Munch Museum in Oslo; in May 2024 the Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp opened a solo exhibition of their work.
They have a forthcoming monograph published by Archive Books.
Sylvia D. Hamilton
Sylvia D. Hamilton is a multi-award-winning Nova Scotian filmmaker, artist and writer known for the documentaries Portia White: Think on Me, The Little Black School House and Black Mother Black Daughter, among others. Her poetry collection, And I Alone Escaped to Tell You, a finalist for the Nova Scotia Masterworks Award and the 2015 League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her latest collection titled Tender was a finalist for the League of Canadian Poets 2023 Pat Lowther Award and the winner of the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia Maxine Tynes Poetry Award. She is an Inglis Professor Emeritus at the University of King’s College and recently she was appointed to the Order of Canada and the Order of Nova Scotia.
Oluseye
Oluseye is a Nigerian-Canadian artist. Using “diasporic debris”—a term he coined to describe artifacts he collects on his trans-Atlantic travels—he traces Blackness through its multifaceted manifestations. Recast into sculpture, performance, and photography, these transformational objects invoke his personal narratives within a broader examination of Black and Diasporic identity, migration, and African spiritual traditions. Oluseye has exhibited at the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Fransisco, 2024), Daniel Faria Gallery (Toronto, 2024), Southern Guild Gallery (Cape Town, 2023), and the Gardiner Museum (Toronto, 2023), among others. His first public art commission, Black Ark, was installed in Toronto’s Ashbridge’s Bay Park, and will tour the Maritimes with stops at the Owens Art Gallery and The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia through 2024.
Camille Turner
Camille Turner is an artist/scholar whose work combines Afrofuturism and historical research. Her most recent explorations confront the entanglement of what is now Canada in the transatlantic trade in Africans. She puts into practice Afronautics, a methodological frame she developed to approach colonial archives from the point of view of a liberated future. Camille is a graduate of OCAD and has recently completed a PhD at York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Currently, she is a Provost’s postdoctoral fellow at University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Turner is the recipient of the 2022 Artist Prize by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Her artworks are held in museums and public and private collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Art Museum at University of Toronto, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Canada Council Art Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Museum London, The Wedge Collection and The Rooms.
Denyse Thomasos
Born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, the acclaimed painter Denyse Thomasos was raised in Toronto and spent most of her professional career in Philadelphia and New York City. Thomasos earned a BA in Painting and Art History from the University of Toronto in 1987. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 1988 and the following year completed her MFA in Painting and Sculpture, Yale School of Art, Yale University. Throughout her career she attended various residencies, such as the Ucross Foundation Artist Residency, in Ucross, Wyoming in 2000 and the Bogliasco Foundation Artist Residency in Genoa, Italy in 2003. She won numerous prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship Prize in 1997; the Joan Mitchell Foundation award in 1998; and the New York Foundation for the Arts award in 2008; as well as grants from both the Canada Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been collected by private collectors, as well as major corporate and public institutions, including Rutgers University, New Jersey; Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa; Bank of Montreal, Toronto; Banque Nationale du Canada, Montreal; Art Gallery of Guelph; Oakville Galleries; the Hart House Collection at the University of Toronto, and private collections throughout Canada and the United States. When Thomasos died tragically in 2012, she was at the height of her career, with major museum shows, a full professorship, New York and Toronto gallery representation, and many prestigious awards and residencies.
Gary Weekes
Gary Weekes, a Canadian Artist and Photographer known for his captivating and thought-provoking work, was born in London, England. His formative years were spent in London and New York City, where those vibrant, cultural and artistic environments deeply influenced his creative vision. Weekes’ photography often explores themes of; identity, diversity, and human connection, blending his transatlantic experiences into a unique artistic perspective. His work has been showcased in numerous galleries and exhibitions, earning him recognition for his ability to capture the subtleties of human emotion and the complexity of urban life. Emigrating to Canada with his family has expanded Weekes’ artistic repertoire, incorporating elements of Canadiana and social narrative into his oeuvre, allowing him to entwine his rich cultural heritage with the serene and diverse backdrops of his new home. Weekes’ art often highlights the intersection of nature and humanity, presenting a compelling commentary on the coexistence of modern life and natural beauty. Through his lens, Weekes invites viewers to see the world from a multifaceted perspective, one that is as introspective as it is expansive.
Selected Bibliography and Further Reading:
Conlin, Dan. “Research Note: A Slave Ship Made Captive: The Schooner Severn.” Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society, vol. 2 (1999): 203–12.
Hamilton, Sylvia D. Tender. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau Press, 2022.
Harris, Jennifer. “Black Life in a Nineteenth-Century New Brunswick Town.” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’Études Canadiennes, vol. 46, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 138–66. https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs.46.1.138.
Larocque, Peter J. “Fine Intentions: An Account og the Owens Art Institution in Saint John, New Brunswick, 1884-1893.” Master’s thesis, Univeristy of New Brunswick, 1996.
Maynard, Robin. Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2017.
“Death of Robert Reed, One of St John’s Oldest and Best Known Citizens.” Daily Sun, St. John, NB, December 19, 1893.
Rutland, Ted. Displacing Blackness: Planning, Power, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018.
Slave Voyages. “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database: Timelapse.” https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database#timelapse
Spray, W. A. The Blacks in New Brunswick. Fredericton: Brunswick Press, 1972.
“The Golden Age of Sail.” Web Tour. New Brunswick Museum and Musée McCord Stewart, 2003. (Removed from Internet)
Robert Reed, Last Will and Testament, proved and filed December 22, 1894.
Vernon, Karina. The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilford Laurier University Press, 2020.
Winks, Robin W. The Blacks in Canada: A History. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.
Wright, Esther Clark. Saint John Ships and Their Builders. Wolfville, Nova Scotia: 1976, 50-56.
Acknowledgements
This exhibition was made possible thanks to funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and the New Brunswick Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture. It received special support from the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax), the Centre for Canadian Studies (Mount Allison University), the Department of English (Mount Allison University), and the Faculty of Fine Arts (Concordia University).
Accessibility
The exhibition contains videos with sound.
The videos are on view on the main floor. The main floor of the Owens is wheelchair accessible. The stairs to the Owens from the entrance nearest the University Chapel have a handrail. There is also ramp access at this entrance, however, the ramp is steep. The stairs to the Owens entrance off York Street also have a handrail, but there is no ramp. Find more information at owensartgallery.com/visit/accessibility/
Top Image: Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, 4 Waters-Deep Implicancy, 2018, video stills, courtesy of the Artists
