AGO department marks 1st year with exhibition that explores Caribbean history
CBC
An Art Gallery of Ontario department that brings together art from Africa and the African diaspora is celebrating its first year and first full exhibition.
The AGO's Department of Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora, created last October, has organized the exhibition called "Fragments of Epic Memory," with works by more than 30 artists of Caribbean descent. Many of these artists are based in Toronto and Canada. The exhibition, which opened Sept. 1, 2021, runs until Feb. 21, 2022.
"Fragments of Epic Memory" includes historical photographs, paintings, paper-mache, sculptures and multimedia experiences. All of the artworks are rooted in the Caribbean after 1838.
The exhibition, organized loosely in chronological order, highlights the arrival of commercial photography to the region in the 1840s and the impact of the post-emancipation period on the present time.
Julie Crooks, curator of the AGO's Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora, said the exhibition includes more than 200 photographs from The Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs, which the AGO acquired in 2019. Crooks curated the exhibition.
The Montgomery collection itself contains more than 3,500 historical images from 34 countries, including Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. The images are studio portraits, landscapes and tourist views and the photos document the lands, peoples and cultures. The collection covers the period 1840 to 1950 and includes images produced by regional and international photographers and studios.
"We've been thinking about this exhibition since 2019, when we acquired the the Montgomery Caribbean photography collection," Crooks told CBC Toronto on the weekend.
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