Tracing Vancouver's Black Art Scene through Pamphlet Literature
by Phoebe Colby
“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was.” It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger…[t]he danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers.”[1] – Walter Benjamin
In 2011, the Vancouver Art Gallery ran an exhibition of the work of Kerry James Marshall, renowned African-American painter, sculptor and multi-media artist. My middle-school class visited the exhibit as a field trip, and while getting a tour I fell behind to look a painting: Souvenir I. One of the parent volunteers stopped beside me, “beautiful,” she said, “it’s such a shame we don’t have artists like this here.” This moment – not pivotal to anyone but me – is still formative to the motivation behind this paper. Primarily, I write this historiography of black art in the lower mainland to contradict the widely-held belief that black art is non-indigenous to Vancouver, and that historically the black community has been so small that its influence – artistic and otherwise – is negligible. While under-discussed and documented, the historical and contemporary presence of black art in Vancouver captures aspects of the city’s history which are otherwise ignored. On one hand, many communities and individuals are fully aware of these aspects of Vancouver history, mainstream historical consciousness and access to these narratives remain marginalized. This paper will draw from a myriad of disciplines including art history, Black Diasporic Studies, and social history to sketch a historiography of spaces, places and people that make up the historical artistic landscape of the “Black Pacific” so that future civilians, artists and historians of the city can draw from and rework this research as needed.[2]
To set the stage for the ideation of a “Black Pacific,” a brief exploration of the interactions of art and history can provide a foundation for the further discussion of their role in the construction and erasure of black cultural production in Vancouver. “All history is perforce a production – a deliberate selection, ordering, an evaluation of past events,” writes Johanna Mizgala in her essay “Lance Belanger’s Tango Lessons.”[3] Like other creative fields of production –for example, art – history is curated and performed iteratively. Further, like the Western art canon, the production of history rests in the fraught landscape of institutional power dynamics, structural racism, and a myriad of other societal forces that dictate access and visibility of certain sources, or certain stories, above others. In this way, the production of art and the production of history contain inherent similarities. Charmaine Nelson, professor of Art History at McGill University, discusses this co-creation or complicity within academia in the introduction to her anthology Ebony Roots, Northern Soil:
“These canons beget each other in the forms of classes devoted to specific texts, artists, styles, periods, cases, regions, objects and movements, frameworks that have historically and inevitably admitted black subjects only as objects of a white western gaze and investigation; the black as producer of history and knowledge, as agent of culture and politics, is only admitted as a token…which is itself, the process and act of othering.”[4]
Within academia as in other institutions such as state-funded museums and galleries, the art historical canon and the historical canon are inextricably linked, just as the production of art replicates the production of history while creating history in its own wake. Therefore, silences or erasures created in one canon can and will transfer to the next. These complicit begettings and consistent forgettings spread to para-institutional spaces, through popular culture and subcultures alike. While the cultural productions that remain unrecognized and undocumented by the mainstream persist in their own spheres of influence and resourcing, these community-based galleries, expositions, or archives are often neglected or removed from official archives. As art and history are produced and reproduced by these strange socio-structural contortions, it is imperative are documented and that alternate routes are mapped. Due to the difficulty tracking these cultural productions, Nelson asserts that “[a]n urgent necessity of [Black Art History] then, is the writing of its historiographies.”[5] It is my hope that this paper and the research undertaken to produce it will answer Charmaine Nelson’s call, however partially or myopic.
The ideation and definition of black art in this essay draws from Paul Gilroy’s theorization of The Black Atlantic. In this 1993 book on black culture and production mediated by diaspora, Paul Gilroy articulates the importance of art for diasporic communities and as a specifically black means of emancipation: “artistic expression, expanded beyond recognition from the grudging gifts offered by the masters as a token substitute for freedom from bondage, therefore becomes the means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation.”[6] Gilroy argues that the black diaspora exists in a space “where lived crisis and systemic crisis come together” and present a distinct critical theory of society incongruent with those produced by, for example, nineteenth-century labour and class relations in the west.[7] The Black Atlantic presents art and its production as a liberating force specifically for black, diasporic individuals and communities; this is inherently at odds with the typical Western constructions of capitalistic production as paramount to the place and production of the Western art canon. For the descendants of enslaved populations, “social self-creation through labour is not the centre-piece of emancipatory hopes.”[8] Gilroy argues that it is in the production of black art – and especially the production of black music specifically – that the possibility of emancipation lies. I have chosen to draw from Gilroy’s theorization of black art as mediated by both temporal and spatial rupture as I believe this can speak to the kaleidoscopic context of Vancouver as a city immersed in iterative erasure and transience. Furthermore, for Charmaine Nelson, Gilroy’s emancipatory hope also manifests in the documentation of said cultural production; to Nelson, the writing of black Canada’s art histories and historiographies can uncover and render visible these threads of emancipation.
Following Gilroy’s assertion of black art as continuously mediated and moved by the black Atlantic, this historiography engages instead in the search for a black pacific, the production of historiographies that focalize what writer and professor Wayde Compton calls “Afroperipheralism.”[9] The Pacific Northwest as a diasporic arena presents a particular problematic to the current reality of Black Diasporic Studies. In Ebony Roots, Northern Soil Charmaine Nelson discusses Canada as a space of double diaspora, a space mediated by Paul Gilroy’s conception of the Black Atlantic but perforated by the movement of black bodies between, away from, and into already diasporic communities. Vancouver presents a picture of this; many blacks that live and work in the city, especially those in the arts sphere, have lived and worked elsewhere, often both nationally and internationally. In an article for Mix Magazine titled “disappearing histories of the black pacific: contemporary black art in Vancouver,” Peter Hudson articulates this phenomenon in the specific context of Vancouver and its erasure of a historic black community, Hogan’s Alley, more recently referred to as Black Strathcona: “[t]he historical discontinuity and lapses in cultural memory engendered by Hogan’s Alley’s destruction and absence have haunted local contemporary black artists, despite the fact that few, if any, actually have roots there.”[10] This double diaspora and the city’s inherent transience lead to the construction of a perforated history; narratives appear in constellation and maps must be created in order to connect seemingly disparate sources of information, individuals, and their stories.
Our mapping begins with the first black migrants who arrived in Vancouver from California and by way of Victoria in the late 1850s as the California Goldrush waned and the Klondike rush took hold.[11] Under duress of racialized violence and facing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1852, some 600 blacks emigrated from the Bay Area of California to Victoria, BC.[12] In April 1858, roughly 35 blacks boarded the Commodore bound for the British colony of Victoria at the invitation of then-governor James Douglas, a man born to white and creole parentage in British Guiana.[13] Among these first thirty-five emigrants was Mifflin Gibbs, creator of the first black newspaper in California and abettor of the underground railroad. Gibbs would go on to be the spokesperson for Victoria’s black community, writing letters to the local Colonist newspaper when publicly debated issues of race arose and leading eighteen blacks to vote in the 1860 local elections by way of a loophole in local naturalization laws.[14] Both the literature and community consciousness Gibbs and others produced in the late 1800s constitute art not by canonical standards, but by production politics of strategic visibility. Although not within the municipal confines of Vancouver, this initial migration denotes the beginnings of black community in BC and Vancouver, these material and cultural productions acting as partial precursor to the community that would form in Vancouver’s Strathcona as the economic tide turned towards Vancouver, taking many black migrants with it.[15]
In 1908 a church was founded in Strathcona, a small neighborhood just adjacent to Chinatown, by the name of Fountain Chapel.[16] Funded in part by locals and in part by the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the church represented the beginnings of a community that would, over the next fifty years, form the cultural hub of a suburban port city on the edge of the water. Near to the railroads and Union train station, the community became an entertainment hub of prohibition-era speakeasies and live music over the course of the 1920s and 30s.[17] While companies like the Colonial Theatre catered to white middle-upper-middle class audiences, it was places like Leona Risby’s Country Club and Vie’s Chicken and Steak House that hosted many visiting performers and musicians of the day. The Canadian Encyclopedia article on Hogan’s Alley, penned by professor and author Wayde Compton, details some of the main attractions and local – or more international – celebrities: Nora Hendrix, grandmother of Jimi Hendrix, Eleanor Collins, the “first Black woman to host a national television show in Canada,” and the Gibson siblings, Thelma and Leonard, who both held long careers in the entertainment industry as dancers and actors.[18] This era of art and performance in Vancouver presented a recognizable, but alienated, or as Compton coins, peripheral junction in the diasporic movement of art across “territory (material) and space (psychic) of nation.”[19] From its coalescence in the early 1900s to its eventual demolition in the late 1960s, the material and psychic reality present between Jackson and Gore avenues represented a focal point of interaction in artistic transmission of diasporic dialogue.
In 1967, in the intre-national zeitgeist of urban renewal, a large concrete viaduct went up over the demolished remains of the hub of Hogan’s Alley. The destruction of Hogan’s Alley ruptured the locus of black community in Vancouver and the double diaspora moved elsewhere in the city or back across national borders to past residences. Black art, entertainment and exhibition slowed as its spatial existence was disrupted, but a few community institutions remained intact and continued the production of black art in the city. One such entity was the Sepia Players, created by musician and nightclub owner Ernie King in 1969.[20] As performer and playwright Celeste Insell details in her article “Laying the Groundwork for Survival: African Canadian Theatre in Vancouver,” the Sepia Players and later iterations of black theatre companies in the Vancouver area had to fight to attain funding and provide much needed space and support to the artists and audiences alike.[21] The story of the Sepia Players is a “rocky” one, Insell states, due to difficulty in accessing resources and negative reviews, in addition to the fact that Sepia continuously “demonstrated a tendency to be innovative and take risks.”[22] The Sepia Players also eventually gave rise to other coalitions of black theatre such as Black Theatre West which was established in 1980 by Michelle Williams, former co-director of the Sepia Players.[23] A short article in Revue Noire, a magazine of black contemporary art based out of France, both historicized and conflated the Sepia Players and Black Theatre West: “Blacks first arrived in British Columbia approximately 139 years ago. Sepia Players established in 1969, became Black Theatre West in 1982.”[24] This contradicts Insell’s assertion of that the Sepia Players disbanded temporarily from 1982-1987.[25] The City of Vancouver archives contain three documents regarding the Sepia Players and two in relation to Black Theatre West; collectively these documents span from 1970 to 1995. Along with the pamphlets from the Sepia Players and Black Theatre West, the City of Vancouver pamphlet collection also contains a study by Nini Baird and Christopher Wallace pertaining to the production of theatre in Vancouver entitled “Theatre Space in Vancouver.”[26] The study discusses at length which companies were operational at the time of publication (1977) and details access to available space and funding for each group. The Sepia Players are mentioned once, in relation to their original locale of performance, the Flamingo Room.[27] Whatever the exact timeline may be, the continued existence and importance of black theatre in BC is clear: as urban renewal remade the landscape of the city, black theatre companies continued to produce black art and correlate community members, providing a tie between the entertainment industry of Hogan’s Alley and the alternative art scene that would rise in the early 1990s.
Nini Baird and Christopher Wallace’s study on Vancouver’s theatre spaces traced an increase in funding from 1972 to 1977 and predicted continued increase in funds and spaces over the next decade. While this did not necessarily come to fruition, especially for theatre groups of colour, funding granted to artist-run spaces, initiatives and publications did continue to increase slightly after 1977. Video In, created to support the ideation and production of “independent video and media literacy in Vancouver,” was founded in 1973.[28] Other key artist-run spaces like the Helen Pitt Gallery (now titled UNIT/PITT Projects) grew out of student art programs at Simon Fraser University and Emily Carr University added to momentum for marginal art spaces between and despite larger institutions (such as the Vancouver Art Gallery). The number of artist-run spaces continued to rise in the 1980s with the establishment of the grunt gallery in 1985 and Artspeak, a non-profit artist-run space focused on creating “dialogue between visual art and writing,” established in 1986.[29] The Helen Pitt Gallery also operated with artists and collectives, offering exhibition space and support to initiatives like B.B.U.N.O. (Building Bridges Untitled Number One) an artist collective that stemmed from an initial 1992 exhibition under the preceding title, B.U.N.O.[30] The publication diaspora magazine listed B.B.U.N.O as a contributor for diaspora magazine and their described focus the “enhancement and understanding of global Black culture.”[31] These various entities and spaces not only interlinked to produce stronger local networks for upcoming and/or marginalized artists, but collaborated nationally and internationally to increase resources. One such organization was Canadian Artists Network: Black Artists in Action (CAN:BAIA). Founded by Ayanna Black in 1992 in Toronto, CAN:BAIA worked to centralize, create access to, and provide resources for the production and documentation of black art across Canada. The bilingual France-based magazine Revue Noire (mentioned above) collaborated with CAN:BAIA to produce an issue on “African Canada;” in the issue CAN:BAIA’s described purpose is “to manifest the burning creativity of Black Canadian Artists for the benefit of all.”[32] The issue moves from visual arts to theatre, to dance, to music and literature, anthologizing a moment of cultural production and demarcating a new canon of art in the international sphere.
With the opening of these artist-run spaces the space and place of black art in Vancouver and alternative performance types gained visibility and collaboration; that is, the network they created brought together artists heretofore working in isolation, solidifying solidarity and access to community, space, and resources. Many artists who had been previously active (visual artist Melinda Mollineaux, playwright and performer Lorena Gale, and multi-medium artist David George Morgan are some examples) in the area remained and began to build momentum around exhibitions that showcased discussion of marginalized identities through art. One such exhibition, titled “Halfbred” and rooted in the exposition of “miscegenation, bisexuality and transgender” experiences, was presented jointly by the Helen Pitt Gallery, Video In and the grunt gallery.[33] This exhibit, held in 1995, consisted of multi-media performances and works by participants Stan Lake, Melinda Mollineaux, Suleh/Sulih Williams, Jan Wade, Mercedes Baines, Lorena Gale, Andrea Fatona, and Lawrence Braithwaith.[34] The exhibition included a performance portion entitled “Miscegenation Cabaret,” which has since been digitized by the grunt gallery using, in part, funds from the Irving K. Barber Foundation’s BC History Digitization Program.[35] It is worth noting that this project of digitization increases access for community members to view these historic performances and explorations of black experience in Vancouver. Near the middle of the 1:43 hour recording, Mercedes Baines, playwright and performer, takes the stage. “Where are you from? I mean, originally. Where are your parents from?” she says, and then repeats: “where are you from? I mean, originally. Where are your parents from?” She repeats this again and again, and again, until the phrases form a litany. Finally, Mercedes rolls her eyes. “You’re right,” she intones in monotone, “an overreaction. You just want to get to know me! Ok, um, my father’s people were enslaved, likely by your ancestors. I don’t know where in Africa because black history’s been erased except for a drum beat, a handshake and a walk.”[36] This piece not only provides a window into the content of black cultural production during the 1990s, centralizing the Vancouver as a space of black experience, but simultaneously represents the inextricable nature of artistic production and the production of history. “The Miscegenation Cabaret” typified a new zeitgeist sweeping Vancouver as momentum and accessibility increased, and artists operating in the margins of the art scene formed new networks, coalitions and exhibitions. As they did so, they made explicit and visible the discussions of the black experience in a distinct diasporic diorama as well as the intersections with other marginalized identities, giving rise to a contemporary historiography of black art Vancouver, through multi-media art and performance. All that was then needed was documentation of the names, places and spaces.
In parallel with the increased interaction of black artists and spaces came an increasing need for their documentation. With new funding, technologies and individual community members, documentation of this rise in production and visibility of black art became increasingly accessible. Publications such as diaspora, a two-issue magazine 1993, focused on the perspectives of black artists and activists living in Vancouver.[37] Mix magazine, an artist-run publication, made explicit conversations that had been long suppressed or absent from the Vancouver context and art scene. Peter Hudson’s article for Mix magazine, titled “In Search of the Disappearing Histories of a Black Pacific” discusses specific artists such as Melinda Mollineaux, David George Morgan, Jan Wade and Terence Anthony among many others, providing a comprehensive overview of their works and exhibitions held in the Vancouver area.[38] Peter Hudson also acted as editor of diaspora and wrote in other grassroots publications such as the Rungh magazine. In the introduction to the premier issue of diaspora, titled “Black?” Peter Hudson situates the publication in Homi Bhabha’s concept of “third space,” that elusive centre of the venn diagram between cultures – the space of their overlaps, contradictions and productions. Peter Hudson applies this theory to the context of Black power:
“The acknowledgement of the third space allows for an integration of aesthetics, activism and pleasure that subverts the mythology of a monolithic Blackness that is contained by, and maintains, white supremacy…welcome to diaspora the third space black power magazine.”[39]
Peter Hudson’s assertion of cultural hybridity as a subversion of white supremacy also extends to the subversion of multiculturalism, or as Hudson phrases it, “one-love nihilistic liberalism.”[40] For Canada, this liberalism and multiculturalism are foundational to the nation’s international status as a peaceful, progressive middle power. Peter Hudson’s diaspora disrupts the confines of “nation” and steps towards the reality of a black pacific, a third space that “displaces the histories that constitute it;” in other words, displaces the history of Vancouver from the apparent lack of black presence to, instead, the roots of that imposed absence.[41] The “third space” Hudson suggests can, for example, see the presence of the Georgia Viaduct as a negation, an erasure, of blackness in the form of community access and networking. This is a bold, ambitious material space and psychic territory to occupy, which perhaps contributed to its short publication run, but nonetheless the first two issues of diaspora are meticulous in their representation of a myriad of artists, perspectives, and even advertisements that reproduce Vancouver as a black diaspora. In the premier issue of diaspora is a reproduction of Melinda Mollineaux’s Spice and an original comic titled “Revolution Now” by artist/activist Terence Anthony which tackles the ambivalence of leftist activism in the face of identity politics and the myriad of power dynamics with which spaces of activism must contend. “Yes, nothing will be able to stop our revolution once we get things rolling,” says a thought bubble attached to a Terence Anthony look-alike cartoon character at the end of the comic, sipping tea, “[but] coloured folks is always late…”[42] Publications like diaspora and mix magazine, as well as Mix’s predecessor Parallelogramme, presented mediums through which artists could express themselves, disseminate their works, and engage in critical (and visible) dialogue with one another and their surroundings, intervening in Vancouver’s art historiography to create “third spaces” in the canon and in the cultural layout of the city itself, then as now.
One such “third space” resides in the personal archives of artist and creator David George Morgan. As founder of B.B.U.N.O. (Building Bridges Untitled Number One) and frequent collaborator with many artists and spaces mentioned above, David George took it upon himself to photograph events and exhibitions, collect pamphlet announcements and publications like diaspora, MIX and Revue Noire, keeping materials from the resurgence of a Black Pacific that could have easily slipped back into obscure waters with the city’s inherent transience and practices of erasure. Without the work of David George and others like him – Wayde Compton, Peter Hudson, and Andrea Fatona to name a few – the search for a Black Pacific would remain simply a hunt through strange silences and surprising blanks.
The history of black art in Vancouver exposes integral subsidiaries of broader histories – the history of Vancouver, the history of Canada, the history of black diasporic movement. Despite institutional and geographical erasure, this history is reproduced again and again in that liminal “third space” as its recreated in a re-opened gallery, a painting, a performance. For Walter Benjamin, history is remembered and reproduced as we confront dangers in the present and as history itself risks erasure by the ruling societal forces. For Mercedes Baines, art and performance provide a stage on which to re-enact history, or as the case may be, its erasure. The moment we are in surely presents its own dangers and erasures under Justin Trudeau’s neo-liberal regime; but perhaps in these moments there is also space for excitement, for creation or re-creation, for hope. As the Hogan’s Alley Society prepares for the upcoming demolition of the obsolete Georgia Viaduct and Kerry James Marshall’s works return to the Rennie Gallery’s storage, and February’s Black History Month broaches the horizon, the moment at hand flashes with bright new potentialities. It may be too early to track our current zeitgeist but in this light blind spots can be exposed and addressed, and the Black Pacific, with its historical existence and current reality, may resurge to the fore of artistic production.
Bibliography:
Primary Sources
“African Canada,” Revue Noire: African Contemporary Art. June 25th, 1997. From the personal collection of David George Morgan. Print.
Anthony, Terence. “Revolution Now?” in Black? Diaspora magazine. Edited by Peter Hudson. Premiere issue vol. 1.1, fall 1993. Print.
Black? Diaspora magazine. Edited by Peter Hudson. Premiere issue vol. 1.1, fall 1993. From the personal collection of David George Morgan. Print.
“B.U.N.O.” Exhibition pamphlet, 1992. From the personal collection of David George Morgan. Print.
“David N. Odhiambo - afrocentric interview (CBC Rough Cutz 1996).” Dnandiblog, Youtube. Original video produced by CBC, 1996. Published online March 24, 2011. Accessed September 29th, 2019.
Hudson, Peter. “Disappearing Histories of the Black Pacific: Contemporary Black Art in Vancouver.” Mix Magazine, Winter 1996/97, Vol 22.3. From the personal collection of David George Morgan. Print.
“Miscegenation Cabaret.” Exhibition Halfbred at grunt gallery, 1995. Published digitally March 27th, 2018. Accessed December 6th, 2018. https://vimeo.com/262068972
Secondary Sources
Allen, Gwen. Artists Magazines: an Alternative Space for Art. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 2011, Print.
Bailey Nurse, Donna. Revival : An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing. McClelland & Stewart, 2006.
Baird, Nina and Wallace, Christopher. “Theatre Space in Vancouver.” Published September 1977. City of Vancouver Archives Pamphlet Collection, item PAM 1977-52. Print.
Clarke, George Elliott. Africadian History: an Exhibition Catalogue. Gaspereau Press, 2001.
Compton, Wayde. After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011. Print.
Compton, Wayde. “Hogan’s Alley.” The Canadian Encyclopedia Online. Historica Canada: published February 14th, 2014. Accessed November 15th, 2018. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/hogans-alley
Crawford Kilian. Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia. Burnaby, BC: Commodore Books, 2008. Print.
Gerges, Merray. “#BlackLivesCDNSyllabus Uncovers a Vital Archive.” Canadian Art Online, Features, July 14th, 2016. Accessed December 10th, 2018. https://canadianart.ca/features/blacklivescdnsyllabus-finds-gold-old-art-mags/
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “On Time, In Time, Through Time: Aaron Douglas, Fire!! and the Writers of the Harlem Renaissance.” American Studies, Vol. 49, No. 1/2, pp. 45-53. Mid-America American Studies Association, 2008. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40644198.
Insell, Celeste. "Laying the Groundwork for Survival: African Canadian Theater in Vancouver." The International Review of African American Art, 1992. Print.
Nelson, Camille Antoinette, and Charmaine A. Nelson. Racism, Eh?: a Critical Inter-Disciplinary Anthology of Race and Racism in Canada. Captus Press, 2004. Print.
Nelson, Charmaine. Ebony Roots, Northern Soil: Perspectives on Blackness in Canada. Cambridge Scholars, 2011. Print.
Thurman, Wallace. “Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists (1926.)” Issuu Inc, POC Zine Project. Originally published October 31st, 1926. Published online. Accessed Sept 29th, 2019. https://issuu.com/poczineproject/docs/poczp_fire_1926_readview
Dedication
As a white scholar interacting with historical scenes and sources that I have little, if any, connection to, this paper is indebted and dedicated to the ongoing work, activism, and scholarship of many members of the black community in Canada and beyond its colonial borders. To name some of many: Peter Hudson, writer, activist, professor and editor of diaspora magazine; Charmaine Nelson, author and researcher of art history and black art in Canada; Lorena Gale, playwright, performer and actor; Wayde Compton, writer and professor of creative writing and founder of the Hogan’s Alley Society; and finally, david george morgan, artist, archivist, activist and friend without whom none of this research would have been possible. Each conversation with dg proved more informative and productive than a myriad of books.
[1] Paul Gilroy. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 2007. 187.
[2] Peter Hudson. “Disappearing Histories of the Black Pacific: Contemporary Black Art in Vancouver.” Mix Magazine, Winter 1996/97, Vol 22.3. Private Collection of David George Morgan. Print. 54.
[3] Johanna Mizgala. “Lance Belanger’s Tango Lessons,” in Racism, Eh? A Critical Anthology of Race and Racism in Canada. Edited by Charmaine Nelson and Camille Nelson, Captus Press: Concord, ON, 1997. Print. 42-49.
[4] Charmaine Nelson. Ebony Roots, Northern Soil: Perspectives on Blackness in Canada. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. 14.
[5] Ibid., 24.
[6] Paul Gilroy. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. 40.
[7] Ibid., 40.
[8]Ibid., 40.
[9] Compton, Wayde. After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011. 15.
[10] Peter Hudson. “Disappearing Histories of the Black Pacific: Contemporary Black Art in Vancouver.” Mix Magazine, Winter 1996/97, Vol 22.3. Private Collection of David George Morgan. Print. 54.
[11] Crawford Kilian. Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia. Burnaby, BC: Commodore Books, 2008. 11.
[12] Ibid., 22.
[13] Ibid., 24.
[14] Crawford Kilian. Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia. 53.
[15] Ibid., 139.
[16] Wayde Compton. “Hogan’s Alley.” The Canadian Encyclopedia Online. Historica Canada: published February 14th, 2014. Accessed November 15th, 2018. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/hogans-alley
[17] Ibid., “Hogan’s Alley.”
[18] Ibid., “Hogan’s Alley.” ; “Black Strathcona,” Creative Cultural Collaboration Society. Last modified 2014, accessed October 27th, 2018. http://blackstrathcona.com
[19] Charmaine Nelson. Ebony Roots, Northern Soil: Perspectives on Blackness in Canada. 17.
[20] Celeste Insell. "Laying the Groundwork for Survival: African Canadian Theater in Vancouver." The International Review of African American Art, 1992. 7. https://proxy.library.mcgill.ca/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1302727595?accountid=12339.
[21] Ibid., 6.
[22] Ibid., 8.
[23] Ibid., 9.
[24] “Black Theatre West,” in Revue Noire: African Canada. June 25th, 1997. 44.
[25] Celeste Insell. "Laying the Groundwork for Survival: African Canadian Theater in Vancouver." 9.
[26] Nini Baird and Christopher Wallace. “Theatre Space in Vancouver.” Published September 1977. City of Vancouver Archives Pamphlet Collection, item PAM 1977-52. Print.
[27] Ibid., 44.
[28] “Video In.” Advertisement in Black? Diaspora magazine. Edited by Peter Hudson. Premiere issue vol. 1.1, Fall 1993. From the personal collection of David George Morgan. Print.
[29]Artspeak Official Site. Accessed November 29th, 2018. http://artspeak.ca
[30] “B.U.N.O.” Exhibition pamphlet, 1992. From the personal collection of David George Morgan. Print.
[31] “Contributors.” Black? Diaspora magazine, Fall 1993. 62.
[32]“African Canada,” Revue Noire: African Contemporary Art. June 25th, 1997. Print. 26.
[33] “Halfbred: Miscegenation, bisexuality and transgender.” Exhibition at grunt gallery, 1995. Exhibition pamphlet. Grunt gallery archives, folder 1995-0516. Item no. HAL 15. Print.
[34] Ibid., “Halfbred,” 1995.
[35] “Miscegenation Cabaret.” Exhibition Halfbred at Grunt gallery, 1995. Published digitally March 27th, 2018. Accessed December 6th, 2018. https://vimeo.com/262068972
[36] Ibid., Mercedes Baines, 1995.
[37] Black? Diaspora magazine. Edited by Peter Hudson. Premiere issue vol. 1.1, fall 1993. From the personal collection of David George Morgan. Print.
[38] Peter Hudson. “Disappearing Histories of the Black Pacific: Contemporary Black Art in Vancouver.” Mix magazine, 48-54.
[39] Ibid., 4.
[40] Ibid., 4.
[41] Ibid., 4.
[42] Terence Anthony. “Revolution Now?” in Black? Diaspora magazine. Edited by Peter Hudson. Premiere issue vol. 1.1, fall 1993. 5.