It's About Time: Dancing Black in Canada, 1900-1970 and Now

Mitchell Art Gallery | 2022

Exhibition Catalogue | October 13 — December 9, 2022

It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900 – 1970 and Now illuminates the largely undocumented dance history of Canada’s Black population before 1970, with responses from contemporary performing and visual artists reflecting on how the archival resonates in this moment, and in British Columbia.

Guest curated by Seika Boye, PhD, this archival exhibition exposes the representation of Blackness on Canadian stages, as well as audience and media reception of Black performance in Canada during this era. It’s About Time also explores legislation of leisure culture, dance lessons and the role of social dances at mid-century. Featured are individual dance artists such as Leonard Gibson, Ola Skanks, Ethel Bruneau, Joey Hollingsworth and Kathryn Brown. This is the fifth presentation of the archival materials in It’s About Time, and includes new commissions from dance artist Justine Chambers, visual artist Ceilidh Munroe, poet and scholar Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, with a graphic response by Adriana Contreras.

It’s About Time was originally commissioned by Dance Collection Danse (2018) and further developed in partnership with The Mitchell Gallery (2020).