current exhibtion:
Vibrant Visions:
The Art of Black Girlhood in Canada
On July 17th, join us at the BAC for a warm summer evening of refreshments, reflection and connection at the opening celebration of Vibrant Visions: The Art of Black Girlhood in Canada, our latest group exhibition showing from July 17th - October 17th, 2025.
Vibrant Visions: The Art of Black Girlhood in Canada, is an ode to the registers of freedom, refusal, and self-regard that compose Black girl being and belonging in the Great White North. This dynamic assemblage of media and material objects recovers sight lines of Black girl joy and defiance across time and geographies. It illuminates these important modes of agency, which are often obscured by media representations and traditional archival practices that overlook and distort the vibrancy of black life in our shared history, through moving and still images, soundscapes, and memory work.
The exhibition takes its name from the radical imaginings and ways of knowing shared by the teen girl co-researchers of the SSHRC-funded Mapping Black Girl Geographies and Belonging in Canada project, many of whom live in the Greater Toronto and Vancouver areas. A selection of their analogue collages reflects the many ways that Black girls navigate hypervisibility and invisibility in spaces that are sometimes inhospitable.
Visitors will be invited to contemplate how adornment practices offer opportunities for care and alternative worldmaking through hair-based, sun-activated and interactive works. Broadening our field of vision will be a series of historical portraits that confront and refuse the formal erasures of the fullness of black lives in early-20th century Vancouver with imagination, care, and ethical storytelling. Together, these aesthetic accounts offer a reparative unfolding of black lives and histories where futures are conjured, reshaped, and fiercely claimed.
Desirée de Jesús, Guest Curator
Speculations Within and Beyond the Black Fantastic
April 1 - July 21
On the exterior façade of The Black Art Centre, amidst the contrasts of an ever-bustling Surrey CentralSkyTrain station, a now-abandoned grocery store, and the towering Civic Hotel, a visual conversation unfolds between the photographs of Kriss Munsya and Ngadi Smart. Lively yet harrowing, familiar yet distant, Speculations Within and Beyond the Black Fantastic addresses the history of Western photography and the political power dynamics that attempt to pathologize the Black subject – and by extension, Blackness itself – within and beyond the frame.
As subjects of speculation, the Black body has historically been rendered as a diminished “other,” burdened with meanings imposed upon its likeness from elsewhere. In response to these turbulent relations between Western photography and the Black body, Munsya's and Smart’s images embrace the fantastical and the speculative. Both artists employ these as aesthetic and liberatory practices to document Black life as it exists today while envisioning possible realities and afterlives for Blackness – both in this world and those yet to come. Incorporating Ekow Eshun's In the Black Fantastic and the works of Black speculative fiction writers, like Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Toni Cade Bambara as points of departure, Speculations Within and Beyond the Black Fantastic scrutinizes the construction of race and the animate and inanimate paraphernalia utilized to reinforce its fictitious nature.
Smart’s and Munsya’s practices illustrate the dynamic canon of Black lens based artists who participate in an interplay of subject matter that merges traditional African and Afrodiasporic folklore, Afrofuturism and the contemporary state of Blackness. Through this synthesis, these works offer a vibrant, wondrous and kaleidoscope vision of Black life that lauds the uses of the speculative, reconfiguresnotions of Black subjectivity, and envisions realities where Blackness transcends the impossible.
upcoming programming
FILM SCREENINGS:
DAWN WILKONSON'S
DANDELIONS, ESSEX GIRLS & MORE
DATE: Oct 26th
about
The Black Arts Centre (BAC) was founded in 2020 as part of Solid State Community Society’s network of cooperatives, and since 2021 has been an independent non-profit society. Since 2020, we have grown as an organization, adding new directors, and establishing an incredible advisory board of professional artists and people who are connected to a wide array of cultural projects and institutions.
Existing at the intersection of art, community, and culture, the BAC hosts exhibitions, performances, events, workshops and other diverse programming. This multifaceted approach provides infrastructure for Black art, creativity, and imagination.
The BAC is a response to our community’s need for a Black-friendly art and gathering space that is culturally relevant, accessible and youth-centered. The Black Arts Centre will not only conceptualize art in an everyday sense, but will become a place that fosters mutual, transformational relationships that connect our community to artistic and cultural Black experiences year-round.
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