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.