A project of the Marion McCain Institute for Atlantic Canadian Art
“Community” is a much-used term currently, one with seemingly as many definitions as it has users. We often talk about the arts community, for example, but what is meant by that is not always the same. The “arts” community can include the theatre community, the poetry community, the fine craft community, the photography community, the film community and on and on, almost infinitely. Membership in these communities can be elastic and vague, comprising all practitioners of a certain medium. Are filmmakers in Hollywood and Fredericton really part of the same community? Does engaging in similar activity, despite little connection between the people so engaged, really make a community? There is no singular answer, of course, just multiple approaches.
One is to forgo the single collective noun, to speak of multiple communities rather than one community. Another is to use the word to describe groups that are small enough to share common cause and mutual knowledge. This exhibition combines both strategies.
Each artist in Communities has, to a certain extent, used community as a strategy in making their work. The late Guy Duguay’s portraits of fellow Moncton artists depict part of the community that grew up around the vibrant Aberdeen Cultural Centre, an important centre of Acadian and francophone arts activity. Yvon Gallant’s ongoing series of portraits of Acadians looks at a larger community, a people who have defied the odds to preserve a unique culture in New Brunswick and the rest of the Maritimes. Though faceless, Gallant’s figures are all recognizable to those who know them, and the sheer weight of the number of “notables” represented is testimony to the strength of Acadian culture. Nelson White has been painting his community his whole career. His portraits of Indigenous artists celebrate the cultural achievements of artists from across the region, and the day-to-day life of his home territory. As he writes, he is “interested in documenting the changing culture landscape of my people.” That “culture landscape” is also Halifax painter Letitia Fraser’s main subject, as she documents her family and the rich cultural milieu of Nova Scotia’s Black community. Her work in Communities examines African Nova Scotian in the context of another community: the dedicated Black educators who helped shape the province in which Fraser was raised.
The power of community, however defined, is celebrated in this exhibition, exhibiting works that create spaces of inclusion and recognition for some of the important communities of Atlantic Canada.
