On January 21, 2022, the Art Canada Institute (ACI) launched a new online exhibition “Sandra Brewster: Traces of Home: Migration, Memory, and Being.” The exhibition explores how Toronto artist Sandra Brewster draws inspiration from the meaning of home, migration, and memory for the Caribbean Canadian community.

Born and raised in Toronto, Brewster has spent over two decades examining the effects of migration on her family and other individuals of Caribbean and African descent in her community. Incorporating their personal photographs, recollections, and cherished possessions from back home into her multilayered works, Brewster foregrounds the complexities of Black diasporic experience and identity.

McMaster Museum of Art’s Senior Curator Pamela Edmonds has written an essay to accompany the exhibition, titled “Shifting the Gaze”. According to Sara Angel, ACI Founder and Executive Director, the essay “invites us to reflect on the role of the family in sustaining cultural heritage, identity, and community”.

“Shifting the Gaze” examines Brewster’s formal and conceptual strategies from her early work to today, and explores how the artist uses these strategies to both disrupt representational space and expand notions of contemporary portraiture.

According to Edmonds, “By complicating tropes of visibility and (mis)representation, her powerful imagery gives emphasis to the performative nature of Black identity in the Americas, opening up ways of thinking about how her subjects negotiate and re-narrativize historical and contemporary geographies.”

Read the full essay here.

View the online exhibition, Sandra Brewster: Traces of Home.