February is Black History Month and to get the party started TD Bank hosted a launch event at the Royal York Hotel’s Imperial Room Monday evening to unveil this year’s BHM poster by photographer Michael Chambers, above.
It also so happens that Chambers has curated an exhibition of posters celebrating black dance in Canada, which opens today at BAND Gallery (823A Bloor Street West). The BAND show is called Motion and the opening kicks off the 24th Annual International Association of Blacks in Dance (IABD) Conference and Festival hosted by Dance Immersion and running all weekend at Toronto’s Sheraton Centre and the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.
Curating Motion was no cakewalk for Chambers who spent months combing through archives and connecting with dance companies across the country. It turns out that many dance organizations don’t exactly follow best practices when it comes to cataloguing and storing their promotional materials. The oldest piece Chambers could get his hands on is from 1979; in many cases he had to scan and upsample small leaflets and flyers.
But the photographer was determined that the exhibition should “make the black experience more celebratory. Our history has been so painful and some of us would like to see hope at the end of the rainbow and many of us already do. We are rejoicing about our history and about the possibilities that lie ahead.”
Motion captures the beauty and exuberance of dance with some very compelling imagery, some of it undeniably modern, some of it, like the 2007 poster below from Toronto’s Ballet Creole (image by Christopher Cushman, art direction and design by Duegood.com) referencing a broader and more historical approach.
Chambers says the Ballet Creole image is one of his favourites “because of the energy and the spiritual quality. Quite a bit of black dance has a spiritual component and that comes through brilliantly in this design.”
Chambers is participating in another Black History Month visual arts exhibition, this one called Bathurst Stripped, opening February 19 at Gallery 918 in the 918 Bathurst Community Centre. The show celebrates Toronto’s first bona fide African-Canadian neighbourhood centered around Bloor and Bathurst streets and pushing west to Christie Street and north along Vaughan Road.
“We had the grocery stores and barber shops and hair salons,” recalls Chambers, “but by the mid-’80s that community had dispersed to the suburbs.”
As part of its support for Black History Month, TD Bank has compiled a page of links promoting events throughout February. Ontario’s Black History Society has created lists of its own, as has the City of Toronto. Harbourfront Centre’s Kuumba festival hits the lakeside February 3 – 5 and the ROM hosts African and Caribbean Cultural Heritage Day February 25, in addition to the world premier screening of RasTa: A Soul’s Journey on February 1 at 2:30 pm.
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