"YOU HAVE TO CHALLENGE YOURSELF WITH WHAT YOU'RE FEELING WHEN YOU SEE THEM"

FROM JUNE/JULY 2021 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

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PHOTO BY BRIANNA ROYE

The curator Ashley McKenzie-Barnes explains why she gravitates to art that upends expectations

Ashley McKenzie-Barnes is sitting in her car. It’s 5 degrees out, and not five minutes ago she was up to her chest in Lake Ontario. Yet she’s smiling. It’s early April and she’s joining me on Zoom following a dip at Budapest Park. “This is my third time this year. The first time there was snow on the ground,” she says. She describes the intense experience as “invigorating.” “If you need to snap out of a rut, it sharpens your mind right away.”

McKenzie-Barnes, who lives in an art-filled condo near Queen and Dovercourt, relies on a sharp, clear eye. As an artist and curator she’s collaborated on projects with everyone from Lauryn Hill to Colin Kaepernick. Several of her curatorial works have been culture shifting, especially in the past few years.

It’s been said that Canadians have tall poppy syndrome – disdain for those among us who grow too high – and that we often only applaud our own when people outside our borders begin the slow clap. It can narrow vision and dampen ambition, though it doesn’t seem to have that effect on McKenzie-Barnes. She’s comfortable taking risks, and her bold moves have paid off in sometimes unexpected ways.

In Grade 1, a teacher told her parents that she was smart but didn’t pay attention; all she wanted to do was draw. Her mom took this seriously and enrolled her at Cedar Ridge Arts Camp in Scarborough. “I was really influenced by the arts at a young age because I had a mother who respected that I had talent.” As a kid, McKenzie-Barnes was obsessed with magazines, collecting Essence, Ebony and Sway. “I wanted to be a designer, a creative director for a magazine.”

After high school at Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts, she took graphic design and advertising at Humber College, later going back to study art direction for film.

In 2019 she was put in charge of the Scarborough zone of Nuit Blanche.

“It was really important for me that it wasn’t treated differently than the downtown core,” she says. “My responsibility was to represent the different ethnicities and immigrant statuses that are there, but do it in a way that was a balance of high art, art that was accessible, and art [that] could reflect the people and be provided by some local artists. But the whole thing did not need to feel, for lack of a better word, ‘lower budget’ than a different zone.”

Project curated by Ashley McKenzie-Barnes, ...three kings weep..., a video installation by the Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson for Scarborough’s Nuit Blanche zone. Photo by Maggie Elizabeth.

Project curated by Ashley McKenzie-Barnes, ...three kings weep..., a video installation by the Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson for Scarborough’s Nuit Blanche zone. Photo by Maggie Elizabeth.

She found herself challenging some of the art being juried at the time, asking the committees, “If this artwork was going downtown, would it even make the cut?” The answer was often no.

“I had some tense conversations. I don’t mean tense in a negative way, but a lot of tension between the responsibility aspect and how we treated the community outside of the downtown core,” she says. “It’s almost like they were justifying that the bar could be held a little bit lower for Scarborough, which is what I was fighting.”

A year earlier, she had seen an exhibit by the Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson at the Perez Art Museum in Miami. McKenzie-Barnes brought in her work for Nuit Blanche. A video piece titled ...three kings weep... shows three elaborately attired Black men undressing, weeping as they do so. “You see them with sunglasses and chains, in beautiful floral fabric. They’re confident and it’s very showy, materialistic. Then they’re stripped down to nothing, making them 100 per cent bare. Seeing that vulnerability, that is what caught me the most,” she recalls.

The video was inspired in part by an article Patterson had read about a study in which white medical students told researchers at the University of Virginia that Black people experienced less pain than others.

“To me, Ebony was one of the most prolific artists that took part in Nuit Blanche that year full stop, not just in Scarborough,” says McKenzie-Barnes. When Nuit Blanche wrapped, the AGO acquired the work for its permanent collection.

Project curated by Ashley McKenzie-Barnes, “Colourblind,” a show of work by Benny Bing at Neighbourhood Studios. Photo by Ashley McKenzie-Barnes.

Project curated by Ashley McKenzie-Barnes, “Colourblind,” a show of work by Benny Bing at Neighbourhood Studios. Photo by Ashley McKenzie-Barnes.

Also included in the zone, titled “Kings and Queens of Scarborough,” were works by Kent Monkman, Mark “Kurupt” Stoddart and Durothethird, an artist celebrating 30 years of graffiti. “He grew up tagging RT stations in the earlier stages of his career,” says McKenzie-Barnes. “Graffiti to high art – that’s the type of range I’m talking about.”

Monkman is known for “massive pieces, his drawings, his figurative work and his performance. You have to look at all facets of the practice,” she says. She went after his films.

And she had the ideal setting in mind to screen them in – the council chamber.

“We’re talking about colonization and systems of power in the government. To have that in the councillors’ chamber, which is otherwise used to make government decisions, it was perfect. It wasn’t just ‘Let’s go get Kent Monkman,’ it was ‘How are we shaping this zone for you to be watching these very provocative and, in some cases, somewhat offensive short films? How are we realizing this space to tell a story through a different lens of his work?’”

She’s also worked with Benny Bing, an artist who’s produced commissions for clients like Dave Chappelle and Milos Raonic, and Kardinal Offishall, who was just named Senior VP of A&R for Universal Music Canada.

Another spark of inspiration struck in 2019, when she picked up the latest issue of Paper magazine and found 12 pages of portraits by the artist Shawn Theodore. They featured Colin Kaepernick, Ava DuVernay, the Exonerated Five, Angela Davis, Tarana Burke, Taraji P. Henson and more. “It was associated with [Kaepernick’s] Know Your Rights Camp,” an empowerment campaign designed in part to help Black individuals interact with law enforcement in different scenarios. “I was surprised that I never heard [the Paper feature] talked about,” she says, given the “massive names” associated with it.

A few months later, when she was asked to curate the 25th anniversary for Kuumba, Canada’s longest running Black History Month festival, which runs each year for the month of February at Harbourfront, she knew exactly what she wanted to do.

Project curated by Ashley McKenzie-Barnes, photos of the Exonerated Five by Shawn Theodore, shown during the Black History Month festival Kuumba, at 207 Queens Quay W. Photo by Maggie Elizabeth.

Project curated by Ashley McKenzie-Barnes, photos of the Exonerated Five by Shawn Theodore, shown during the Black History Month festival Kuumba, at 207 Queens Quay W. Photo by Maggie Elizabeth.

She told Kaepernick’s team that she wanted to include those portraits in the show and put one particular photo on a billboard – “so it’s nice and big and shines at night. The idea of seeing these five Black men, the Exonerated Five, lit up in a public space 24 hours a day, so you can be walking down the street at 2 a.m. and you have to challenge yourself with what you’re feeling when you see them.”

“They asked what the budget was. I don’t even remember what it was, but it wasn’t a lot. And this is where it gets romantic,” she smiles. “They said, ‘You know what, we love this idea so much that we’re not gonna take anything. Let’s just do it.’”

The billboard stayed up on Queens Quay into the spring of 2020, even after the Kuumba exhibit came down. “The advertising season wasn’t booked for spring, so we kept it up, and then BLM happened.”

“The Know Your Rights campaign was helping protesters in the streets, getting people out of jail, getting them into the hospital, paying their bills. It became the face of protest rights during Black Lives Matter. And so that billboard became an installation that was more relevant than ever,” McKenzie-Barnes explains. “So many people were seeing it for the first time during that moment in history. To me that’s really significant.”

Her dips in the lake are keeping her sharp for a number of current projects. She’s currently teaching a course at Humber, called Professional Practice in Visual and Digital Arts. And her curatorial work is ramping back up with a Canada-wide campaign for Bombay Sapphire and a new venture in Yorkville. “I’m bringing in Nina Chanel Abney to do a large-scale mural on Bellair Street this summer,” she says. “A queer Black artist in Yorkville, an area that has class issues – that’s a really powerful project that I’m looking forward to.”

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