Oluseye’s art collects objects and stories to create a love letter for Black Nova Scotia

Oluseye Ogunlesi has a strong love affair with Nova Scotia. The Nigerian Canadian artist, who goes by the mononym Oluseye, has had six artist residencies in the Maritime province. And just a couple weeks ago, he opened a new exhibition at the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax. 

Curated by Pamela Edmonds, Oluseye’s new show, Oluseye: By Faith and Grit, further showcases his love letter to the East Coast, and specifically, Halifax. It has been a busy month for the artist, who is also exhibiting a show entitled Oluseye: Orí mi pé at the Art Gallery of Ontario and working on upcoming exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., both which will open later this spring.

His interest in Nova Scotia started when he learned about the long history of Black people in the region, fanning a curiosity about the lack of education around this important part of Canadian history. The artist has been visiting since 2018. He claims it’s the people and the community that keep him returning. “I always feel loved and welcomed here,” he says. “People are so willing to share anecdotes about their lives, and a lot of my practice actually begins with stories people share with me. I’m very much interested in keeping oral histories alive.”

Oluseye collects items that speak to him as part of his practice and uses the anecdotes he hears to piece the art together. These found treasures include car parts, nails from Senegalese fishing canoes and braids of hair from the streets of Brooklyn, Lagos and Salvador, Brazil. 

One installation in By Faith and Grit uses hockey sticks combined with farm implements. It is based on an anecdote Oluseye was told by community elder Myrna Provo, who passed away in 2019. “She said something along the lines of her ancestors had dug their own graves because they spent their whole lives tilling and farming this land that was so poor,” the artist recalls. “I didn’t know how I would express that sculpturally. I wasn’t even making sculpture at the time when I first met her in 2018. Four years later, I found hockey sticks that my neighbour had thrown out. I took them to my shed, and there were also farm implements like rakes lying around. I placed the hockey sticks behind them and I had like an a-ha moment.” Oluseye saw a vision for the piece that now hangs in the exhibition.

The name By Faith and Grit comes from the slogan of North Preston: “We’ve come this far by faith.” North Preston is the largest Black community in Nova Scotia and has the largest concentration of African Canadians in Canada. Oluseye says that the perseverance of the Black Nova Scotian people is what informs his art — like “Miss Myrna,” for example, who seemed to never be able to sit idle whenever the artist would visit. “She always felt like she needed to do something to keep me and my partner … happy and comfortable. You could tell that she comes from a legacy of hard workers, and people who work with her were never idle.”

Oluseye also noticed how faith bound the people of North Preston together. “I was also taken aback by the faith of the community — and not in a religious, church sense.” Rather, he says, “[it’s] the belief in self, the belief in the community, in what they have for one another and this drive to keep who they are and the pride alive.” 

As Oluseye explored these ideas, he looked to what the Black community made with their hands to keep their faith alive as well as where they found a sense of joy — including in labour and sports — and how these activities were tied to the church. “This idea of faith and great labour started to feel like you couldn’t have one without the other.”

Some artworks connect Africa, Toronto and Nova Scotia together. A principal piece in the exhibit features a Canadian flag with the pan-African colours of red, black and green behind a fence, exemplifying what Oluseye calls “diasporic debris.” The term refers to items Oluseye finds that he feels can shed light on both the story of the Black diaspora and his own diaspora as well.

Oluseye had the flag made in the West African country of Côte D’Ivoire. It is embroidered with lines adding up to the number of Black communities in Nova Scotia. The flag is mounted behind a fence from Africville, a community in northern Halifax  built by Black Nova Scotians that was famously demolished, forcing residents to leave the area. Oluseye first saw the metal fence seven years ago, but was then unsure how to incorporate it in his artwork. Now, it is a pivotal part of the exhibition. “This fence represents so much of what faith and grit is, and also the destruction that had happened in Africville. [The fence] gives hope and is also a witness to the atrocities.”

Despite his focus on Nova Scotia, Oluseye finds inspiration elsewhere in Atlantic Canada, too. In another of the exhibition’s artworks, he explores the legacy of Al and Karen Ferron of Ferron Family Farms in New Brunswick. When the artist learned about the family, he felt that he and Edmonds, the curator, should go meet the only Black farmers in the province. For him, the Ferrons truly embody the exhibit title. “The Ferrons really are our ancestors’ wildest dreams: Here’s a Black family who own all of this land and despite the hardship of what that meant they’ve persevered.” 

Oluseye did a small photo documentary series of the family. There are eight photos, alternating from black-and-white to colour, which show the Ferrons smiling proudly on their farmland with their livestock. He feels that their presence humanizes the exhibition’s theme, when so many other elements on display are objects. The family, Oluseye shares, embodies Black joy and success.

Another formidable piece in the exhibit is entitled Muhammad Had a Dream. Two beat-up boxing gloves hang beneath groupings of rubber and found items, resembling machinery, car parts and broken technology. The artwork seems to suggest that the dream — the gloves — comes at the end of long moments of labour.

Edmonds, whose family is from Nova Scotia, has always felt there was a disparity between Blackness and Canadianness as she moved through the country. She has been drawn to this theme throughout her career, and upon seeing Oluseye’s work, she felt someone was finally shedding light on the history of Black Nova Scotians and her own roots.

Edmonds hopes that the community will feel an immense amount of pride when they walk through the exhibition. “Recognizing the journey that we’ve been on and what all of us have been through. People are making it work, but it’s connected to the dream, right? It’s a thank you and an honour to recognize those communities and individuals within those communities.” 

Oluseye hopes the community also feels it is a thank you from him. “Thank you for being open to me,” he says. “Thank you for taking me in and giving me the chance to make this work.… Coming here really changed the trajectory of what I’m interested in saying and doing and the scale at which I want to do that work.”

His message to all who walk through is to “have faith, do the work and also have fun,” he says. “My practice is really rooted in having fun finding objects, bringing them together, affording myself the space to dream and imagine. I really hope that people come in and feel that, but also leave knowing that anything is possible.”

Oluseye: by Faith and Grit is open through April 27 at the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax.