↳ Exhibitions

Letitia Fraser at Zalucky Contemporary

July 30, 2022

Artist: Letitia Fraser

Exhibition title: Binding Threads

Venue: Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto, Canada

Date: July 9 – August 13, 2022

Photography: Toni Hafkenscheid / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Zalucky Contemporary

In 1998, David Woods and Harold Pearse co-curated In This Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia , a groundbreaking exhibition of Black maritime artists at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. A response to the lack of institutional recognition of Black Canadian culture, the exhibition featured nearly 50 artists and over 100 works, among them a selection of handmade quilts.

Almost a quarter century later emerges Letitia Fraser, a Haligonian painter who deploys her community’s tradition of quilting as a means to represent the often unheard stories of Black life in Eastern Canada. Fraser’s paintings, which recall the narrative quilts of celebrated American painter Faith Ringold, developed from an interest in collage, recycled textiles, and mixed media experimentation. Using repurposed fabric thrifted from second-hand stores or given to her as gifts, the artist makes quilts that then become the canvases on which she paints, resulting in an intimate and materially dynamic body of work.

The people and moments depicted in Fraser’s paintings are drawn from her childhood memories of North Preston, the largest black community in Nova Scotia located northwest of Halifax. A Black settlement dating back to the 18th century, North Preston remains a relatively rural and independent enclave within Nova Scotia. Fraser’s paintings pro-vide fractured glimpses of what life in North Preston might look like: a game of dominoes, the players’ hands poised at the ready; a woman, seated, plucking a chicken; a portrait of a man gently hunched over his elbows at the dining room table, his gaze directed somewhere just out of frame. These quotidian scenes, while peaceful and contemplative, become charged against the backdrop of a quilt, with its gendered implication of the domestic.

Despite some instances of institutional recognition, textile practices like quilting continue to remain on the margins of art history. Largely dismissed as feminine craftwork, quilting still struggles to be accepted as the conceptually rigorous and technically difficult artform that it is. Painting, on the other hand, is a medium in which artists are lauded for technical mastery. By combining the two, Fraser dissolves the boundaries between the gallery and the home, between public and private, between Fine Art and “women’s work.” Suggesting a connection between domestic labour and artistic practice, a motif of busy hands reoccurs throughout the exhibition. Hands play dominoes, pick berries, and pluck chickens. There’s the hand that threads the needle, and the one that holds the brush.

– Cason Sharpe

Letitia Fraser (b. 1988, Halifax) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work centers around her experience as an African Nova Scotian woman growing up in the province’s Black communities of North Preston and Beechville. Descending from a long line of artists, her creative instincts were nurtured early in life. Through a combination of painting and textiles, she unearths previously untold narratives and pays homage to her community’s history of quilting. Recent exhibitions include Family Patterns with Darcie Bernhardt at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (2022), Every Chain at the Chester Art Gallery, Halifax (2022), Letitia Fraser at Mount St. Vincent Art Gallery, Nova Scotia (2019) and Mommy’s Patches: Traditions & Superstitions at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, Nova Scotia (2019). She graduated with a BFA from NSCAD University in 2019. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2018 Nova Scotia Talent Trust RBC Emerging Artist Award and was recently longlisted for the 2022 Sobey Art Award. Her work is included in several private and public art collections including the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Canada Council and the Wedge Collection.