Friday, January 24th 2025

Vernissage: Hidden Blackness: Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828-1901)

Hidden Blackness is the first major exhibition of Edward Mitchell Bannister’s work ever presented in Canada—124 years after the artist’s death. Born in Saint Andrews, New Brunswick, Bannister was a self-taught, nineteenth-century, African American/Canadian painter of the Barbizon school known for pastoral landscapes and seascapes. In 1876, Bannister’s painting Under the Oaks (now lost) won the bronze medal (first place) at the Centennial Exposition Art Exhibition in Philadelphia, thus making him the first artist of African descent and the first Canadian to win a major art prize in North America. Before becoming a full-time painter, Bannister worked as a cobbler, shipmate, barber, and daguerreotypist. He was also a prominent abolitionist and philanthropist (along with his wife Christiana Carteaux Bannister), and a respected art critic and co-founder the Providence Art Club, one of the oldest art societies in the United States.