Ink, Charcoal & Jet

Of the 1028 artists represented in the Art Windsor-Essex Collection, 7 identify as Black Artists. A total of 0.681% of the collection.
Of the approximately 4214 total works in the Art Windsor-Essex Collection, 10 works are by Black Artists. A total of 0.24% of the collection.

If we use the American auction market as a metric for understanding what artworks are currently being collected by private collectors, the statistics are bleak: art by women, for example, accounts for 3.3% of auction sales between 2008-2022, art by Black American artists only 2%, and art by Black women artists just 0.1%.

This exhibition, pulled from the Art Windsor Essex- Collection, seeks to locate and foreground Black within the institution; examining absence through presence. By interrogating Blackness as a medium, alike to the title Ink, Charcoal, & Jet – the colour Black is positioned as a central character: an active, contributing voice, speaking from the collection.

Through close looking, Black reveals itself through material and formal considerations; lithographic ink, asphalt, traces of shadow, ghosts, or the gestures of an artist’s hand. Black reveals itself as the foundational bedrock for where we make, and how we make, as artists – the material easily found, the initial sketches, the finished project, the process through to the end.

By excavating the collection, Ink, Charcoal & Jet asks: where does Blackness speak from within the institution, and how might listening to it reshape our understanding of presence, absence, and power?