Courtnay McFarlane is a Jamaican-born and Toronto-based visual artist, curator and poet whose literary work has been published in African-Canadian and Queer anthologies. A long-time activist in Toronto’s Black LGBTQ communities, he was a founding member of a number of groups that were forerunners in providing voice and visibility to Black LGBTQ issues.
In 2018 he created Legacies in Motion: Black Queer Archival Projects and curated its first exhibition See We Yah! in April 2019. The exhibition unearthed and celebrated the political and cultural activism of Black LGBTQ communities in Toronto. See We Yah! was exhibited at BAND Gallery as part of Myseum’s Intersections Festival and later remounted at the ArQuives. Subsequent curatorial projects have included: Joints + Junctions: PRESENTing Hogan’s Alley featuring work by Andrea Fatona, Cornelia Wyngaarden and Rose Ann Bailey; Bigger Than We 2, an intergenerational Black Queer and Trans community art event; Honam: An Akan Word for Body focusing on the exploration of the Black male body through the lens of Ghanian-born and Toronto-based queer emerging artist Kwasi Kyei as part of 2022’s CONTACT Photography Festival. His own art work was exhibited later that year in the group show Indexing Resistance: The Blood and Guts of Queer Protest in Canada at the Plumb Gallery.
He was selected for the 2023 – 2024 Black Arts Fellowship (BAF), an interdisciplinary program for eight emerging and mid-career Black artists, at Wildseed Centre for Art and Activism in Toronto. He curated selected work from See Me Yah! an ongoing digital archive project in collaboration with Myseum for the BAF 2023 – 2024 cohort’s culminating group exhibition Love is the Antidote at Wildseed Centre. His recent writing has included contributions to: Welcome to Blackhurst An Iconic Toronto Neighbourhood, featuring his profile of writer and activist Makeda Silvera, and a personal essay in the Transformative Vision: Studio Portraits of Black Women in Leadership.
In his other life, Courtnay works in the community health sector where he is currently Director of Health Promotion and Community Services at Regent Park Community Health Centre.
Program
Notes to Belonging: An Adaptation
In this timely and poignant performance, critically acclaimed director, playwright and scholar Jaye Austin Williams introduces a live stage adaptation of Toronto-based poet Dionne Brand’s renowned non-fiction book, “A Map to the Door of No Return” published in 2001. Adapted and directed by Austin Williams with excerpts from Brand’s book, this program is staged as […]
October 12
7:00pm – 8:00pm
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