Material of Belonging: An Interview with Pamela Edmonds
Pamela Edmonds has spent over two decades engaging in conversations around race, gender, identity, and belonging in Canadian visual culture. Now based in Halifax as the Director and Curator at Dalhousie University Art Gallery, Edmonds brings both grassroots experience and institutional leadership to her work.
Born in Montréal to an Anglophone family and raised in Dartmouth, where her family has roots in the African Nova Scotian community, Edmonds became keenly aware of whose perspectives were absent from Canadian art spaces when she began painting in the 1990s. As a curator, she now seeks to foster dialogue and belonging in these spaces. In this conversation, we speak about her background and philosophy in curation, ideas of site, and craft objects as meeting places.
For Edmonds, moving beyond existing frameworks begins with a simple but radical question: “Who is this for, and who decides?” In the context of craft, that means honouring not just the finished objects, but the makers, the processes, and the communities that give them meaning. She emphasizes that inclusion is about more than representation; it is about shared authorship, equitable fees, and access built in from the start. Craft in the curatorial landscape thus becomes a powerful site for transformation, where histories of labour, care, and cultural memory guide us toward more equitable cultural futures.
Miles B. Clarke: You’ve said, “A lot of us who are curators, especially those with more grassroots backgrounds, were artists that wanted to see exhibitions and took it upon themselves to organize.” Out of that need, you and others start organizing shows yourselves. What was missing, and what drove you to step into curating as the answer?
Pamela Edmonds: I came into curating because the work I wanted to see and the voices I wanted to hear weren’t being invited into the room. DIY organizing taught me that curation isn’t just selecting objects; it’s building conditions for people to meet each other’s ideas. Early on, I learned to borrow space, pool resources, and create context where there was none. That urgency, to make a public for work that felt invisible, still drives me. Curating, for me, is a social practice as much as an aesthetic one.
MBC: Black representation in Canadian art has historically been limited, but coming from Halifax, a place with such a rich yet often overlooked Black history, did that dual reality influence your curatorial practice?
PE: Absolutely. Halifax and the wider African Nova Scotian communities have deep histories that are too often footnotes in the Canadian narrative. Having roots from here attuned me to absence in the record and to the resilience of communities who built culture in spite of erasure. I think of how Africville¹ still lives in memory and advocacy. That dual reality made me a listener first. It also shaped my ethics: cite locally, pay attention to who is in the room, and understand that the Atlantic world is a network, what happens here is in conversation with the rest of the world, even if it sometimes feels cut off.
MBC: How have your approaches to identity, race, and gender evolved as you’ve moved from grassroots organizing into institutional curatorial work?
PE: In grassroots contexts, the work is immediate: make space now. Inside institutions, the work is slower but can be deeper, and about changing the terms under which space is made. My focus has expanded from representation also to infrastructure, like fundraising for acquisitions, or building mentorship programs. I still center Black and other racialized artists, but I try to move from “inclusion” as invitation to “belonging” as shared authority. Intersectionality isn’t just a theme; it’s how decisions are made and who benefits from them.
The Secret Codes: African Nova Scotian Quilts, Dalhousie Art Gallery, installation view, 2023. COURTESY DALHOUSIE ART GALLERY, PHOTO STEVE FARMER
MBC: What do you think about the ways material, technique, and racialized histories intersect in the works you curate?
PE: Materials carry memory. A textile can hold migration routes; clay can hold land and labour; moving images can hold memory and testimony. I’m interested in how technique is a kind of embodied knowledge, how skills are passed down, adapted, and sometimes policed. When artists from racialized communities choose certain materials, they’re often activating archives that were never written down. Exhibitions can make those lineages visible without fixing them in place.
MBC: You’ve spoken about curating in relation to site, body, and space. Does thinking about “site” always mean a physical place, or can it also mean cultural or historical space?
PE: Site is layered. In Mi’kma’ki², site means land and treaty relationships, but it also means cultural memory, language, and the emotional space a work opens in the body. A gallery is a site; so is a shoreline, a church basement, a shared community garden. . . . I often pair exhibitions with walks, meals, or conversations, so the work can resonate beyond the walls.
MBC: How do you see craft objects functioning as sites of dialogue, between past and present, local and global, or between communities and institutions?
PE: Craft objects are already in conversation: with the hands that made them, with the people who used them, and with materials that come from specific lands. When we present craft, we’re mediating between systems, from museum display, community use, and personal meaning. I like to create multiple entry points: maker’s notes in their own words, chances to handle materials in a workshop, and programming that brings elders and emerging artists together. The object becomes a meeting place, not an endpoint.
At the Seams, Grimsby Art Gallery, installation view, 2016. COURTESY GRIMSBY ART GALLERY.
MBC: Some craft-based works are rooted in intergenerational knowledge and community histories. In exhibitions like At the Seams, artists take practices, like sewing, weaving, or embroidery, and push them into new contexts. How do you see exhibitions serving as a space for preserving or translating these cultural narratives for contemporary audiences?
PE: Preservation without translation can freeze a practice; translation without care can flatten it. Exhibitions can [preserve and translate crafts] by letting artists set the terms of how knowledge is shared, what is shown, what is withheld, what is taught in a workshop rather than on a wall label. With At the Seams, co-curated with Sally Frater and presented at the Grimsby Art Gallery, the aim was to let techniques speak to the present: mending as political vocabulary, pattern as map, adornment as armour. This project and others are often [centred] around slow looking and making, so visitors could feel the time inside the work, not just read about it.
[1] Africville was a historic Black community in Halifax, Nova Scotia, founded in the mid-19th century by descendants of formerly enslaved and free settlers. It was demolished in the 1960s under the guise of urban renewal and has since become a powerful symbol of systemic racism and Black resilience in Canada.
[2] Mi’kma’ki is the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq, comprising Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, the island of Newfoundland, and parts of New Brunswick and Quebec.
We would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario.
