City of Surrey public art display celebrates Black History Month

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The City of Surrey is hosting an exhibit highlighting the history and vibrant culture of Black communities at the Cloverdale Recreation Centre until April 3. 

“Making Histories: An Exhibition of Black Artists” features pieces by four local Black artists from Surrey, Langley, and New Westminster to celebrate Black History Month in February. The exhibit comes from the city’s community arts team.

“This was to create new spaces within the City of Surrey that our community artists could be shown in to create opportunities for up-and-coming artists [or] for people that might do art as a hobby … [so] they also get a space that they can be seen in,” says community arts manager for the City of Surrey, Kim Drabyk.

“[It’s] also [about] making art more accessible to everyone. Maybe they’ve never been in a gallery and never seen it before, so they’re seeing art for the first time.”

The artists whose pieces are a part of the exhibit include Devon Mars, Clancy A.F. Ngolah, and Anthony Santiago. Collin Patrick of the Black Arts Centre in Surrey also contributed three pieces towards the exhibit.

Patrick’s artistic practice involves preserving moments for himself because, since he had lots of head injuries during his youth, he struggles with short-term memory loss and is in the early stages of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain disorder.

“The Backseat Driver” is among his pieces at the exhibit, which depicts the inside of a car.

“That physical painting is just based on a night out with the boys, to be honest, with me and my rugby teammates after a big weekend game,” Patrick says.

“But for me, I remember all the details of that night, everything we went and did because of this painting, when otherwise, it’d probably just blur into the rest of my memory.”

The next of his paintings is “Il Bistrot di Anton,” which is of Anton’s Pasta Bar in Burnaby. While Patrick says he does more impressionist work and is aiming towards realism pieces now, he was “very loose” with his artwork during the time he created this piece by drawing it how he would in his sketchbook, rather than trying to preserve all the details.

“I think that’s fun, you’re almost abstracting the details. There’s parts of it where you start to see in the foreground, you’ve got a pretty detailed person, and then as it gets further away, you just start to lose all control and definitive form,” Patrick says.

“Miss Fortunate” is Patrick’s final piece in the exhibit, which shows a girl sitting in a chair in a kitchen with plants and other objects around her. For him, the painting depicts his girlfriend in the kitchen of their old apartment, preserving this memory.

Patrick chose these three artworks for the exhibit because they are all “congruent in style” and were created early last year. A lot of his paintings come out in doubles or triples and are from the “same birthplace,” he says. 

For the pieces, Patrick used oil pastels, acrylic paint for intense colour, and charcoal, which was one of the first mediums he explored in university and loves for its heavy contrast and pencil-drawn feel.

Patrick says he finds there are very few people who look like him here, and there are lots of assumptions on what being Black is or what Black individuals are like, so the exhibit allows the public to see the different artists’ narratives.

“It’s really important that people be able to understand we do the same things as everyone else, we’re still people, and each of us has our own individual narratives, like there’s no understanding Black people. Everyone’s their own person,” Patrick says.

Drabyk says she hopes attendees take away who the artists in their community are, as well as learn more about Black history and people in Canada and why February is such an important month.

For more information, visit the City of Surrey’s website.