A visual art exhibition focusing on stories by Africans and its diaspora is premiering at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) on Saturday.
The exhibit “Feels Like Home,” spearheaded by Josef Adamu and his creative agency Sunday School, invites viewers to examine the idea of home through contemporary conversations using photography.
Debuting in Toronto on May 6, the exhibit will feature works from three Sunday School series: The Hair Appointment (2018) by Jeremy Rodney-Hall, Ten Toes Down (2021) by Kreshonna Keane, and Jump Ball (2019–ongoing) by O’shane Howard and Joshua Kissi.
The Hair Appointment (2018) amplifies and glorifies the Black hair experience from the perspective of a Black African hair salon in New York City,” Adamu told Now Toronto on Tuesday.
“We shot it in Brownsville in Brooklyn. And we collaborated with a local hair salon to tell the story of what those conversations are like, what that atmosphere is like, and what it feels like to feel beautiful after an empowering hair appointment. I was hungry to tell more stories that reflected beauty,” he detailed.
The Hair Appointment set the tone for Sunday School and ignited its flame to continue to tell stories often left untold.
Ten Toes Down (2021) follows Jordan Peterson, a Black ballerina from Philadelphia, navigating her Blackness in the predominately white space of ballet, which often failed to consider tights and pointe shoes for darker complexions.
The third series being showcased at the AGO is Jump Ball, which is ongoing since 2019 and birthed after the Toronto Raptors won the NBA Championship that same year.
“The Raptors won the NBA championship in 2019 with a Nigerian general manager and a Cameroonian star player, and I was like something about basketball and Africa needs to be told. Away from the continent. What kind of story can we tell about the culture of basketball as it ties into Africa and the African experience? I started in Toronto and got some kids that play recreationally. So kids from Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Somalia, kids that reflect what we see on a daily basis,” Adamu said.
Sunday School was founded in 2017 and calls on photographers, videographers, stylists, and models to contribute to the space of visual storytelling for Black people in Africa and beyond. The agency has worked on visual campaigns including Nike, Converse and Spotify.
“I had this mission to just tell more organic stories that represented being Black, African, Caribbean, whatever that may be. I just didn’t see as much representation, especially from a Canadian lens. So, growing up in Toronto, I wanted to fill that void with the vision I had,” Adamu continued.
“I started to talk to friends and peers and just other creative people that were coming up in the scene with me in Toronto, and I was like, ‘Hey, let’s just start doing stuff that is really cool and unseen in the city.’ And that, over time, slowly evolved into a more concrete and concise idea.”
Through Sunday School, Adamu pulls the varying unique and vibrant representations of Black identities, in community, fashion and culture to emphasize home as an “inhabited space both tangible and intangible.”
He grew up religiously attending Sunday school at church as his dad was a youth pastor and recalls the shared space as one filled with optimism and youthful energy that inspired the name behind the agency.
“I removed the religious connotation, and something about Sunday school feels very positive and optimistic, like an intangible place where people can come together to learn about something. And I wanted to create a space and platform for that. We do a lot of work that focuses on youth especially from the lens of diaspora youth.”
Since its inception, Sunday School has used art through photography and film as a meeting point to educate audiences who may be unaware of cultural histories and invites Black people to reconnect and marvel in a sense of belonging.
“I think that’s what home is, home is familiarity, home is community, home is feeling empowered, home is feeling aligned.”
The AGO presentation marks Sunday School’s sixth anniversary while commemorating the agency’s first major exhibition in Adamu’s hometown.
In the next six years, he hopes to tell even more stories through film and eventually even place the various photo series’ into a collectible coffee table book.
“Outside of these exhibits that are really good opportunities to display work, we haven’t had anything tangible. As important as the work is, I want people to be able to research it and refer to it when talking to other people. I want people to get lost in the photography, get lost in the storytelling and get lost in the concepts,” Adamu said.
“‘Feels Like Home’ speaks to me as a first generation Nigerian but also bridges the gap for African kids all over the world. I’m just trying to bridge the gap,” he concluded.
The art gallery will be showing “Feels Like Home” until May 2024.
Find tickets to the upcoming exhibit here.
