That exploration of identity and self-expression continues at the Art Gallery of Ontario with Sunday Best: The Power & The Glory of Black Style.
Running until Feb. 28, 2027, the exhibition traces self-fashioning across the African diaspora from the 1880s to the present, featuring historical and high-fashion garments, contemporary art, photographs, accessories and other objects from Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and the Caribbean.
Among the contemporary works is Tawny Chatmon’s The Restoration/Not Your Blackamoor, a portrait of a woman wearing an elaborate hat decorated with flowers and brooches, including a Blackamoor figure. Chatmon reclaims the historically ornamentalized figure as an ancestral relic, while the hat recalls church hats worn by generations of Black women.
