As We Rise Author, Dr. Kenneth Montague, on Collecting and Championing Black Art
Dentistry is the art of preservation. I learned this most intimately as a child, after needing several dental procedures in a relatively short time. While at the dentist’s office, I would often ask questions along the way during each examination and subsequent procedure. (I think this was my way of trying to calm my nerves.) Whether it’d be a filling or a much worse procedure, my dentist explained that he was interested in preserving what was there, as much as he could, of course. It wasn’t simply about making new things––though he could do that, when necessary––but about ensuring that the things that already existed could continue for as long as possible.
Photo: Aaron Clarke
Dr. Kenneth Montague has been practicing dentistry for over 30 years. In 1992, Montague opened his dental practice, Word of Mouth Dentistry. His practice has since become an integral part of the Toronto area, winning numerous awards and regularly being named one of the “Best Of” dentists in the city. But Montague is hardly your average dentist; he’s also a prolific collector of Black art and a longtime supporter of emerging artists, boasting one of the most extensive collections of its kind in the world. His journey as a collector began in the 90s, following his time in dental school. He was interested in the local arts scene and up-and-coming artists in Toronto, so in 1997, he established Wedge Curatorial Projects to highlight the works of Black artists in the Toronto area.
Previously neglected, interest in Black art has increased in recent years. While exhibitions featuring Black art and artists feel like the norm now, this was hardly the case when Montague began collecting in the late 90s. Simply put, many did not see Black art’s value, its worthiness of being saved, preserved or remembered. (For context, Montague started collecting back when a Malick Sidibé photograph would go for about $1,000. In 2022, Sidibé’s photos regularly sell for upwards of $10,000). However, in the true spirit of dentistry, Montague was always thinking about preservation, even when everyone else thought the art, like a tooth, had decayed.
In late 2021, the Wedge Collection, in conjunction with the Aperture Foundation, released As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic, a photobook exploring Black image-makers from across the Atlantic, connecting them in profound ways. As We Rise is subversive, meticulously telling stories of identity, resistance, interiority, joy and perseverance. It’s both revealing and impressive as a body of work. Following the release of As We Rise, I got a chance to talk with Dr. Montague about his new book, Aperture and his mission to “insert the Black Canadian experience and artistic practices into the story of art.”
JODE-LEIGH NEMBHARD: I read an interview where you said, “collecting art was a happy accident that went up in value.” What led you to start collecting art?
DR. KENNETH MONTAGUE: I was born in Windsor, Ontario, which is the southernmost Canadian city but also directly across the river from Detroit, Michigan. My mother and father were immigrants from Jamaica who arrived in the late 1950s––earlier than most who moved up here. My father went to Ontario Teachers College at the University of Toronto but could not get a job because the Toronto District School Board was not hiring Black teachers. So he ended up going to Windsor, where they needed teachers and lived in this place where we were maybe the second Jamaican family. I was born in the 60s but grew up feeling like an island, and I didn't really recognize myself in the Black media that I grew up with. Sitcoms like Good Times and so forth didn't feel like my family.
Photo: Aaron Clarke
Photo: Aaron Clarke
Then, I saw a photograph by James Van Der Zee at the Detroit Institute of Arts. It's a famous photograph that's actually in the book As We Rise––I bought it later when I could afford it. The image is of a couple decked out in raccoon coats in front of a Harlem brownstone with their brand new Cadillac and impossibly sophisticated. That was very aspirational for me. Even as a 10-year-old, I knew I wanted to have a longer relationship with this image than just seeing it on the wall of a gallery. I didn't know that I wanted to be a collector, but I had this instinct or impulse that I wanted to spend more time with the art. This early exposure is where it started. My parents took us to art galleries as often as sporting events and kid activities.
It's been a long road over the 25 years I've been collecting and championing Black artists. I've been pushing for this work to be included in the story of contemporary art, and it's been interesting to see over time, particularly within the last decade, how the art market is finally recognizing work by Black artists as something valuable. For me, the happy accident is that my collection went up in value. But even if that didn't happen, I would still love it. I would not consider it a bad spend; it's been enriching for me. It's been great for the artists we've pulled into the fold. One of the greatest joys of my life is being surrounded by the beauty of images of my own community.
JN: Recently, your photobook, As We Rise, was published by Aperture. How did this collaboration come about?
Kennedi Carter, Untitled (Self-Portrait), 2020, from As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (Aperture, 2021). Courtesy Kennedi Carter
KM: I have been a fan of the Aperture Foundation's books since my university days. I’ve followed this great organization that promotes and celebrates photography in all its forms for many years, so it was a great honour that they chose to publish my book. So many artists that are in my collection, like Hank Willis Thomas or Ming Smith, have had books organized or published by Aperture, so it was a great fit. It was a beautiful surprise for them to reach out to me during the pandemic. They were interested in putting out a book about Black artists within a Black-owned collection. I think that was important. They saw the connection between Black collectors and Black artists.
“As we rise” was a phrase that my late father always said. He meant: as we do well, we must pull up other people in our own community. When I was explaining my origin story to Aperture in our first meeting, they really locked onto that phrase and thought it was a great metaphor for what I've been doing as a collector––pulling these artists into the mainstream, into the story of contemporary art, lifting them up. The subtitle, Photography from the Black Atlantic, has to do with the fact that almost all of the works in my collection feature artistic practices that are peripheral to the Atlantic––the UK, the African continent itself, Brazil, the Caribbean, the United States and Canada. It’s a continuum from the legacy of slavery right through to this moment of Black Lives Matter. My focus is on regions of the world that represent who I am as a person and my family history, so this is reflected in the work that I collect.
JN: Paul Gilroy talks about the Black Atlantic as “delineating a distinctively modern, cultural-political space that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but is, rather, a hybrid mix of all of these at once.” As We Rise centers on the Black Atlantic. Could you elaborate on these image-making practices we find across these continents? Will you also talk about how these practices change or remain constant over time?
James Barnor, Drum Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck , Kilburn , London , 1966, From As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (Aperture, 2021). Courtesy Autograph ABP
KM: The image on the lower left of the cover is a woman leaning against a car. This is in the swinging 60s in London, England, but the story of artist James Barnor is a great example of the idea behind the Black Atlantic. He was born, grew up and had a successful studio practice as a photographer in Accra, Ghana, and he was one of the key image-makers in that era of nation-building. Ghana was the first African country to declare independence from their British colonizers. And in that time of modernism and change in the 1950s and 60s, James Barnor created wonderful pictures. He then moves to London and catches the waves of a youth movement with, you know, the Beatles and so forth, and he becomes a fashion photographer there. His sensibility as a Black man being kind of an island in that first wave of Black immigrants from Africa to England comes to play in this work. He's privileging Black models in his work, and he's seeing things from a different perspective. So I think that’s a good example of this idea of what I mean by The Black Atlantic and what Paul Gilroy is referring to––where it's a hybrid. You could think of many of the artists in this book as being kind of Afropolitan and not necessarily born and staying on the continent. They might have been born on the continent but went to school in London or taught in America. So there's all these permutations and combinations of being Black that have to do with that phrase, the Black Atlantic.
JN: In the preface, Teju Cole introduces As We Rise as a photobook that showcases Black people “present as human beings, credible, fully engaged in their world.” Why was it important to you to showcase Black people in this regard?
Vanley Burke, Boy with Flag, Winford, in Handsworth Park, 1970, from As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (Aperture, 2021). ©Vanley Burk
KM: I think it was really just a reflection of my life experiences. As a kid, almost all the images of Black folks I saw were images of oppression or conflict. You get the starving child in the Biafran war or conflicts on the African continent and other places like Haiti and so forth. You’d see Black people in poverty and despair after natural disasters and many images of violence, especially of young Black folks in America. Here in Canada is a history of slavery as well. Early Canadian newspapers, like The Globe and Mail and Montreal Gazette, would feature ads for runaway enslaved people and so forth. So I'm just ready to move away from these images of oppression and celebrate the beauty of ordinary Black life. Like a kid riding his bicycle in a park in Birmingham, England, fixing a British flag to his handlebars, saying, “this is who I am” in the context of a lot of racial oppression. A political party of white supremacists like the National Front was gaining ground at that time, with all kinds of violence happening, and here's this kid––resisting by doing his own thing. I feel like that kind of image hasn't been shown as much as the images of kids being beaten in the street by a mob of white supremacists. You want to show this other side, you know? So that's what As We Rise is all about for me. It's a celebration of “being and becoming”, as the cultural theorist Stuart Hall said. For Black people, we urgently need this kind of visual representation.
JN: Teju Cole also describes this photobook as a family album, pointing out that “these are pictures that say: I am not alone, I have another with me.” He talks about an implied community in each image—can you elaborate on these themes of family and community within this photobook?
Deana Lawson, Coulson Family , 2008, from As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (Aperture, 2021). © Deana Lawson, courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; David
Jamel Shabazz, Best Friends, Brooklyn , New York, 1981, from As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (Aperture, 2021). Courtesy Jamel Shabazz
KM: The idea of the family album was very much a part of the book’s design. I remember the designer that Aperture chose, Jeanette Abbink from a company called Rational Beauty. I thought she would go for a clean cover with one iconic image on it––for example the boy with the bicycle and the flag. Instead, she comes back with this family album-looking thing. The photos were laid out like the kind of album that we all grew up with, maybe from the 70s or 80s, the ones with the cellophane you could pull up––something your parents, your grandparents had. That's the feeling she got as a designer from seeing the hundreds of photographs of my collection. This idea that we should celebrate in a way that is familiar for people, to open up a family album. Contributing writer Teju Cole, a good friend, has been to my home and seen how I think about art in the same way that I think about music. He compares the book to a record album as well. This idea of mixing and selecting and curating it as a metaphor for an album or personal playlist. I really like using the idea of an album for presenting work in my collection.
JN: It’s beautiful to see you providing mentorship and community with the next generation of Black Canadian artists and curators. Where do you see the Black Canadian art world in the future?
KM: My mission is actually twofold right now. It is very much to do with Canada, and my mission as a collector is to ensure that my beloved Black Canadian artists achieve their rightful place in the story of contemporary art. I think it's very easy for that not to happen because there's a moment right now of celebration around Black artists in the art market. But like everything else, it's skewed to the African American experience. As you know, there is a bigger and very well-established community there. They have art stars already, like Kehinde Wiley, Gordon Parks and others. It's very difficult to compete against that kind of dominance in the art market, in the media and so forth. So I'm on a personal mission to insert the Black Canadian experience and artistic practices into the story of art. The way to do that with this book was to insist that our own great artists like Sandra Brewster, Anique Jordan, Dawit Petros, June Clark and Bidemi Oloyede are featured. Alongside Ming Smith and Mickalene Thomas and the other Black American artists that are celebrated, I find these works by Canadian artists just as compelling. And I think that our story as Black people matters just as much.
The other part of my collecting mission is to just be a role model for other Black folks, encouraging not just people of means but Black folks at every level to start collecting art and controlling the narrative of our own stories. I'm doing that also as a trustee at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where I've been working hard to bring Black folks into the fold as patrons and ensure that the institution itself is hiring Black people so that we're represented beyond this moment.
This interview has been edited and condensed.