The Front Room: Inna Toronto/6ix (AGO) 

The Front Room: Inna Toronto/6ix was iterated as part of the tour of Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now, at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), 9th December 2023 – 1st April 2024).

*Photos courtesy of Sean Weaver, Tracey Owusu & Michael McMillan, 2023.

London was the metropole centre of the British Empire, and Toronto was a satellite, where Caribbean migration began en masse from the late 1970s/early 1980s. Apart from those coming directly from the Caribbean, there was diasporic movement via Britain and the United States. Consequently, The Front Room: Inna Toronto/6ix was set during the 1980s at the height of diasporic Caribbean to Toronto.

My curatorial approach towards recreating The Front Room installation is wherever possible, to be on the ground carrying out research with local communities towards sourcing local materials based on their local oral histories. But as with some previous iterations, this was not possible with The Front Room: Inna Toronto/6ix.  

Consequently, through the curatorial and production team (Julie Crooks, Emilie Croning, Brittney Sproule and Gillian McIntyre) at AGO, I was put in touch with Dexter Bonaparte, who based in Toronto, was able to source materials for the installation. His parents come from Grenada, and with a long practice sourcing materials for film and television production sets, Dexter became a culturally relevant and professional component collaborator in the development process.

Research also drew on the lived experience of Black British artist, Marlene Smith, whose mother had relatives in Toronto; Aaron Tyler Francis, who provided archive photos and videos from Vintage Black Canada; Karen Carter, who runs BAND (Black Artists’ Network in Dialogue), and Julie Crooks, curator of Life Between Islands at AGO, who provided archive photos of her mother’s nursing days in Barbados.

As with The Front Room for Life Between Islands at Tate Britain, a fictional narrative was created about who owed the room.

Gloria’s Front Room

This front room belongs to Gloria, who stayed behind in the Caribbean as a child when her family emigrated to the UK as part of the ‘Windrush’ generation in the early 1950s. Gloria rejoins her parents, Carmen and Bally, and siblings, Henley, Marvin, and Paulette, in Toronto in the 1960s. They visit relatives in the UK, where Carmen trained as a nurse with the National Health Service. Gloria also becomes a nurse, in Scarborough, Ontario, where she meets and marries Marcus, a teacher from the Caribbean. They have two teenage children: a son, Marcus Jr., and daughter, Michelle.

We encounter Gloria’s front room during the 1980s, with the material culture of her family’s everyday lives: watching home movies on VHS, reading books and magazines, and listening and dancing to calypso, reggae, soul, RnB, jazz on vinyl records and tape cassettes. Marvin Jr. and Michelle are of the hip hop generation, and Gloria constantly reminds them that front room is not their bedroom, to remove their hoodies and high-top trainers, and not to sit in their father’s armchair.  

On the walls are framed photographic portraits of family and friends, Black female nurses, proud in their pressed uniforms, souvenir memories of ‘back home’, and Black consciousness through a picture of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, African sculptures and prints, and a Black version of The Last Supper. Like Carmen, the front room is Gloria’s domain, where she can express a sense of respectability in her own feminine style.