I looked up at the portraits from the sidewalk, the sun shining on the northern wall, beaming over the students, washing them in safety and timelessness. I took photos of their photos, and they watched me from inside instead of focusing on their studies. The teacher in me said “yes, watch me record this moment in time, appreciating you, seeing you, expanding you with my writing, connecting to you with childlike abandon.”

When asked about the impetus behind choosing each location of the Three-Thirty exhibition, Anique Jordan, a Scarborough resident and empowered artist, professed “I want this work and all the work that I do to find spaces that bypass that question of whether or not we are fixing or unfixing [stereotypes about us] because that puts power in the hands of people who decide that. The community is always doing this work. There isn’t a moment where that breaks and becomes something new overnight. I’m interested in repositioning power into the eyes of the people who already live there, and understanding how they see themselves, how we see this community.” It was only after my education that I learned to play within the art, to see myself outside of it instead of fighting to be represented by it. The autoethnography of the students putting themselves on the map, with the tools offered by Ebti Nabag and the visionary light of Anique Jordan healed something in me that I didn’t know education had robbed me of.

At the Doris McCarthy Gallery, the history of Scarborough’s development hangs outside, and an acknowledgement of the Indigenous land it exists on, is inside, in the vestibule. Within the gallery, I was entranced by the 14 collages that spanned the left wall, and more images from The Bubble of Youth to the right. The collages were unique, although similar enough to show belonging. Not only did each piece belong to the collection as a whole, but together they encouraged a sense of “Black people, this is for us.”

Like knowledge, space too has a calculus: the continuum of class power decreases the further outside of the GTA that we go. Toronto’s core is the financial capital, while Scarborough has the Bluffs, but Malvern is often depicted as dangerous or “the hood.” Its rich history of art and community is often subsumed by stereotypes of immigrants decreasing property value.

The collages by artist Aaron Jones, named after the myriad ways in which knowledge can be classified, and constructed from the wealth of Black knowledges, these works form a rhizome of Black genealogy, demonstrating that our power is ancestral, internal, communal, and not to be taken lightly. Named after different ways in which knowledge is classified, such as Situated Knowledge, Imperative Knowledge, A posteriori, and more, the collages were comprised of visuals from the prestigious Rita Cox Black and Caribbean Heritage book collection, which has a home at the Malvern Public Library.

Again, I was transported temporally, to a time in my past when I was searching for art like this. I looked at the cover of author Robin D.G. Kelley’s book Freedom Dreams and remembered being floored by page seven where he posits: “what are today’s young activists dreaming about? We know what they are fighting against, but what are they fighting for?” Finding camaraderie with art that shows you a way of being that is so different from what you struggled to become, is freedom.

Within the walls of the gallery, I was in a home that was so welcoming because it was so infused with Caribbean culture that I dropped the weights of racism, and celebrated in my skin, smiling with my lips. I asked Anique, in an overly academic way, to describe how the dreams of the artist and audience might purport significance. Again, in the cool of Scarborough chic, she remixed my question and asked plainly “when you zone out, where do you go?” and before I could answer her (better) query, she went on: “I hope that they do not go to a place where they’re dreaming of freedom. I want that to be so granted and given that it’s not exciting. Anything other than freedom. And feel no ways about it; walk slowly toward your dream, and let people see you happy. It forces all of our actions that move beyond race to be radical. I want them to be dreaming of anything.”

As someone who believes in Earth’s networks, from the root systems of trees to the conduits of oceans, to the web of the stars that has guided navigators for centuries, like the little Black girls who had geometry braided into their hair, I am fascinated by those maps, their power, and seek to amplify their potential energy. As garnet is to pomegranate, as host is to hospitality, humans have constructed a system of meaning, where one exists in Nature and then we mirror those concepts.

Anique and I agree that as Black people, our wisdom is special, and exists within colonized spaces such as school, but is heightened when we are in community with other Black people. In Anique’s words “[Black youth] have to understand [the world] differently to know that they can live and survive. There needs to be a hyper level of care when talking about a Black person’s body.”

In another gallery room, the exhibit includes a three-channel film by Kelly Fyffe-Marshall. Projected on three walls, the artist asks audiences to consider “what happens after the status quo has shifted,” and guiding us to be “optimistic about the shift.” Encouraging youth to “be you unconditionally, the world will adjust,” the subjects in the film explained where they dig their power from: community, ancestors, introspection, humanity, mentorship, courage. The film ends with each of the subjects reverberating a chant of “power,” which was unapologetically Black and felt like shelter within the walls of the intimate room. The film had no veneer of cloaking onlookers from the fear that comes with connotations of “Black power.” It celebrated our collective, diverse, and individual power.