Building Black Civilizations: Journey of 2,000 Ships continues artist Ekow Nimako’s afrofuturistic reimagining of ancient African kingdoms. Using LEGO bricks as his medium, Nimako explores the mysterious fourteenth century sea voyage of Mansa Abu Bakr II, predecessor of Mansa Musa, ruler of the ancient Mali Empire. According to legends, Abu Bakr II was an intrepid explorer, who abdicated his throne and took 2,000 ships on an expedition into the Atlantic, but was never to return or heard from again. Some accounts suggest the massive fleet reached as far as the Americas, but where they went beyond this is still unknown. Combining architecture, historical accounts, and fantastical possibilities, Nimako transcends the geometric form of LEGO to recreate the epic voyage. And in doing so, Nimako presents an uninterrupted and unco-opted narrative of Black civilizations and imagines liberated futures.

Ekow Nimako is a Toronto-based, internationally exhibiting LEGO artist who crafts futuristic and whimsical sculptures from the iconic medium. Rooted in his childhood hobby and intrinsic creativity, Nimako’s formal arts education and background as a lifelong multidisciplinary artist inform his process and signature aesthetic. His fluid building style, coupled with the Afrofuturistic themes of his work, beautifully transcend the geometric medium to embody organic and fantastical silhouettes.

Organized and circulated by Dunlop Art Gallery.

The Building Black Civilizations: Journey of 2000 Ships reading nook is presented in partnership with Oshawa Public Libraries.

We are pleased to present the annual Durham College Thesis Exhibition! Like all visionary explorers, the students in Durham College’s Fine Arts Advanced program are involved in a continual process of identifying and studying meaningful subjects that pertain to their own evolving bodies of work. They first research then develop strategies unique to their practice through experimentation, all the while learning to define and focus their personal interests. This exhibition includes a wide range of subjects, interests, and mediums.

Celebrate EMERGING VISIONS with the staff and students of Durham College! The opening reception will be hosted during RMG Friday on May 2, 2025. Then, stop by the gallery at 1pm on May 14^th for an artist-led tour of the exhibition. This is your chance to learn more about specific projects and hear about the journey from conception to fabrication to presentation.

Borrowing its title from the last poem written by Chilean singer and activist Victor Jara, this exhibition brings together artists who respond to their lived or inherited experiences of colonialism, displacement, and genocide. The artists draw on an embodied “language of textiles” to communicate—through the body—what cannot be expressed in words. Their artworks are alive and an integral part of cultural, social, and political movements reclaiming and remembering buried histories; refusing displacement and disappearance; and building towards liberation.

The artists use symbolic materials and methods that carry stories of the land, its people, and their labour. In doing so, their projects point to the bloody footprint of extractive capitalism across the globe. The everyday familiarity of textiles articulates the weight of holding injustice and grief, but more importantly, the undeniable power of collective resistance and hope.

Megan Feheley is an ililiw (Cree) interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto. They are currently working towards their BFA in Indigenous Visual Culture at OCAD University, and work predominantly in experimental sculpture/installation, beadwork, textiles, painting, and video.

Feheley’s work has been exhibited internationally in Aotearoa (New Zealand), and nationally in Toronto, Regina, North Bay, Picton and in online presentations. Feheley has had a recent solo exhibition with Xpace Cultural Centre (Toronto, 2020), and was the recipient of the 2022 Virtual Residency with Open Studio (Toronto). They also participated in an award-winning collaboration with the Royal Ontario Museum (Uncover/Recover project, 2019), for which Feheley was the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Award (2019).

Maureen Gruben’s multi-media practice incorporates diverse organic and industrial materials that are often salvaged from her local Arctic environment. She was born and raised in Tuktoyaktuk where her parents were traditional Inuvialuit knowledge keepers and founders of E. Gruben’s Transport. Gruben holds a BFA from the University of Victoria as well as diplomas in Fine Art, Creative Writing, and Indigenous Leadership from the En’owkin Centre, Penticton. Recent exhibitions include Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2024); Rovaniemi Art Museum Korundi, Rovaniemi (2024); Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle (2024); Bodenrader, Chicago (2023); Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo; Fogo Island Gallery, Fogo Island (2023); Women’s Gallery & Darkroom, New York (2022); Cade Centre for Fine Arts, Baltimore (2022); Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Los Vegas (2022); Contemporary Native Art Biennial, Montreal (2022); public art installations for The Bentway Skate Trail & Canoe Landing, Toronto (2021); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca (2021); The Rooms, St. John’s (2021); Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver (2020); and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2019). She was long listed for the 2019 Aesthetica Art Prize and the 2021 Sobey Art Prize, and her work is held in public and private collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Indigenous Art Centre, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada.

Sharmistha Kar is an artist from India, currently living in Montreal, Quebec. She obtained her MFA from Western University and is currently a doctoral student at Concordia University. Kar’s early education began in West Bengal, India, and she pursued higher education in Fine Arts at the University of Hyderabad. She continued her studio practice and worked as a lecturer in Hyderabad. She has been awarded scholarships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (2024), Peter N. Thomson Graduate Scholarship (2023), Concordia Merit Scholarship (2022), Charles Wallace India Trust Award (2013), and the Graduate Thesis Research Award (2018) at Western University. She had exhibited in India, the United Kingdom, the United States, Finland, and Canada.

Gloria Martinez-Granados is a Phoenix, Arizona based artist. Born in Guanajuato, Mexico she migrated to the United States of America with her family at 8 years old. Gloria is an interdisciplinary artist creating with indigenous practices, adding a contemporary approach by including printmaking, assemblage, installation and performance to the more traditional arts of beadwork, stitchwork and weaving. Through this process, she develops themes around identity, dreams, place, home and land. This merges with her experience growing up undocumented in the United States and the legal limbo she lives day to day as a DACAmented person.

Martinez-Granados is a former member of the all women craft collective The Phoenix Fridas. In 2019 she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Printmaking from Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Gloria is an award recipient of the 40th Annual Environmental Excellence Award, Valle Del Sol’s 2022 Profiles of Success honoree and she received the Sally and Richard Lehmann Emerging Artists Award. She has exhibited throughout the United States, most recently in Georgia at Atlanta Contemporary and Indiana at Herron School of Art and Design. Her work is currently exhibiting at Phoenix Art Museum as part of The Collection: 1960 – Now.

Soledad Fátima Muñoz is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural worker and researcher born in her family’s exile in Canada and raised in Rancagua, Chile. Her work seeks to explore the ever-changing social spaces we inhabit and the archival properties of cloth. Through the investigation of the materiality of sound and the understanding of the woven structure as the continuation of our interconnected social gesture, her practice seeks to fabricate embodied instances that participate in the construction of a more equitable society and the creation of new archives of resistance. Soledad’s involvement with music started at a very young age in her hometown of Rancagua, where she studied piano, was part of several bands and participated in voice ensembles. Once in Canada, this interest grew into a more experimental approach to sound, focusing on deconstruction, modular synthesis, instrument building, and the physical/material aspects of sculpting in space with sound. She uses live computer sampling, single oscillator synthesizers, her voice, and handcrafted instruments for her live performances and installations.

In 2014 she started Genero, an audio project/label that focuses on the distribution and representation of women and non-binary artists within the sound realm. Subsequently, in 2017, she co-founded CURRENT “Feminist Electronic Art Symposium and Mentorship,” a multidisciplinary, electronic art program working with women, non-binary, and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) artists in Canada and beyond. Her latest collaborative audiovisual project entitled La Parte de Atras de la Arpillera features a collection of interviews with Chilean textile workers whose experiences stitch together the country’s history of resistance.

She studied Film at Universidad ARCIS in Santiago Chile, has a Diploma in Textile Arts from Capilano University in North Vancouver Canada, a Bachelor in Fine Arts Degree from Emily Carr University of Arts + Design in Vancouver and a Master in Fine Arts from the Department of Fiber and Material Studies of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago USA. Soledad has been the recipient of several awards, including the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Artist, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago New Artist Society Full Merit Scholarship, the Emily Carr University of Art + Design President’s Media Award and most recently the Textile Society of America Student and New Professionals Award.

Nazzal Studio is a pioneering brand at the intersection of fashion, ethics, and activism, deeply rooted in Palestinian heritage and resistance. Founded by Sylwia Nazzal during her university years, inspired by her exploration of politics and culture, the brand gained prominence with her graduate thesis collection, What Should Have Been Home, created in 2022-2023. This collection, symbolic of Palestinian resistance, garnered global recognition after events on October 7th, highlighting the need for art that amplifies marginalized voices. Nazzal Studio prioritizes ethical practices, collaborating with refugee women and advocating for community empowerment over mass production. Embracing their role as artists in clothing, they challenge conventional fashion norms while championing important causes.

SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) is a non-profit, artist-run centre in Canada dedicated to increasing the visibility of culturally diverse artists by curating and exhibiting their work, providing mentorship, facilitating professional development and creating a community for our artists. SAVAC was founded to be an organization staffed by people of colour, committed to support the work of artists of colour. 

Installation of We are ten thousand hands that plant seeds at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2025. Photos by Toni Hafkenscheid.

Co-presented with