We’ve Been Here

Black History in Kingston

Celebrate, affirm, and connect the Black Kingston community in this Black Light Series event with Yellow House Student Centre for Equity and Inclusion.

The Kingston Frontenac Public Library and Yellow House Student Centre for Equity and Inclusion present a Black Light Series event: "We've Been Here". Join experts Dr. Kristin Moriah, Edward Thomas, and Qanita Lilla in a discussion with Tianna Edwards to reflect on Black history in Kingston.

As part of the event, attendees are invited to receive a free T-shirt featuring a local Black historical figure, printed by Alejandro Arauz through his Tracing Kingston’s Solidarities (TKS) collaboration with Agnes Etherington Art Centre.

Open to all. Culturally affirming refreshments will be provided.

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Dr. Kristin Moriah is an award-winning scholar and associate professor of African American Studies at Queen’s University. Her research focuses on African American literature and culture, performance studies, and sound studies. Dr. Moriah’s work bridges literary scholarship with public humanities, often exploring how Black voices resonate across time, space, and media. She is the editor of Insensible of Boundaries: Studies in Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first collection of essays on nineteenth-century Black feminist, Mary Ann Shadd Cary. Dr Moriah has received numerous honours for her scholarship, including the American Studies Association’s Yasuo Sakakibara Prize and the Marie Tremaine Fellowship from the Bibliographical Society of Canada. As Canada Research Chair in Black Feminist Technologies and Artistic Praxis, Dr. Kristin Moriah is advancing knowledge about Black feminist methodologies and their wider cultural impacts—focusing specifically on these practices—to transform how we view the relationship between Black feminist creative arts and technology. Dr Moriah is also a member of the American Antiquarian Society. 

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Edward Thomas currently serves as a Term Adjunct in the Department of Physics, at Queen’s University. Alongside teaching, Edward is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies whose groundbreaking historical research sparked key institutional change at Queen’s. His investigation into the 1918 ban on Black medical students unearthed both who was affected and why. His findings led to the formal repeal of the policy and helped prompt a public apology and reparative initiatives within the School of Medicine. 

Edward draws on a rich, multidisciplinary background. Before his academic career, he worked as a journalist and earned an MEng in Chemical Engineering. Edward also serves as the assistant director of Queen’s office of partnerships and innovation. Furthermore, he supports the MacDonald institute as the associate director of external relations. 

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Qanita Lilla (PhD Stellenbosch University, 2018) is a curator, researcher and podcaster. She is interested in liberating traditional collections of Africa from their ethnographic status by engaging artists from the diaspora and considering the role of digital media in creating access in the public domain. Her practice draws on anti-dystopian methodologies embedded in visual activism from the Global South and includes work on art collectives, community radio and podcasting. Her recent work in print and digital media includes a podcast series and programming related to newspaper archives and printing processes. She is currently Associate Curator Arts of Africa, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University.

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Alejandro Arauz is an artist and educator whose research-based studio practice examines displacement, identity, and resistance within the Latin American diaspora. Working across printmaking, digital imaging, performance, and installation, his work considers how migration reshapes the body, memory, and material culture, foregrounding processes of adaptation, resilience, and the formation of belonging. Grounded in print as praxis, Arauz approaches printmaking not as a stable mode of reproduction but as a durational, performative, and relational process. His practice is informed by fugitivity as a conceptual framework, embracing provisionality and resisting fixity through strategies of inscription, erasure, layering, repetition, and delegation. Hybrid analog–digital workflows and the use of the body as a printmaking matrix position the body as both archive and site of inscription, revealing how identities are produced, fragmented, and circulated. Arauz also interrogates the role of print in systems of surveillance, documentation, and classification, reworking institutional and archival visual languages as sites of refusal and counter-inscription. Collaboration and community-based production are central to his methodology, emphasizing collective labor, shared technical knowledge, and distributed authorship. He is an Assistant Professor at Queen’s University and holds an MFA from Louisiana State University and a BFAH from the University of Windsor.

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Tracing Kingston’s Solidarities (TKS) is a series of art-based performances initiated in 2023. The first movement mobilized Kingston’s Black entrepreneurial history through printmaking and collaborative T-shirt publishing. Participants engaged with an award-nominated pamphlet documenting Black entrepreneurs in Kingston, then co-published and recirculated when the participants wore these printed histories in public. Stories Out Loud is movement #2 and #3, which shifts from Kingston’s past to its present, positioning the city as a site of memory, belonging, and diasporic experience. Through workshops in collage, drawing, painting, photography, scanning, and digital printing, participants assembled personal and collective Kingston histories. The project highlights print media’s role in connecting traditional artifacts—such as photographs, documents, and heirlooms—with contemporary print practices, using both digital and physical processes to explore diasporic identity, memory, and evolving archives.

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This event is sponsored by the Friends of the Library.

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