When I reflect on Judi, I think about how she created a road map for celebrating, advocating and acknowledging blackness in Kingston. … Although she’s passed, her impact on Kingston runs so deep and the collective memory of her bright spirit and positive progress in our community lives on.  – Tianna Edwards

Judith Brown, Kingston’s much-loved mentor, leader, community advocate and educator, passed away in October 2024 at the age of 81. In her honour, Agnes and artist Sandra Brewster re-mount the 2019 portrait Brewster made of Brown. It now adorns a prominent downtown wall as a monumental public artwork with the blessing of building owner Dr. Aba Mortley, proprietor of Chere-Mère Spa.

Paying tribute to the joy and enduring presence of Black people in Kingston, Brewster’s 2019 portrait of Brown was part of a commissioned series of blurred portraits that feature several influential community members. Like all of Brewster’s Blur works in the series, this portrait of Judith Brown was taken while the sitter was in movement. It evokes the complexities of global movement through a material meditation on states of diasporic presence. Inspired by the feeling of memory suffusing old photographs, Brewster’s chosen medium—an unstable gel transfer process—mimics and exaggerates the qualities of printed images by embracing the appearance of creases, tears and folds, while evoking a subject’s resistance to capture. Here the camera is a tool, not of capture, but of decolonial social life and cultural memory.

Biography

Sandra Brewster is an internationally renowned  Canadian artist based in Toronto. Born of Guyanese parents, Sandra employs a range of artistic media to express an internal relationship with identity, grounded in people of the Caribbean diaspora, who maintain relationships with “back home.”

Recent group and solo exhibitions have been held at Remai Modern (Saskatoon), Art + Practice (Los Angeles), Kenderdine Art Galleries (Saskatoon), Art Gallery of Guelph, Leonard & Bina Art Gallery (Montreal), Les Rencontres d’Arles – Méchanique Générale, Hartnett Gallery (Rochester), The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto), OPTICA, centre d’art contemporain (Montreal), MCA Chicago, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Gallery of Ontario, Or Gallery (Vancouver), Rajko Mamuzic Gallery (Novi Sad), Lagos Photo Festival. Sandra has recently participated in artist residencies at Artpace in San Antonio, Loghaven Artist Residency in Knoxville and Sacatar in the northeast of Brazil. Awards include the Gattuso Prize for outstanding featured exhibition of CONTACT Photography Festival in 2017, the Toronto Friends of Visual Arts Artist Prize in 2018, and the recipient of the prestigious Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award in 2024. She is currently longlisted for the 2025 Sobey Award.

Sandra Brewster is represented by Olga Korper Gallery.

Special thanks to Aba Mortley and Tianna Edwards. Produced with support from the Canada Council for the Arts and materials generously donated by Cultural Services, City of Kingston.

Hero image: Sandra Brewster, Judith Brown (Blur 6), 2025, photo-based gel transfer on Dibond, 192x192in. (4.9 x 4.9 metres)