Muse & Museums' Monthly Musings: June 2025
Written by Zuviel Naazie and Shadio Hussein
Justin Ming Yong’s Blur
Toronto-based textile artist Justin Ming Yong’s Blur at MOCA Toronto offers a compelling reimagining of quilting as a vibrant contemporary art form. Presented in the North End Gallery and within the museum’s elevators, this site-specific installation transforms often overlooked spaces into an immersive environment that challenges traditional boundaries between art and everyday life.
Rooted in a rich familial tradition passed down by his mother, Yong’s practice moves beyond craft to explore abstraction, texture, and colour through bold, playful layered compositions. His quilts pulse with geometry and improvisation, inviting viewers into a dialogue about memory, resistance, and transformation. While his process often begins with sketches, the final works embrace spontaneity, resulting in pieces that feel both deliberate and alive.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the installation is how the museum’s elevators, which are typically the most overlooked part of a visit, become part of this immersive world. As the elevator doors close and visitors are surrounded by fabric, an unexpected sense of safety emerges, like being wrapped in something familiar yet newly transformed. This experience reveals how little attention we often give to our surroundings, and how powerful it can be when art compels us to slow down and truly feel.
This unexpected setting prompts a pause, encouraging heightened awareness of space and evoking a quiet emotional response rarely found in such mundane moments.
Yong’s large-scale quiltworks activate the architectural space, transforming walls and elevators into canvases rich with texture and emotional resonance. By situating his work in both gallery and transitional spaces, he dissolves the boundary between art and everyday experience.
Blur is not just an exhibition but an experience that lingers. It invites viewers to move differently, look closely, and reflect on how art can hold personal and collective memory. Justin Ming Yong has created something deeply rooted yet radically present. I left feeling comforted, challenged, and ultimately inspired.
Installation view of Justin Ming Yong, Blur, at MOCA Toronto from April 17, 2025 — August 3, 2025. Image by Shadio Hussein.
WAVES CONT’D
This past April, artists and archivists Wintana Hagos and Choltu, founder of Toronto Black Archives, in partnership with It's OK* Studios, presented an interactive exhibition exploring the shared histories and evolving identities of East African and Caribbean communities within Toronto, spanning from the 1950s to 2006.
Installation view of WAVES CONT’D at It’s OK* Studios from April 10, 2025 - April 20, 2025. Image by Shadio Hussein.
This exhibition was a powerful coming together of community, centring rarely seen archival photographs alongside a deeply moving sonic installation. Together, they offered an intimate look at the stories and shared experiences that have shaped Toronto’s cultural fabric. Visitors were invited not just to observe, but to engage deeply with themes of migration, memory, and identity.
On display were 4x6 photographs in decorative frames, a wall highlighting seminal moments in African diasporic Toronto history, and ten detailed maps of different Toronto “ends” (neighbourhoods) that narrate spatial stories of belonging and movement. A thoughtfully arranged library provided space for reflection. The sonic installation completely transformed the atmosphere, with low frequencies and gut-rumbling tones layered with intimate recordings, including one of Winta’s grandmother singing to her father. The sounds felt distant and ominous, yet oddly calming, vibrating like riverbaths in your eardrums.
Multiple domino tables sat beneath strands of embaba (popcorn), a meaningful East African offering often used in buna ceremonies. Here, the popcorn formed a ceiling of scent and memory, holding space above the games below. The domino tables themselves evoked Caribbean traditions. Dominoes, a cultural anchor passed down through generations, is played in barbershops and backyards and is rooted in laughter, debate, and storytelling.
When I asked about the exhibition’s title, WAVES CONT’D, Winta shared that it refers not to a single wave, but to the multiple waves of immigration that have shaped the city. As someone of East African descent, it was powerful to see our stories represented and honoured in this way.
This exhibition feels like an important step toward more community-driven art spaces. It points to what is possible when storytelling, memory, and culture are shared with care and intention. Hopefully, it is just the beginning of more projects that bring different communities together in meaningful ways. As both a tribute to the past and a way to connect in the present, it shows how art can hold space for reflection, conversation, and belonging.
Installation view of WAVES CONT’D at It’s OK* Studios from April 10, 2025 - April 20, 2025. Image by Shadio Hussein.
This Month’s Muse: Ludovic Nkoth
Ludovic Nkoth is a Cameroonian-born visual artist whose evocative, impasto-rich portraits serve as both a personal testament and a collective chronicle. Born in Yaoundé in 1994, he relocated to the United States at the age of 13. Now based in New York City, Nkoth channels the complexities of diasporic identity into bold, textured works that blur the boundaries between memory and materiality.
Educated in the fine arts, Nkoth holds a BFA from the University of South Carolina and an MFA from Hunter College, NYC. His practice draws deeply from his lived experience as a Black immigrant navigating the shifting contours of selfhood, culture, and history in a foreign land. His distinct visual language is characterized by swirling brushstrokes, vivid patches of pink, red, yellow, blue, and brown, and fluid, meandering lines. Nkoth transforms each canvas into a cartography of feeling, where faces emerge as layered and complex maps that boldly reveal the pain, beauty, and quiet resilience of Black life.
Nkoth’s work is steeped in postcolonial allegory and grounded in Cameroonian cultural motifs. It explores themes of displacement, migration, and the duality of belonging and outsiderhood. His figures, often ambiguous and emotive, carry the weight of both familial and global histories while reaching toward futures shaped by solidarity, self-determination, and healing.
At the core of his practice lies an intimate exploration of the Black experience across geographies and generations. Whether referencing transatlantic migration or reflecting on the lingering shadows of colonialism, Nkoth uses the canvas as a space for storytelling where personal narrative and political commentary converge. His paintings do not offer easy answers. Instead, they create space for reflection, honour ancestry, and imagine new forms of presence in a world still grappling with its past.
Through his art, Ludovic Nkoth invites viewers to witness a layered journey that is at once deeply individual and universally resonant.
What is life if not a game (2024) by Ludovic Nkoth | 142 x 203 cm | Oil on canvas.
Upcoming Events & Exhibitions: Don’t Miss These!
Muriel Ahmarani Jaouich: From lore to foresight
On view: May 24, 2025 – July 5, 2025
On view: May 1, 2025 – July 19, 2025
Happening: June 12, 2025 – August 24, 2025
On view: May 22, 2025 – February 27, 2026
Thank you for being part of our community and for supporting Muse & Museums.
Stay tuned for more updates next month!
All the best,
The Muse & Museums Team