Image: Art Gallery of Hamilton
The Art Gallery of Hamilton will present 'Camille Turner: Hometown Queen' from June 26, 2026, to January 3, 2027, marking the first in-depth retrospective of the artist’s nearly 30-year career. Installed on Gallery Level 1 and offered with admission, the exhibition traces a practice that has moved across performance, installation, photography, video and sculpture while remaining focused on racial and social politics. The gallery describes Turner’s work as a critical examination of enduring systems of oppression in Canada and abroad.
Turner, who was born in Jamaica and raised in Hamilton, has built a body of work that the gallery says alternates between starkness, poetry, irony and humour. The exhibition text centers one of Turner’s own statements about the erasure of Black life from the Canadian nation, framing that concern as a guiding thread through her scholarly research and artistic production. In the artist’s words, she explores the “mechanisms” through which this disappearance has been achieved, including historical omissions, social exclusion and the literal burying of evidence of Canada’s Black past.
The exhibition brings together foundational works such as 'Hometown Queen' and 'Miss Canadiana' with more recent large-scale video installations informed by Turner’s research into Newfoundland’s ties to the transatlantic slave trade. Across 6,000 square feet of media, the retrospective includes the interactive 'Afronautic Research Lab', audio walking tours and archival documentation. According to the gallery, these components reveal recurring conceptual and narrative threads in Turner’s anti-racist practice.
A new work, 'Worthy', will premiere in the exhibition as a multi-media installation. The gallery says the piece explores Turner’s father’s childhood experience of growing up on the grounds of a prominent Jamaican business that had formerly been a slave plantation, connecting personal memory to the continuing legacy of slavery across generations and geographies. The exhibition materials present the work as part of Turner’s broader effort to confront histories marked by erasure and systemic silencing.
'Camille Turner: Hometown Queen' is organized by the Art Gallery of Hamilton with the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and Stamps Gallery, University of Michigan. It is co-curated by Melissa Bennett, senior curator at AGH; David Diviney, chief curator at AGNS; and Srimoyee Mitra, director of Stamps Gallery. Touring support is provided by Canada Council for the Arts. The exhibition is scheduled to travel after Hamilton, with dates listed for the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax from February 27 to May 24, 2027, and for Stamps Gallery in Ann Arbor from September 17 to December 11, 2027.
The AGH Shop is also offering a related catalogue, priced at $45 CAD, that reproduces more than 70 images of Turner’s work and includes essays by artists, curators and scholars. The publication highlights the range of the retrospective, from the title work and 'Miss Canadiana' to 'Worthy'. The gallery’s exhibition page identifies Turner as an artist and scholar whose work is grounded in Afrofuturism and historical research and notes that she lives and works in Los Angeles.
