Buseje Bailey

Buseje Bailey photographed by Liz Ikiriko.

One of the largest concerns about researching visual women artists of African descent is the fact that America is considered the center of the art world for finding them. Even the very nature of this blog is the assumption that BWMA highlights only African American artists. Black women have been making art for a long time in different parts of the world, especially in Canada where the absence is extremely felt. Unfortunately, up in the north, it is African Americans that are heavily promoted. For example, Kenyan-American Wangechi Mutu and African American Mickalene Thomas are the only Black women artists who have had solo shows at AGO-- a premiere gallery in Toronto. Yet no Afro-Canadian Black woman has had that opportunity. Why are the curators willfully ignoring their own local talent?

"When there isn't a space, you make it yourself," Buseje Bailey said to Susan Douglas in When I Breathe There is a Space: An Interview with Buseje Bailey. Photograph is Bailey in front of her mural Tender Mercies, 1988, Canadian Artists Network: Black Artists In Action Archives.

Enter Buseje Bailey, co-founder of the Diasporic African Wimmins Art (DAWA) Collective. DAWA is responsible for the first exhibition of Canadian Black women's art in the highly prolific Black Wimmen: When and Where We Enter that traveled throughout Canada in 1989. 


Buseje Bailey is a Jamaican born, Canada based multimedia artist. She obtained a BFA at York University in Toronto, Canada and a MFA at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax.

“I tend to use my art to say that we are here, and we intend to stay here. We live here, we work here, and we die here,” Buseje Bailey said to Susan Douglas in the article, When I Breathe There Is a Space.

Bailey’s multidisciplinary practice of video, photography, sculpture, and painting have a dignified storytelling approach. On the surface, the spirituality content comes clear in her strong visuals containing Black women bodies as valiant figures worthy of presence and space. The interaction between imagery and text language deliver powerful messages that expresses the need to not have to comprehend to viewer the undeniable validity of existence.

In addition to art making, Bailey is a known advocate for making Black women visual artists heard, especially in Canada where the silence (the major galleries excluding them) remains questioned and challenged.

Untitled, mixed media, 1998, Boxes Beyond Borders.

Untitled, mixed media, 1998, Boxes Beyond Borders.

Bailey has exhibited all over Canada primarily in Nova Scotia, Quebec, Calgary, and Toronto and was cited as an Outstanding Black Canadian Artist by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2018.

Buseje photographed by Liz Ikiriko.

Last year, Bailey participated alongside many other Canadian Black women and non-binary artists and curators for The Feast, a performative dinner held at the AGO Toronto.