Little Burgundy – Evolving Montreal

After Griffintown (Robert Walker, 2019-2020) and Hochelaga (Joannie Lafrenière 2020-2023), the McCord Stewart Museum has selected Andrew Jackson for the third photographic commission in its Evolving Montreal series. The Montreal-based British-Canadian artist’s research-creation project focuses on Little Burgundy.

Andrew Jackson will explore the urban, social and cultural transformations of the neighbourhood known as the cradle of Montreal’s Black Anglophone community. He is particularly interested in the themes of family, transnational migration, displacement, trauma and collective memory. As an artist expressing himself through documentary photography, he has an impressive track record. His work has been published in many major publications, including the L. A. Times, The Guardian and Stern magazine, and is held in prestigious collections in the UK and the USA.

Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson is a British-Canadian photographer and artist who has worked primarily in Montreal, Canada and the UK. He is an associate lecturer at the London College of Communication, teaching in the MA Documentary & Photojournalism program and has previously served on the advisory board of the Photo Ethics Centre.

His practice is developed at the intersection of photography and text and, most recently, focuses on notions of family, transnational migration, displacement, trauma and collective memory.

Artist statement

‘’ As philosopher Henri Lefebvre might have attested, our built environments exist as much within the imagined spaces of our minds, which shape and define them, as they do within the physical spaces surrounding us.

I am particularly interested in how the combination of race, place and power can help mould what scholar George Lipsitz calls the racialization of space and the spatialization of race.

When city spaces, such as Little Burgundy, are designated as Black Spaces, there are profound implications for Black occupants. This is especially true in North America, where historically, in non-Black minds at least, Black Spaces have not existed as places of acceptance or celebration of difference. Rather, they have been linked to notions of failure – notions that become catalysts for urban renewal, gentrification and the ensuing erasure of Black communities.

The oldest Black settlement in Montreal, in what would eventually become Little Burgundy, was home to many Black-owned businesses and a Black middle class. Yet it wasn’t until the media began to highlight perceived criminality in the area, in the post-expropriation 1980s, that it became culturally accepted as a Black Space within the city, regardless of the Black community being in a minority there.

In light of this, my aim with this commission is to explore the duality of the conceptualized Black Space and how it paradoxically exists simultaneously as a space of and as a space of shelter, belonging and intimacy.

This is so powerful that long after Black residents have left, involuntarily or otherwise, they continue to make the pilgrimage of return.’’

– Andrew Jackson

Evolving Montreal

Evolving Montreal is a series of commissions initiated by the McCord Stewart Museum to support documentary photography projects that capture the transformation of neighbourhoods from unique points of view. After Robert Walker and Joannie Lafrenière, who photographed Griffintown and Hochelaga-Maisonneuve respectively, the Museum has selected Andrew Jackson for the third installment of the series.

For his commission, Jackson chose to document the changes occurring in Little Burgundy, considered the cradle of Montreal’s Black anglophone community. Over a period of about two years, the photographer recorded some of the key sites and individuals that compose Little Burgundy’s Black community today. Jackson’s personal interpretation of the commission extends the purview of Evolving Montreal by exploring the notion of neighbourhood as a space that is at once physical and conceptual.