70/150: Edward Mitchell Bannister on exhibition in Hidden Blackness

HALIFAX – This is the first exhibition of Edward Mitchell Bannister’s work presented in Canada — 124 years after the artist’s death.

Born in Saint Andrews, New Brunswick, Bannister was an accomplished, 19th Century African Canadian painter known for pastoral landscapes. (Above: Approaching Storm, 1886, oil on canvas, 40 ¹⁄₈ x 60 in.)

In addition to being a respected painter and abolitionist (with his wife Christiana Carteaux Bannister), he won first prize at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia for his painting Under the Oaks (now lost), making him the first African American/Canadian to win a major American art prize.

While Bannister is increasingly revered in the United States, he remains largely unknown in Canada.

Bannister (1828-1901) lived in a segregated Black village at the eastern end of Saint Andrews colloquially referred to as Slabtown. Orphaned at age sixteen, he was left in the care of Harris Hatch, a wealthy lawyer, merchant, and Registrar of Charlotte County, for whom the artist’s mother had worked as a maid.

Racism in New Brunswick

Bannister’s interest in art emerged early and, by his teens, there are accounts of his drawings appearing on the barn doors and fences of Hatch’s farm. Much of his early life was overshadowed by the limited job opportunities and racism Black New Brunswickers faced.

In 1850, Bannister and his brother, William, moved to Boston, where Edward worked as a barber and eventually met Christiana Carteaux, a hairdresser, wigmaker, and entrepreneur of mixed African American and Narragansett heritage. Bannister married Carteaux in 1857, and she helped him become a successful professional artist in Boston and later Providence, Rhode Island.

Organized and circulated by the Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University, and the Black Artists Network of Nova Scotia (BANNS), the exhibition Hidden Blackness: Edward Mitchell Bannister is on view at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia through January 11, 2026.

At the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, here.

Online exhibition, Art Canada Institute, here.

On the African-American Registry, here.

At the Smithsonian American Art Museum here.

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This is No. 70 in 150 Artists, an ongoing series on Canadian artists you should know.