Camille Turner: Hometown Queen is the first in-depth retrospective of the artist’s nearly 30-year career. This exhibition traces her trajectory, from foundational works such as Hometown Queen and Miss Canadiana to recent large-scale video installations that draw on her research into Newfoundland’s ties to the transatlantic slave trade. Across 6000 square feet of media—including the interactive Afronautic Research Lab, audio walking tours, and archival documentation—the exhibition unveils her persistent conceptual and narrative threads on anti-racism.
The retrospective premieres Worthy, a new immersive multi-media installation exploring her father’s childhood experience of growing up on the grounds of one of Jamaica’s most profitable businesses, which emerged from what was formerly a slave plantation. Worthy illuminates the enduring impact of slavery across geographies and generations, positioned through her father’s vital voice in this living history.
Through her work, Turner confronts histories marked by erasure, deliberate burying, and systemic silencing, and yet she actively forges a hopeful path forward. She creates spaces of contemplation and imaginative possibility, inviting reflection on what might emerge—for herself, for her father and family, and for generations still to come.
Curated By: Melissa Bennett, Senior Curator, Art Gallery of Hamilton | David Diviney, Chief Curator, AGNS | Srimoyee Mitra, Director, University of Michigan, STAMPS Gallery
Image: Camille Turner, Afronautic Research Lab : Newfoundland Edition, 2019 Video (6:19 minutes : colour : stereo), 1/3. Purchased with funds provided by the Charles Anthony Law and Jane Shaw Law Charitable Trust, 2021
About the Artist
Camille Turner is an artist and scholar whose practice spans a variety of media including social practice, performance, video, photography, installation, and sculpture. Grounded in Afrofuturism and historical research, she reimagines colonial archives and confronts the entanglement of what is now Canada in the transatlantic trade of Africans, envisioning liberated futures shaped by Black knowledge, memory, and imagination.
Born in Jamaica in 1960, Turner was raised in Hamilton and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She was the Provost’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto and completed a PhD at York University with a research-creation project closely connected to her artistic practice. In 2025, Turner was featured in the São Paulo Biennial and was Artist-in-Residence at the Fine Arts Center of University of Massachusetts Amherst in partnership with Slavery North.
Turner has held solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally and is the recipient of the 2025 Exhibition of the Year award for Otherworld (Art Museum at the University of Toronto) from Galeries Ontario / Ontario Galleries (GOG) and the 2022 Artist Prize from the Toronto Biennial of Art. Her work is held in major public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Canada Council Art Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Museum London, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Wedge Collection, and The Rooms. She is represented in Canada by Central Art Garage.
