Anique J. Jordan

Anique Jordan is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, writer, curator and entrepreneur known for her work in photography, sculpture, and performance. Her artwork challenges historical narratives, reinterpreting the past in order to develop a vision of the future. Among her themes are black history in Canada, working-class communities, the relationship between the country's black and Indigenous peoples, and the work black people have put into explaining and fighting against racism.

Biography Anique Jordan's family immigrated from Trinidad. She was born and grew up in Scarborough. She received a B.A. in International Development at York University, Toronto (2011) and a Masters of Environmental Studies at York University (2015), a Latin America and Caribbean Studies Graduate Diploma, again from York University (2015) and a Business and the Environment Graduate Diploma from the Schulich School of Business, Toronto (2015) as well as an Entrepreneurship Certificate, at the Schulich Centre for Executive Education, Toronto (2015).

In 2012, she was gifted a family archive from a cousin which told of her family's Caribbean roots. She used it as the basis for her Masters thesis at York (2015) titled Possessed: A Genealogy of Black Women, Hauntology and Art as Survival and is writing a book with that title. Possessed was based on the family history of a particular group of Black loyalists, who became freed people of colour, in the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago. It is an autobiographical account that reflects a larger historical context. All that she knew were the stories she found on television in the form of a joke or as being enslaved as in the violent program Roots.

In 2015, Jordan was invited to be one of 10 black artists accompanying a Jean-Michel Basquiat show at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The work she created was of her mother and elder aunts wearing uniforms for the war of 1812. Her work was praised as offering an alternate view to Harris's version.

In 2017, she was included in a panel discussion accompanying the opening of Position as Required, a show at the Art Gallery of Windsor and in a show titled The Arts Against Post-Racialism: Strengthening Resistance Against Contemporary Canadian Blackface, spearheaded at McGill University, Montreal, for which she created Scream Café, a performance in which audience members were invited to participate and witness an act of audible or silent screaming. In 2020, she curated an exhibition called Three-Thirty for the Contact Photography Festival in Toronto about cultural landmarks in Scarborough’s Malvern neighbourhood and ideas of power, land and agencies that define it. She titled the exhibition Three-Thirty to play off the after-school programs on which many kids in Scarborough rely. In the summer of 2020, inspired by a social media post following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police officers, she created We Have Done Enough, a installation for the Nia Centre for the Arts that challenged the viewer to consider the significant work that Black people have put into explaining and fighting against racism. She is a member of the collective Black Wimmin Artists (BWA) which she founded, a network and resource sharing platform of Black women artists and arts workers across Canada, begun in 2016. A 2015 photo work by Jordan, Sixth Company Battalion – The Aunties (1/3) is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Guelph. Mas' at 94 Chestnut is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

In 2024, Anique Jordan presented a solo exhibition of new work at Patel Brown Gallery in Toronto, Ontario, titled Underbelly. The solo exhibition closed with a conversation between Jordan and Fred Moten, moderated by Dr. Evelyn Amponsah.

Private life In 2019, she was mentioned as one of five Canadians bringing diversity to Pop culture in "Fashion magazine".