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Public Art Profile

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Artist: Emkay Adjei-Manu
Category: Temporary Public Art Projects
Address: 8 Nelson Street West Brampton, ON (only viewable outside of the building)

This public art installation is part​ of the Convenient Ar​t Gallery. This exhibition space is funded by the City of Brampton and is part of the Exhibition Support Program. This is an initiative designed to support local artists by providing opportunities to exhibit their artworks.

Born 2 Fly / Too Fly is an analogue collage series that explores Black girlhood through the intimate, transformative relationships between Black girls. The work considers friendship as both a literal and metaphorical fabric, one woven through care, imagination, protection, and shared becoming. I am interested in these bonds as sacred spaces where Black girls create freedom, cultivate joy, and make themselves visible through one another.

Drawing from research on Black girlhood alongside personal memory and collective storytelling, the series asks: How do Black girls survive because of each other? How do frie​ndship and intimacy become practices of refuge in a world that often renders Black girls vulnerable to violence and invisibility? What forms of expression, play, and world-building emerge from these relationships, and how can collage hold those histories materially?

The collages are rooted in memories of the artists’ childhood - of wandering, imagining, and creating expansive worlds with their best friend. Those moments of play, pleasure, and mutual recognition continue to shape how they understand Black girlhood as a site of possibility rather than limitation. By incorporating shared anecdotes and conversations with people reflecting on their experiences of Black girlhood, the work expands beyond autobiography to honor the collective ways Black girls have found safety, love, and liberation in one another.

"Through analogue collage, Born 2 Fly / Too Fly pieces together fragments of memory, history, and imagination to celebrate the tenderness, resilience, and radical beauty of Black girls' friendships. The series positions these relationships not as peripheral, but as essential archives of care, spaces where Black girls have always learned how to dream, to survive, and ultimately, to fly."

Emkay Adjei-Manu

image of Born 2 Fly / Too Fly, 2026

Emkay Adjei-Manu (b.1996) is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and facilitator whose practice explores Afro-diasporic queer and trans cultures through myth, memory, and sound. Through their primary medium, analogue collage, their practice serves as a critical method for crafting narratives that reflect Black queer and trans ways of being, knowing, and feeling. They work with archival and found images, ephemera, texts, and sounds.

Influenced by Black trans feminist traditions, Emkay’s work examines Black queer and trans life as a site of memory-work, ceremony, and ritual, further engaging questions of archive, relation, and the practices through which worlds are imagined otherwise. Their work has been exhibited and supported by Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Ken Seiling Waterloo Museum, Factory Media Centre, Nia Centre for the Arts, McMaster Museum of Art, Xpace Cultural Centre, and published in Black Canadian print magazines such as PITCH magazine and 1919 MAG. They were selected as an RBC × The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery emerging artist and a YTB Gallery Artist Fellow. They are currently completing an artist residency with Whippersnapper Gallery