Procession

Come together with facilitators and participants of the African and Caribbean dance and mas camp workshops, musicians, Moko Jumbies and more for a celebratory procession.

This event is part of Carnival Blues, a celebration of Caribbean Carnival through art, movement, and community. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt.: Terrestrial and Aquatic Contemplations of the Caribbean on view at the Art Museum through August 1, 2026.

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Moko Jumbies

Abigail Dingwall is a moko jumbie, steel pan player, and pleasure activist who is deeply passionate about preserving and sharing Caribbean culture. She is drawn to steel pan and moko jumbie, seeing them not only as art forms but also as powerful expressions of resilience, resistance, freedom, and the ability of culture to endure despite colonialism. Inspired by Caribbean traditions that embrace boldness, challenge respectability politics, and centre joy, Abigail believes culture is something to be lived, shared, and celebrated. Through performance and community, she contribute to spaces where people can connect with the richness of Caribbean traditions and experience joy as an essential part of liberation.

Xica Dieffenthaller-Lee Poy is a multidisciplinary performance artist from Trinidad and Tobago, now based in Toronto. An undergraduate student in Integrated Media at OCAD University, her practice spans dance, music, performance, and Caribbean cultural traditions. A lifelong participant in the arts, she has performed on stage since 2007 through acting, dance, music, and traditional Carnival masquerade.

Since 2015, Xica has practiced and performed as a Moko Jumbie in Canada and internationally. For her, stilt walking is more than performance—it is a living expression of Caribbean culture, community, and identity. Rooted in the rich traditions of Carnival, her work combines movement, rhythm, and storytelling, using the Moko Jumbie tradition as a powerful way to stay connected to her heritage while sharing it with diverse audiences.

From West Africa, crossing many languages and cultures to the Caribbean and the Americas, the image of people walking, dancing and playing on sticks a metre or more high has a meaning that transcends the diaspora. Frightening specters to guardian spirit, Mokojumbie binds the lives of people to the unknown. Luna-Rose Walker-Malcolm has had the privilege of honouring her Trinidadian and Tobagonian lineage by dancing on stilts for 24 of her 27 years. She is a child of Caribana, her life has been lived as a flag bearer for Carnival culture and she is proud to share this magical art form with the world.

Curators

Bushra Junaid is a Toronto-based visual artist, author, and curator. Born in Montreal to Jamaican and Nigerian parents and raised in St. John’s, her work explores history, cultural memory, and placemaking. Through archival research and storytelling, she brings overlooked histories and narratives into view.

Junaid has exhibited nationally and in the United States and curated landmark exhibitions and programming centered on Black and Caribbean diasporic experience. This includes What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic (2020) at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in St. John’s. The exhibition traced the province’s historical, economic, and cultural ties to Africa and the Caribbean through the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its afterlives, bringing together contemporary artworks and rare historical materials. Building on this, Junaid wrote and illustrated the award-winning The Possible Lives of W.H., Sailor (2022), which reimagines the life of a 19th century sailor found on the Labrador Coast in the late 1980s and who’s remains are in The Rooms collection. This has sparked renewed scientific investigation into this little-known chapter of Canadian history.

Natalie Wood is an award-winning Trinidadian-born, Tkaronto-based visual and media artist. Her multimedia artwork cohabits the areas of popular culture, education, and historical research. Her practice includes painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, video, and performance, and extends into her work as a curator, educator, and community-based Black queer activist. She is presently completing a PhD at York University, focused on Black Queer Resistance in the performance of Blue Devil mas.

In the past several years she has exhibited her art in both solo and group shows at national and international venues such as A Space Gallery, the AGO, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, Paul Petro Contemporary Art, The Plumb, and Aird Gallery; at Art Fairs such as Montreal’s Plural, Toronto International Art Fair, Art Basel Miami; and her videos at Images Festival, Zong! Global, Inside Out, In Your Pocket, Caribbean Tales Film Festival, and Trinidad Film Festival.

Wood is a founder of the Blue Devil Posse, co-conspirator in the Blue Sea Devil Moko Jumbie Mas Camp, co-founder of the Environmental and Urban Change Black Caucus at York University, an inaugural fellow at Black Lives Matter’s Wildseed Centre for Art and Activism, and, as a GBC Professor she is one of the visionaries of the newly launched Black Futures Initiatives.

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Moko Jumbies, photo: Nila Gupta.