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Born and raised in Harlem, June Clark was forced to relocate in 1968 during the Vietnam War to the city in Treaty 13 territory known as Toronto. It was here, following her initial separation from family and community, that she commenced her trajectory as an artist with a camera she had been gifted. Her approach to image-making that began in Toronto has since brought her back home as Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem and taken her to Paris for extended periods.

For many people of my generation and younger, exposure to Clark’s practice arrived eight years ago through Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971–1989, the inaugural exhibition curated by Wanda Nanibush at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Formative Triptych (1989) literally shone in that show with its the three duratrans transparencies in lightboxes that each paired images with typeset texts reflecting on moments from Clark’s childhood. Instead of making photographs for this series, Clark utilized extant photographs as material, including two snapshots from her youth and one portrait of iconic blues singer Bessie Smith by Carl Van Vechten.

Witness is both noun and verb. Positioned directly after Clark’s name to comprise the title of her current exhibition, the word seems to adopt the former sense with reference to the artist as its literal embodiment. Viewers, however, make manifest the latter meaning as they enter the Power Plant and move through a survey spanning three decades of her work.