Kenneth Montague is Toronto based art collector, and founder and director of Wedge Curatorial Projects. He began collecting and exhibiting photo-based work that explores black identity and the African diaspora over ten years ago. The Wedge Collection reflects Kenneth’s love and interest in vintage and contemporary photography, painting, video, and design-based work that explores race, gender, identity, community and personal style.

Recent shows curated by Montague include Position As Desired / Exploring African-Canadian Identity: Photographs from the Wedge Collection  at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto (2010), and Always Moving Forward: Contemporary African Photography from the Wedge Collection, a feature exhibition during the CONTACT in Toronto (2010). In 2007, Wedge published FLAVA, a 10-year retrospective of projects, exhibitions and community workshops produced over its first decade.

Montague currently sits on the Photography Curatorial Committee of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Advisory Board of the Ryerson Photography Gallery and Research Centre. He is a frequent lecturer and panelist at international art symposiums, including the Bamako Encounters in Mali, ARCO in Madrid, and Design Caribbean. Montague has been invited speak about collecting photography at The Studio Museum in Harlem, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Portugal.

Becoming: Photographs from the Wedge Collection brings together approximately 110 works by more than 60 artists from North America, the United Kingdom, and throughout the African Diaspora to explore how new configurations of black identity have been shaped by the photographic portrait over the last century.

Works featured in Becoming include:

Malick Sidibé: Malick Sidibe was born into a Peul family in a small village of Mali. He graduated from school in I952. After being noticed for his talent as a draftsman, he was admitted to the School of Sudanese Craftsmen in Bamako from which he graduated in I955.

Viviane Sassen was born in Amsterdam in 1972, and spent her early childhood in Kenya. She began studying photography after going to school for fashion design, where she realized that her interest was not in clothes but in making images. In 1997, she received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Royal Academy in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Since then she has found great success as a fashion photographer, publishing work in avant-garde fashion magazines throughout the world.