Quick Pick — Ekow Nimako In Kelowna

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Ekow Nimako, “Asamando” (detail), 2022, LEGO (photo courtesy of the Dunlop Art Gallery)

If you're heading to Kelowna, British Columbia this summer, swing by the Kelowna Art Gallery to take in Toronto-based artist Ekow Nimako's Building Black Civilizations: Journey of 2,000 Ships, on now through Aug. 24, 2025. 

The installation, which features half a million black Lego bricks, has been incredibly popular in other Canadian cities, including Calgary, Regina and Edmonton. 

And while the medium (plastic Lego bricks) may seem like stuff for kids, the subject matter is for everyone. Each sculpture, which takes between 50 and 800 hours to contruct, explores a fourteenth century sea voyage of Mansa Abu Bakr II, predecessor of Mansa Musa, ruler of the ancient Mali Empire.

“According to legends, Abu Bakr II was an intrepid explorer, who abdicated his throne and took 2,000 ships on an expedition into the Atlantic, but was never to return or to be heard from again,”  according to the news release. 

“Some accounts suggest the massive fleet reached as far as the Americas, but where they went beyond this is still unknown.” 

Nimako started making Lego art in 2012 and shortly after that, he began using only black Legos. The reasons were many, he has said. For one, there are more black Legos than any other. 

“I think there’s something that is so sophisticated, something that is just expansive about black, and then there’s also something that is dark and sometimes foreboding or haunting about black. It has so much spectrum to it,” he told CNN in 2023.

And, he said in the CNN story, “the beings that he creates are "unequivocally Black. Despite their features or what I may do with them, they’ll always be regarded as Black.” ■

Ekow Nimako's Building Black Civilizations: Journey of 2,000 Ships, is at the Kelowna Art Gallery now through Aug. 24, 2025.

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