Erasure Art Collective is an interdisciplinary arts group committed to researching and reinterpreting archival texts using visual, poetic, and performative erasure. Founded in 2022 by Shauntay Grant and Tyshan Wright, the collective’s inaugural project—called BLACKOUT—reimagines slave ads using ‘erasure’, or ‘blackout’, a form of poetry created by erasing words from an existing text to create a visual poem. Grant and Wright began collaborating together in 2017 when they created Abeng—an artwork developed for the Canadian Museum of Immigration’s national group exhibition Canada Day 1. Shauntay Grant is a poet, playwright, children’s author and interdisciplinary artist with roots in Nova Scotia’s historic Black communities. A former poet laureate for the City of Halifax, she’s been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Awards and a recipient of the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Writing and Publishing from the Canada Council for the Arts. Grant curated the Dalhousie Art Gallery exhibition Stitched Stories: The Family Quilts in 2016, and more recently the Nova Scotia spotlight for the Pan African Heritage Museum’s virtual gallery. Tyshan Wright is regarded as a ‘Keeper of the Heritage’ of the Jamaican Maroons (Jamaican Gleaner). He’s been shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award and an Artist-In-Residence Fellow at Slavery North. His work has been acquired by the National Gallery of Canada and the Nova Scotia Art Bank, and exhibited at galleries and museums including the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Confederation Centre for the Arts.