The project was selected through a Public Call for Black Artists and Designers by the City of Toronto in April 2023. The park design is informed by a community-led vision to celebrate and commemorate the history, presence, diversity, and future of Black communities in the Moss Park neighbourhood. The broader architectural design team includes Abel Omeiza, Ogbe David Ogbe, Chukwuebuka Stephen Idafum and Folusho Afun-Ogidan, with Jane Rosenberg & Studio taking the lead as landscape architect.

Inspired by the histories of Black migration that have shaped Toronto, the space will feature a significant public art and design component, including three large bronze cowrie shells – an element often recurring in Oluseye’s work. Other features will include cornrow-inspired pathways, a stone water feature and seating areas corresponding to the various regions of the world from which Black Canadians have migrated, including Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean.

“In a neighbourhood with a significant population of Black and Indigenous residents, my vision for the park draws on the shared cultural symbolism of water, cowrie shells, corn rows and Sankofa to trace the global migrations of Black people to Tkaronto. As an immigrant who arrived in Canada 21 years ago this is a full-circle moment for me,” explains Oluseye.

From divination, to migration, to births, to burials, to celebrations and beyond, water as a pathway and as a tool is an essential cultural element to both Black and Indigenous people. The North East corner of the central seating area will host a stone water inspired by the calabash, a West African vessel used for storing water. “Water no get enemy” will be engraved on its brim – a well-known lyric by Fela Kuti, highlighting the importance of water to our survival via the nourishment of our physical and spiritual being.

Building on the symbolism of water, the proposed design imagines the park as an ocean or major waterway. In the centre of this ocean – at the heart of the park – sits an island with three large bronze cowrie shells reaching up to almost six feet tall.

The cowrie is found in oceans across the globe and has been used for centuries as a symbol of Black pride, spirituality, fertility, wealth, beauty and ancestry. Many Asian and Indigenous cultures also value the shell for its decorative and spiritual use. Here, each cowrie will represent a region of the world that is important in the narrative of Black migration to Canada – Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean. At the point where the cowries meet, there will be a compass engraved into the ground to show the NWSE coordinates.

Flowing from the compass are three braided pathways that take visitors on a journey to the secondary seating areas in the park. The criss-cross pattern of the trails is inspired by cornrows, which are, of course, central to Black traditions. They are an expression of pride and beauty and were used to conceal maps to freedom for those escaping enslavement.

The braided paths will lead to the secondary seating areas in the park, which will also correspond to the regions of origin where Black Canadians have migrated from. As visitors travel along the braided path to the corresponding region of the world, they will notice bronze inlays engraved with dates commemorating the historical arrivals of Toronto’s Black populations.

The braided paths will meander through the park like the winding curves of the Sankofa symbol, which contains an important lesson about “learning from the past to build the future”. As the braided path approaches the seating area, it will rise from the ground and evolve into a circular bench that frames the seated area. Hence, the path becomes the bench, and the journey leads to a resting place: home at the end of a long migration.

The final element is a plaque, in each seating area, which offers a brief explanation of each of the migration milestones indicated along the path. To and from, back and forth, the cowries and braided pathways take visitors on a discovery of Black Torontonian history.