Last year, Edmonton textile and street artist AJA Louden was hired by the Oilers to design a team logo for their Black Futures Month celebration. The collaboration led to a bold and colourful tapestry paying homage to the team’s history of Black players — Anson Carter, George Laraque and Darnell Nurse, to name a few — through Black futurism and hip hop-inspired design. When Louden dropped off the piece at Rogers Place, he was told that Grant Fuhr happened to be in the building. They met briefly. Louden asked what it was like to be under the microscope as the NHL’s first Black superstar. Fuhr’s advice: focus on the game. Louden never forgot it.
As one of the most prominent Black artists working in Edmonton, and in the public creating massive murals, Louden often feels the burden of representation. Fuhr’s advice was both calming and motivating. “What I took from that was that I just need to stay focused on the craft,” he says. “That my sense of purpose is making meaningful work and honouring the opportunities that I have by showing up.”
A year later, Louden returned to his meeting with the Hall of Famer for the inspiration of Brick Wall — an interactive mixed media portrait of Fuhr, based on his rookie card, for a group exhibition at Latitude 53. Curated by co-executive director Michelle Campos Castillo, Oily: on fandom uses the Oilers — not the team itself, but the culture around them — as a lens into civic identity, obsession, protest and pride.
The idea for the exhibition, on now until Aug. 2, sprung from a short film by Métis filmmaker Conor McNally, made 10 years ago, after Connor McDavid was drafted to dig the team out of its years-long rut. What begins as a fan’s hopeful monologue morphs into a surreal, Seventh Seal-style spiral of obsession and dispossession. “(McNally’s) film introduced this parasocial relationship fans can have with players — almost like they’re modern-day gladiators,” Campos Castillo says. “And that layered idea of devotion, delusion, class and gentrification really informed the entire show.”
It set the tone for the rest of the exhibit: some pieces are satirical, some confrontational, and others, like Brick Wall (a nod to hockey slang for an unbeatable goalie) are purely devotional. Similarly, Maria Buffalo’s beadwork and archival display about the Hobbema Oilers — a former amateur hockey team in the town now called Maskwacis — reflect the joy and team pride many Indigenous Albertans feel for the team.
On the other hand, Emily Riddle’s written work, printed on oil drop-shaped sheets, wrestles with fandom as both a source of joy and complicity in gentrification. Veronica Fuentes’s Stop the Sweeps, a protest print circulated widely in 2023 during downtown encampment evictions, takes a more direct aim at the Ice District development.
The arena may have re-energized the city’s core for some, but for many others it has meant displacement, shuttered services and soaring rents. “I have resentment,” says Campos Castillo, reflecting on how public money continues to fuel a franchise while arts spaces, shelters and support services struggle to survive.
“A lot of (Edmontonians) have complicated feelings about the team,” adds Campos Castillo, who moved to Edmonton from El Salvador in the early ’90s, just after the franchise’s golden era ended. Despite her mixed feelings for the team, she remembers wearing her Oilers shirt proudly around Toronto when she briefly lived there. “It was about identity — about being from Edmonton.”
That sentiment was visible at the Latitude 53 opening, which drew a bigger crowd than usual, she says. It’s no surprise: the team’s recent back-to-back Stanley Cup runs have rekindled a sense of collective nostalgia and civic pride not seen since the ’80s. “One of the things that’s interesting about a city like Edmonton,” says Louden, “the spirit of the city seems to track to the team. When the team is doing well, the energy is palpable.”
The Oilers fandom may be messy. But Oily proves it’s also deeply meaningful.
See Oily: on fandom at Latitude 53 until August 2.
