Joshua Glover - Part 1

So, I'm Quentin Vercetty, I am a black artist from the City of Toronto, specifically from Rexdale, Etobicoke. I have created the monument that will commemorate Joshua Glover's life. So,  Joshua Glover was a person who was once enslaved in America and came to Canada and lived in Etobicoke. 

And so I knew about Joshua Glover's story as a young man. My mom actually knew of his name and told me to look him up as a punishment to know that there were other people who looked like me who resided in that neighbourhood before me, you know, black people who made something of themselves. 

Yeah, the thing the really stunned me about Joshua Glover was the way people spoke about him, his character as being someone who was very giving, someone who was very caring and someone who also went through a lot of different transitions. And at a certain point in time he had to imagine himself beyond his circumstances. And I felt it was a perfect mirror to my own life. Where as a youngster, specifically around the time my mom told me about Joshua Glover, I wasn't making the best decisions with my life. I was hanging around the wrong people and, you know, I ended up seeing a lot of my friends going to prison and some, quite a few of them actually died. And it took me to go through certain life trials to really figure out my purpose and where was I trying to go, you know.

And so, with Joshua Glover's story, his legacy was his personality. He was more than just being an enslaved, once upon a time enslaved African. He was more than that but actually a community member and someone who was a part of the community. And so this is why you see him clutching his books because he was someone who liked to read. But beyond liking to read he also liked to build things. So he would read how to build things. He would constantly become more learned and more skilled in how he can contribute to the community. 

And so that’s really what I wanted to leave people with. For me it's like: if you are a person of upstanding character, there's no limits on what you can achieve in this life.