When David Woods volunteered at the north-end library in Halifax in the 1980s, one of the women he ran into regularly there used to tell him about how her mother used to paint.

And although she used to bring this up frequently, she didn't provide a lot of details.

When Woods was putting together an exhibition of Black Nova Scotian art in the late 1990s, he thought back to those conversations with Ruth Johnson. He then went over to her house to see some of the paintings her mother, Edith MacDonald…