Toronto Arts Council Grant Projects
The Toronto Arts Council has partnered with The City of Toronto for on "Animating Toronto Streets." This multidisciplinary grant program will fund public art projects that take place in the public Right-Of-Way during ArtworxTO.
Creation Story Mural
Toronto Council Fire Native Cultural Centre with artist Phil Cote, supported by Canadian Heritage.
The Toronto Council Fire Creation Story mural which will be displayed on the Parliament Street-facing wall of 439 Dundas Street East. It is connected to the Centre’s Spirit Garden Project which will open at Nathan Phillips Square in 2023. The 1,925 square foot Indigenous cultural space and the mural will honour our Residential School Survivors and our cultural traditions. Including the Turtle (Our Mother) and clan symbols, the colourful mural depicts a rich, vibrant and living culture.
Augmented Reality in the Village of Islington
Arts Etobicoke with Albedo Informatics. Lead Artists: Susan Blight, Philip Cote, Colette Murray, Luke Garwood, and Community Artists: Ashley Beerdat, Karun Ramani, Shabnam Afrand, Aitak Sorahitalab, Natalie Very B, and Akshata Naik.
Ten artists have combined AR technology and their unique storytelling to bring an Indigenous and New Canadian perspective to the pre-existing historical murals. Arts Etobicoke will be hosting tours, bringing live music, and providing local snacks to enhance the AR experiences.
Rewind/Forward
Rewind/Forward is a two-part public art exhibition calling attention to the invisibility of the city’s soundsystem and bass music cultures. The project was conceptualized and developed by Bonjay’s Alanna Stuart, a Caribbean-Canadian music artist, curator and researcher, as a means to stimulate conversation on how we typically engage with the Jamaican cultural forms and legacies we’ve inherited
Rewind/Forward features monumental portraits, taken by Jamaican-Canadian photographer Jorian Charlton, of five notable Toronto selectors (DJs) and soundsystem owners: Heather "Live Wire" Bubb-Clarke, Tasha Rozez, Ace Dillinger, Nino Brown, and Bambii. Together, their individual experiences offer a fuller view of local bass music culture
Cacao: A Venezuelan Lament
Victoria Mata with Cacao Collective
Cacao | A Venezuelan Lament is a new live performance work about belonging, land and the preservation of traditions. Drawing on twelve years of community-based fieldwork, this polylingual and multidisciplinary dance and theatre production offers timely insight into the complex lived realities of Venezuela’s cacao farmers. Creator, Director and Choreographer Victoria Mata roots her vocabulary and aesthetics in the tensions between remembering and forgetting, and in a dynamic dialogue between Afro-Venezuelan genres and contemporary expressions of dance and music. Premiering in 2022.
Photo by Zahra Saleki
Healing Corridor and Playable Road Mural
Monica Wickeler, Nyle Miigizi Johnston, The Laneway Project
A collaboration between Nyle Miigizi Johnston (Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation), Monica Wickeler (Luxembourg) and The Laneway Project. The project transformed two neglected public laneways into beautiful, welcoming shared neighbourhood spaces.
View the Healing Corridor and Youth Murals and Playable Road Mural on the Interactive Map.
Indigenous Community Map
North York Arts with Lead Artist Lindsay Lickers, and Advisors Aqua Nibii Waawaaskone, Veronica Johnny, Joanne Dallaire
NYA is developing an illustrated community map that highlights Indigenous stories in North York. This includes changes to the environment (e.g. lost rivers), Indigenous history, cultural representation of Indigenous nations that have lived or traveled through this area, interwoven with storytelling and imagery. Programming will include workshops, teachings, public arts and tours. Supported by Toronto Arts Council’s Animating Toronto Streets.
Laneway ART-ery Dances
An AR dance performance taking place in 3 very different alleyways in Toronto. Choreographed and directed by Karen and Allen Kaeja, Laneway ART-ery Dances invites audiences to pause in the back alleys we usually hurry through, and to be present with each other, artists, and the space we share.
Making with Place - in movements of care and community
A public art project series of SKETCH Working Arts, builds on its community-engaged design that launched installations in 2020.
Queering Place - Queer, Trans and 2S artists create digital stories and earth art with city-wide partners in the four directions of the medicine wheel (May-Sept); Reconstructions of Home – a wandering presents an immersive AR/Audio walk under the Gardiner Expressway celebrating the creativity and scholarship of Toronto’s homeless communities, (co-presented with The Bentway)(April-August); and My Public Living Room presents -Toronto Mans Reflection: The Lokey Care Booth at the Maria A. Shchuka Library (May-Sept).
Projects consider the complexities of place, and animate and archive, hidden, forgotten or invisibilized environmental and social histories, to innovate models of care and community. Learn more about these installations at www.sketch.ca/publicart and follow @sketchpublicart.
Memory Work
Memory Work Collective (Rajni Perera, Tala Kamea, Naomi Skwarna, Omii Thompson, Macy Siu, Robert Bolton, Emily Woudenberg, Erica Whyte, Jac Sanscartier, and Sydney Allen-Ash)
Situated at the Strachan Gate entrance to The Bentway, Memory Work is a speculative monument that commemorates Toronto’s potential. Twelve embellished photographic portraits depict members of a future-fictional movement, the Mothers of Invention, honouring their roles in nurturing Toronto’s transition to a regenerative economy. A work of foresight, Memory Work extrapolates from signals of change and glimmers of hope. The individuals photographed are luminary figures, present-day seeds of the characters they portray. An audio tour, available by calling a toll-free number, offers an additional narrative layer and a portal to the possible city.
Memory Work is co-presented by From Later and The Bentway with support from the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival as part of ArtworxTO: Toronto’s Year of Public Art 2021–2022. Additional support by the Canada Council for the Arts, City of Toronto, and the Toronto Arts Council.
On view at The Bentway, May 1, 2022 - April 30, 2023
Hybrid
Hybrid is a Skate Urbanism project. Skate urbanism recognizes skateboarding as a positive part of urban life and seeks to integrate skateboarding into public spaces. Hybrid invites Torontonians to appreciate the art of skateboarding and to question what it is we want our shared spaces to be for.
Artist Pierre Descamps created three sculpture designs responding to the architectural context of sites in Bordeaux, Malmö, and Toronto. Three designs were created to be simultaneously exhibited and interpreted in all three cities. The shapes through inclinations or sequence of surfaces imply body movement, inviting the public to explore and play with the sculptures, offering an opportunity for citizens to reclaim their role in these spaces – not simply as consumers of art, but as artists themselves.
This project is a collaboration with BOARD-O (Leo Valls and Grégoire Grange), Skate Malmö (Gustav Eden), and Public Visualization Lab (Immony Mèn and Ariel Stagni).
Skate and explore all three Toronto sculptures, and use #hybridskatesculpture2022 to share your art. Find more at www.hybridsculptures.com
Hybrid is on view August 19, 2022 – October 15, 2022
Nave
Toronto Biennial of Art with Camille Turner
Following the success of its 2019 exhibition, The Shoreline Dilemma, the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art will be a city-wide, multi-venue free contemporary art event, running from March 26 - June 5, 2022. Biennial curators have commissioned Jamaican-Canadian artist, Camille Turner, to present a site-specific installation, a free artist publication, and a series of public walks, talks and workshops exploring the Black histories of Toronto and Canada.
Photo by Camille Turner, Afronautic Research Lab: Newfoundland 2019, still from video cinematographer/editor Brian Ricks
Nil:Nil
Studio F Minus (Mitchell F Chan, Michael Simon, and Bradley Hindson), commissioned by the Bentway Conservancy
A kinetic multimedia installation, Nil:Nil is a portrait of play in pandemic times. As our work and play move online, our human interactions become subject to a comprehensive enframing. In Nil:Nil, technology allows the game to go on, overcoming lockdowns and closures, and also ensures that the result is never in doubt.
Photo by Jack Landau
Place Settings
Critical Distance Centre with curator Noa Bronstein, with projects by Morris Lum, Karen Tam with Tea Base, and Reel Asian, jes sachse, Reza Nik, Farrah Miranda and Suzanne Morrissette with Alia Weston, Lisa Myers, and Ayumi Goto
Place Settings is a large-scale, durational project that considers how food functions to connect and disrupt. Focusing specifically on the intersections of food, public space, and architecture, Place Settings points to formal and informal structures that offer forms of nourishment, be they physical, emotional, social, or political.
Two x 30
Michael Caldwell with Robbie Grunwald, Alana Elmer, Aria Evans, Syreeta Hector, Karen Kaeja, Benjamin Landsberg, Pulga Muchochoma, David Norsworthy, Atri Nundy, Nivedha Ramalingam, Takako Segawa, Roberto Soria, Heidi Strauss, Irma Villafuerte, East End Arts, Jamii, Lakeshore Arts.
"Two x 30" is a series of thirty duet performances in summer 2022, exploring the inextricable link between our collective unconscious patterns of movement and our environment. Walking past each other on the sidewalk develops into an intricate physical conversation, highlighting the beautiful complexity of human interaction and communication.
Photo by Zhenya Cerneacov
Public Works
SummerWorks with artists Rodney Diverlus, Syrus Marcus Ware, Switch Collective, Action Hero, Mia & Eric, Mark Reinhart
Artists explore possibilities for the public realm through four large-scale projects synthesizing outdoor installation, performance, and extensive public participation with distinct communities across the city. Incorporating collective storytelling, handmade crafts, dance, poetry, visual messages, and much more – Public Works is a city-wide exploration of how the public can connect, communicate, reclaim space, and imagine what else is possible.
Scarborough Made
Alex Narvaez x Sid Naidu & Scarborough Made Artists
Scarborough Made is a social impact art project documenting the stories of humanity in Toronto’s East. Through photography and cinematography, the project aims to amplify the voices of underserved neighbourhoods by documenting diverse narratives around culture and community. For Toronto’s Year of Public Art, Alex Narvaez & Sid Naidu will explore the theme of resilience with local youth artists to create a public art installation with the Toronto Public Library. The installation will reclaim a space in the public right of way to highlight people from Scarborough and build dialogue around our collective identity.
Water is Memory
Jamii invites you to discover a series of 30 performances in the Esplanade neighbourhood from May to October 2022. Presented from Jamii’s mobile arts space the "Kisanii Hub", these performances are an opportunity to explore creatively how water holds memory and how these memories are a shared web of connections between our individual stories.