EXHIBITION OVERVIEW
This map, created by The Artful City in collaboration with the Martin Prosperity Institute and presented in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario, is the first comprehensive visual view of public art in Toronto. It reveals important patterns of production, ownership, and networks linking artists over time.
Over the last 50 years Toronto's public art landscape has grown dramatically, embracing new artists, mediums, policies and funding sources. However, this development has been concentrated in particular neighbourhoods and has prioritized certain forms of practice over others. This map shows who has access to the vast majority of the artwork and who does not. It also illustrates what type of work has received the most support.
We invite you to explore and help complete this evolving map by identifying areas in need of public artworks. What does public art mean to you? What can it look like in the future?
Community Gallery
The Community Gallery in the Weston Family Learning Centre is an exhibition and project space which provides a platform for artistic experimentation and dissemination. Focused specifically on the processes of making art, and those ideas which feed into contemporary artistic practice, the gallery seeks to take risks and push the boundaries of how work is traditionally represented within formal institutions. The space draws also on the voices of those groups, regardless of age, sex, profession, and socio-economic constraints, who are at once represented and marginalized within normal institutional channels. In doing so, the Gallery steps away from conventional definitions of what is meant by the word "Community", seeking new interpretations and evolutionary paths for the possibilities of art-making. Visit https://www.ago.net/community-arts/ for past projects in the Community Gallery.
The Artful City is a project uniting many of Toronto's cultural and educational institutions who share a commitment to supporting healthy and imaginative cities. This cumulative research, as well as the public feedback collected over the course of the AGO installation, will be presented in May 2017 at the Public Art; New Ways of Thinking and Working symposium organized by York University's School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design.
Organized by the The Artful City and the Art Gallery of Ontario
This exhibition is free admission.