Archives /// Public Art
The Henry Moore outside the AGO may have been turned into an improvised chaise longue by lunchtime OCAD students, but Liberty Village has art that you're actually supposed to sit on.
In 2006, the Liberty Village BIA unveiled The BENCHmark Project, a set of three park benches commissioned as artworks from two area artists. The project received most of its funding in the form of a grant from the mayor's Clean and Beautiful City initiative. Its first three benches were designed to metaphorically link the neighbourhood's past, present, and future.
Artist Mina Arawaka decorated one bench with an archival map of the ...
It's a standard issue narrative: in the shadow of a more outgoing, attractive older sibling, the younger, homelier sibling, feeling neglected, turns to the time-honoured refuge of the introvert — art.
This relationship can hold true metaphorically as well, as evidenced by the two secondary arteries of Toronto — its ravines and laneways. Older sibling Ravine — its natural beauty strikingly handsome amidst the concrete it inhabits — has long been the city's darling. Meanwhile, the Laneway — the "ugly duckling" younger kin — starved of attention and encouragement and left to its own devices, has been nurturing creative inclinations.
According to ...
What is your favourite piece of public art in Toronto?
"That's like asking me which child I like best," says Terry Nicholson, Manager of Cultural Affairs for the City. "I like a lot of what we have in Toronto, and we continually add new pieces." It's no surprise Nicholson can't bear to pick favourites. He's responsible for overseeing the process by which public art on city-owned lands — including parks, subway stations, sidewalks, and city-run attractions such as the Toronto Zoo — is chosen and acquired.
Not everyone may share Nicholson's sentiments. Most people, in fact, are quick to point out which ...
When artist Carolyn Tripp was a teenager making day trips to Toronto she found the big metropolis confusing, and would occasionally find herself headed in the wrong direction after exiting a subway station.
This experience planted the seeds for her Street Level Efficiency project, stenciled directional markers painted guerrilla-style on the ground outside each subway station.
Initially, she began practicing her stencil art in other areas, including stenciling the word "fatality" in a coffin-shaped outline at Queen and Gladstone to mark the spot where cyclist Ryan Carriere was killed by a truck.
Then her discovery of a subtle but charming metallic compass set ...
During the spring, a series of official-looking signs that warned of homeless conditions nearby mysteriously appeared on poles downtown. They looked official and had phrases like "Homeless Sleeping: Quiet" and "Please have change ready for homeless."
After much speculation, Mark Daye, a graduating graphic design student at OCAD, came forward and took credit.
"Instead of rebranding a product or service for my fourth-year thesis project," he says, "I chose to represent a local population that usually gets overlooked....
"I re-coded official signage and affixed 30 of them to poles in the downtown core with messages pertaining to an obvious but ignored urban subculture. ...
Scarborough has a powerhouse working to promote the arts, and its name is Karin Eaton. After eleven years as executive director of Scarborough Arts Council, Eaton, whose initial art interests lay in writing and theatre, found her passions leading her to become perhaps the foremost Canadian spokesperson for mural art. She now serves as mural curator and executive director of Mural Routes, an internationally respected institution she helped found.
It began at Scarborough Arts Council in 1990, when Eaton heard about a public mural project in Chemainus, BC, and decided to celebrate Scarborough with 12 murals along Kingston Road, called Heritage ...
Whimsical pencil sketches of bicycles sit alongside brightly coloured pictures of birds and flowers. Enthusiastic drawings of cars, rows of houses, and trees accompany descriptions of how much fun it is to play after school with friends and family who live right across the street. These lively pictures and words from students at Claireville Junior School near Albion Road and Highway 27 would surely make the artists' parents proud, but these particular works of art are not destined to decorate refrigerator doors — they are part of an exciting Toronto District School Board program that helps children find creative ways ...
I was riding my bike through Forest Hill late at night recently when the neighbourhood street lights went out. Up until that point, I had only been paying as much attention as I needed to — keep going southwest, I told my brain's auto-pilot. But with the street lamps rendered useless, I turned to the street signs to guide me out of harm's way.
Living in the city, we often turn to the signs to find out whether we can do something or where we need to go: Can we park here? Where's Yonge? Watch out for kids chasing balls! These ...
Some of the best public art reacts to the changes a city undergoes as it grows, and like all cities, Toronto is constantly evolving. Along with the new City Hall and the TD Centre, the CN Tower is one of the few developments that propelled this town into the future.
In response to its construction, artist Rick Simon, who believed the tower was too obtrusive, combined an aerial photo and a map along with a horizontal tower that showed its radius if laid on its side. The posters were printed up ...
