Culture
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Recording Hart Massey’s Factory and Concert Hall
In 1986, I photographed the historic, sprawling Massey Ferguson farm machinery plant in Toronto just as demolition work was getting underway. Staying one...
By Peter MacCallum -
EXCERPT: Indigenous Toronto, Stories That Carry This Place
This essay is excerpted with permission from Indigenous Toronto: Stories That Carry This Place (Coach House Books, 2021). NOW THAT WE KNOW When I first...
By Lila Pine -
Poetry in community: Q&A with poet Ronna Bloom
Ronna Bloom is former Poet in Residence at Mount Sinai Hospital, now Sinai Health System. Long before face coverings became mandatory on the TTC or...
By Emily Macrae -
Soundscapes on College: This ain’t a library
This article originally appeared in Spacing #14, summer 2009. It was recently announced that the iconic music shop Soundscapes on College Street in Little...
By Jonny Dovercourt -
PODCAST: Spacing Radio 054, Packaged Toronto
To celebrate Spacing‘s latest book, Packaged Toronto: a collection of the city’s historic design, we go deep into the history of early...
By Spacing Radio -
The Bentway: Rethinking public art amidst COVID-19
The publication of the city’s 10-year public art strategy accompanied an announcement that 2021 would be Toronto’s Year of Public Art. Of course...
By Sarah Ratzlaff -
How racism in Ontario schools today is connected to a history of segregation
Toronto’s Africentric Alternative School first opened in 2009 after years of advocacy and then months of heated public debates and criticism about the...
By Funké Aladejebi -
The role of cricket in an inclusive city
Cricket has a rich cultural history in Toronto. The sport is closely tied to Black history, following the Black Diaspora throughout the colonized world ...
By Perry King -
EXCERPT FROM ‘UNCLE’: Aunt Jemima in Chicago
Excerpted with permission from Uncle: Race, Nostalgia and the Politics of Loyalty, published this month by Coach House Books. Thompson, a Ryerson...
By Cheryl Thompson -
The ‘bashment’ parties of my childhood are Black history
In 2002, reggae artist Sean Paul shot the video for his song ‘Get Busy/Like Glue,’ in Vaughan. Directed by Toronto’s own Director X, the video begins with...
By Cheryl Thompson -
‘Out of this world’ sculptures land in midtown
In Toronto, there are a number of public artworks that re-imagine the human subject. I’m thinking, for example, of Hadley+ Maxwell’s Garden of Future...
By Sarah Ratzlaff -
THOMPSON: What if the Caribana Carnival went back to its roots?
“The watching Torontonians didn’t cheer, didn’t wave,” reported the Toronto Daily Star on August 5, 1967, as “Caribana” left Varsity Stadium on Bloor...
By Cheryl Thompson