During the height of the Spanish flu pandemic, afflicted Norwegian artist Edvard Munch painted a pair of self-portraits. In the first, he sits alone in a chair beside his rumpled bed, bundled in a robe, blankets covering his legs. His face is drained of color and his mouth hangs open, as if gasping for breath. In the second, painted after his recovery, he lists, seemingly exhausted, toward the viewer.
Dundas West creates Toronto’s first open-air museum
Dundas West creates Toronto’s first open-air museum
This article orginally appeared on Kickstart BIA.
At Toronto’s newest museum on Dundas West, there’s no umbrella storage or coat checks, no half-priced admission or well-dressed security kindly requesting you don’t touch the art. Instead, the works are all there in the street, a patchwork of murals telling the story of what and who the neighbourhood is and will be. The dundaswest.museum is an open-air street art museum. And it’s Toronto’s first.
“The city’s changing so fast, there’s so much development,” says Rodrigo Ardiles of the Creativo Arts Collective, which worked alongside the Lula Music and Arts Centre and Dundas West BIA and Little Portugal BIA to create the museum. “We talked to the people from the city and what the community is today – Portuguese, Vietnamese, Brazilian – and everybody really wanted to have a bit of their story stored in this place.”
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Street art is having a moment. Is it a pivotal one?
Create HOPE – Collective Mural Initiative
In the context of the current state of isolation, recommended by public health officials across the globe due to COVID19, a new initiative has been launched through an alliance between local Canadian arts and health advocates, to create an arts-based health promotion initiative in response to the high demand for mental health support for families to cope during this difficult period that we face.
Créer l’espoir – une murale virtuelle pancanadienne se dessine à l’horizon
Malgré les distances qui séparent les Canadiens en ces temps de confinement, des initiatives pour les réunir virtuellement surgissent partout au pays. L’une d’entre elles est le projet de murale virtuelle numérique Create Hope | Créer l’espoir.
L’initiative consiste à compiler des interprétations visuelles du concept d’espoir. Elle s’adresse en premier lieu aux enfants qui, comme le reste du monde, sont en quarantaine pour une période indéterminée.
Le projet repose sur deux initiatives lancées par Rodrigo et Paola Ardiles Gamboa, frère et sœur, soit le Dundas West Public Museum de Toronto (géré principalement par l’ONG Creativo Arts) et la coopérative de promotion de la santé Bridge for Health basée à Vancouver. Le mot-clé avec lequel ils veulent faire résonner le projet au pays est #createhopemural.
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