Huffman Award Aimed at Collaboration
Posted in Art | Written by Christopher Jones | 0 comments
All aboard the Pant Raft, William Huffman (l to r), Christine Swintak, Sebastian Koever and Nicholas Brown
An impertinent gesture by a young art school grad and a “put up or shut up” taunt by his peers has resulted in a decade’s worth of artistic collaborations catalyzed by the William Huffman Award. Upon graduation from the Art and Art History program offered jointly by the University of Toronto at Mississauga and Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Oakville, Huffman, above left, was presented with the Grumbacher Award, a set of paints from the venerable art supply company. The young artist exited stage right with his diploma and promptly dumped the paint set in the trash.
“It was my performative gesture,” remembers Huffman, who is now an independent curator and Associate Director of the Toronto Arts Council. “At school I was doing installation, performance and video work so a paint set wasn’t going to do my practice much good.”
“Someone chewed me out about my behaviour and challenged me to come up with an award geared to the practice of the recipient. Why not give them a voice, give them an opportunity and a venue to connect with the broader community. So several years later I started to pull it together.”
Odessa/Havana and Diasporic Genius
Labour Day weekend might seem like an unfortunate time for a culture fest but like other long-weekend fêtes, Toronto’s biennial Ashkenaz Festival brings loads of visitors into the city, which helps to counter the exodus of outbound cottagers.
Now in its 8th iteration, Ashkenaz is the largest festival of Jewish culture in Canada and its co-founder, David Buchbinder, left, is back this year to perform with one of his many projects, Odessa/Havana, a jazz ensemble helmed with Cuban/Canadian pianist Hilario Duran. The band, which features some of Toronto’s very best jazz performers (including Rick Lazar, Mark Kelso and Roberto Occhipinti), will preview work from its forthcoming disc.
The melding of traditional Jewish music with Cuban jazz is more natural than the description suggests. While Buchbinder’s music is deeply rooted in Klezmer – he’s a founder of the long-popular Flying Bulgars – he is presently exploring the Sephardic musical traditions of Moorish Spain, which the conquistadors took with them to Cuba and other new world colonies. (The name Ashkenaz refers to a branch of the Jewish family originating in Eastern Europe, as opposed the Sephardic branch prevalent in Spain and the Mediterranean.)
Cutting Corners at Camp Shakespeare
The summer of 2010 has been kind to Canandian Stage’s TD Dream in High Park; the hot, dry weather has ensured fewer lost performances — there were 14 cancelled shows last year and 16 blow-outs in 2008 — which means that the current production of Romeo and Juliet is on track to re-coupe its costs.
“CanStage is the country’s largest not-for-profit theatre company,” says Director of Production, Alistair Hepburn, “so for us success is breaking even. Sure it would be glorious if we could end up with a record-breaking profit but success means making sure everyone gets paid and we don’t end up costing anyone else money.”
Now in its 28th year, the Dream in the Park is one of the city’s longest running theatrical traditions. The elaborate, multi-tiered set may not look like shoe-string theatre but it definitely is says Hepburn, whose job it is to make sure that the show’s small budget stretches as far as humanly possible.
“We take the everyday and the mundane and turn it into stuff that people don’t recognize,” he explains. “The background of the entire set is scrimmed with tack cloth, the material used to cover the undersides of box spring mattresses. We shop at Value Village and use other people’s cast offs, rehemmed or reinvented to turn them into something new.” READ MORE
Poetry Goes Public With Viva’s Help
Frank Viva is an in-demand illustrator and branding expert whose work has appeared on the cover of The New Yorker, in Time and Esquire, the New York Times and Toronto Life: commercial clients include Butterfield and Robinson, New York Life and Le Creuset. But busy as he is, Viva found the time to do a pro bono job being unveiled today (August 26) at the Toronto Reference Library (789 Yonge Street); the OCAD-educated artist has lent his talent to Poet Laureate Dionne Brand’s Poetry is Public is Poetry project, an initiative designed to etch some of Canada’s most celebrated poetry into public spaces.
A collaboration between City of Toronto’s Cultural Services, Transportation Services and the Toronto Public Library and the TPL Foundation, the project will embed two to four installations per year in outdoor library spaces. Viva’s hoarding design (above) blends his whimsical art with snippets of poems by 34 Canadian poets.
Council To Revisit Culture Funding
Toronto City Council’s Executive Committee frequently hears ardent deputations but last week’s entreaties on the subject of strategies for arts and culture funding were surely among the most heartfelt in recent sessions. In fact, Mayor Miller, commenting on remarks made by young Scarborough arts advocate Lakesha Bambury, above, noted that, “This is the first time in about eight Executive Committee meetings that the whole room has been silent for a deputant and that’s because of the power of what you said. So thank you.”
Bambury’s plea for continued and increased funding to grassroots local arts service organizations (LASOs) was sandwiched by impassioned remarks from actors Albert Schultz and R.H. Thomson, as well as from TIFF’s Cameron Bailey and the National Ballet’s Karen Kain, among others.
Jim Fleck, a representative of the business community, reminded Committee members that “having a significant cultural infrastructure [is] a way to attract and retain high tech people . . . these are highly mobile workers, Silicon Valley is after them, Austin, Texas, is after them and we can’t provide the same weather but at least we can try and provide the cultural amenities that are so important to the quality of life.”
“Money to the arts is not a gift,” concluded Fleck, “it’s an investment.”
