About Arts in the Hood:
When the City of Toronto kicked off the Live With Culture
campaign in September 2005, Mayor David Miller declared
a particular interest in initiating community arts projects
in the underserved areas of our creative city. Understanding
the importance of the arts in all levels of society, the
Live With Culture campaign needed to ensure that, in addition
to supporting national treasures such as the Art Gallery
of Ontario, the Canadian Opera Company and the Gardiner
Museum, all of Toronto - especially its at-risk neighbourhoods - should
have access to arts and culture.
And so the community arts initiative, Arts in the Hood,
was created. Live With Culture partnered with sixteen community
arts groups in its first year and many more since then,
with a special focus on youth. Changing lives and building
communities from Weston to Malvern, Kingston/Galloway to
Rexdale, the projects varied from photography workshops
to drumming; from dub poetry to graffiti mural painting;
from video making to short-story contests and from mask
making to Manga art.
All the partner arts organizations operate on a not-for-profit
basis; all have a mandate to enhance their neighbourhoods
through the arts; almost all the programs are FREE. By
means of classes and workshops, and an emphasis on the
ultimate public component (the art is complete only when
presented in front of an audience), the projects provide
a forum in which new ideas germinate. The youth develop
skills that are used not only in art-making, but also in
all aspects of their lives: creation, co-operation, leadership,
personal empowerment, confidence, understanding, resilience... and
the list goes on. All at once the youth have a new vehicle
with which to express themselves, in a medium where all
races, genders, colours and creeds are equal and accepted,
where anything is possible as they paint the biggest canvas
that is their lives.
Youth are Toronto's future; they are Canada's new national
treasures. Their ideas and their creative well-being are
what will ensure that our great city will survive and excel
in its future endeavours.
Every great city must be nurtured.
So: Paint, Sing, Dance, Write, Read, Act, Create and
Live With Culture!
