Walking, talking, and ropemaking with natural fibres on Coast Salish Territory, Vancouver. Mixing new music and improvising dance in Cabot Square, Montreal. Naming and stencilling Indigenous plants in Ogimaa Gichi Makwa Gitigaan (Chief Grizzly Bear’s Garden), Winnipeg and designing picnic tables for a newcomer community garden in Halifax.
How to use this website:Comment utiliser ce site
On this site you will find videos, photos and descriptions of a range of community-engaged art events in Canadian parks. You’ll also find a wealth of resources on how to initiate participatory art-making and community building in parks and public spaces. Whether you’re a park professional, a community member, a settlement worker, a funder or an artist, this resource is for you.
In Welcome to This Place, a 2018 cross-Canada project led by MABELLEarts, artists in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax animated parks and public spaces through dance, live music, weaving, cooking, printmaking, beading and more
If you’re looking for practical tips on to how to foster community engagement, artmaking and cultural activity in your local park, you’ve come to the right place! Browse our guidelines for stakeholders from all relevant fields and backgrounds
Sharon Kallis / EartHand Gleaners, Vancouver
Canadians are increasingly recognizing that activities and events in local parks reduce social isolation and strengthen community connections. Likewise, there is growing awareness of the power of participatory artmaking - from its potential to build bridges across difference, to its positive impacts on health and wellbeing. For newcomers to Canada and the host societies who welcome them, arts engagement can play a vital role in the settlement process. Neighbours can meaningfully interact with each other, sharing their histories, aspirations and cultures. Intergenerational relationships can be nurtured, leading to increased community support for seniors and youth. A shared sense of belonging can begin to develop.
Governments and funders have begun to foster participatory arts and culture events in parks and public spaces, and we are hopeful that support for arts and culture in Canadian parks and public spaces will continue to grow. Welcome to This Place was supported by the federal Department of Canadian Heritage, with a fund designed to foster intercultural understanding through arts and culture. Locally, MABELLEarts has been supported by the Toronto Arts Council’s Animating Toronto Parks granting program, which funds Toronto-based artists to produce hundreds of free arts events in parks each summer. The Ontario Trillium Foundation supported a three-year residency in Broadacres Park where much of our work with asylum-seekers and refugees took place.
Indigenous Knowledge Keeper, Val Vint / Winnipeg
Artists can enliven parks in lots of ways. In Welcome to This Place, a 2018 cross-Canada project led by MABELLEarts, artists in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax animated parks and public spaces through dance, live music, weaving, cooking, printmaking, beading and more. MABELLEarts collaborated with organizations and artists that work closely with Canadian newcomers and work in public spaces. We provided funding for their initiatives, helped execute their outreach, and helped produce some of their final events, among other things. We hope our videos and descriptions of their projects will inspire you as you dream up a project for your local park. Are there any elements of these projects that could work in your context?
Our partners across the country include:
Mark Glassock (Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust)
Cited in Sparking Change / Park People
If you’re looking for practical tips on to how to foster community engagement, artmaking and cultural activity in your local park, you’ve come to the right place! While some of the advice in these pages may seem like second-nature to you, other information may be entirely new. That’s because we’ve designed our guidelines for stakeholders from all relevant fields and backgrounds; from park professionals, to artists, funders, community agencies, and more. We see all of the guidelines we’ve provided here as critical to inclusive art and culture-making in public spaces. Woven throughout these practical guidelines are principles that we at MABELLEarts hold dear—principles of flexibility, active inclusion, artful hosting and responsiveness to place. We think that the magic of our work in parks flows from our attention to those principles
Tips for how to be an artful host, which is at the core of all MABELLEarts’ work.
Things to think about when designing a creative project for a park or public space.
Tips and strategies for raising money to support your projects.
Tips for artists collaborating with municipalities or agencies.
Tips for municipalities, agencies and cultural institutions collaborating with artists.
Points to consider when planning a community-engaged project in a park or public space.
How you will welcome, actively include and keep specific cultural communities and groups safe?
Outreach is an art unto itself, and is critical to the success of any community-engaged project
Photo and video share the beauty of our projects with a wider audience, and help us secure more funding.
Points to consider when creating your Evaluation Strategy.
These images are details from Picnic Table Prints, collaborative artworks created during community workshops led by Charley Young, as part of Welcome To This Place: Halifax
Natalie James / Spence Neighbourhood Association, Winnipeg
We advise municipalities and funders to consider these key learnings from our work and to create policy with these key concepts in mind
At MABELLEarts, we have developed our own approach to community engagement and artmaking in parks. Centering our projects around core principles of active inclusion and artful hosting we’ve increasingly worked with asylum seekers and other newcomers to Canada in Toronto parks. We have found that parks can be places of welcoming, of getting to know one another and becoming friends. Parks can be places where we sing the songs from the places we come from and make art that recalls the natural landscapes of our childhoods. Parks can be places where we share foods that remind us of our mothers and grandmothers and teach our children to dance.
