The sun had set, our session was long over, and we were still at Daniels Spectrum. As Focus Media Arts members collapsed chairs and tables, and the sounds of singsong goodbyes from our classmates echoed around the room, our team found ourselves in an exasperated multi-way embrace. The ambitions that we have set out for ourselves and this project are multi-layered and time-intensive, and it became apparent towards the end of this session that those demands were weighing on all of us. However, we had worked hard that day and finally solidified a clear-cut direction and deliverables to set our previously nebulous proposals into motion. Sighs of exhaustion in parallel with sighs of relief.
“Do you need a hug?” Sunnie asked Amie, already leaning in for comfort.
“Hug me and you’ll make me cry!” Amie responded, only half-jokingly, and leaned into Sunnie’s offer.
Avila and Leticia joined in without a second thought. My eyes may have been tired and bleary, but I looked on with a grin on my face. Eight weeks ago, we were strangers; now, we were five women who felt safe enough to search for comfort in the other’s embrace.
Pulling away, Leticia gestured to the group and proclaimed, “You know, this is what this class is all about though: collaborating, meeting interesting people, and building a real community here. This is what we are doing it for”.
Last week, Leticia told us that Regent Park is a community built off the backs of single mothers and migrant women. We originally came into this project interested in the physical landscape of Regent Park and how art helps reinforce and/or distort a sense of identity among its residents. That said, after speaking with Leticia, a lifelong Regent Park resident, and artist Zahra, we have come to understand that the art scene in Regent Park is far more than what is painted on its walls. In many cases, art is less about the final product and more about the community that is created within the process. Furthermore, some of our team members have developed a particular fascination with the importance of drop-in crafting programs for women in the neighbourhood. Crafting and textile arts have historically been ignored as a higher art form, as it is often written off as “DIY” or “kitschy”. The truth is that this art practice is often diminished as it has been perfected and innovated by mostly women. In reality, crafting is a deeply impressive and inherently beautiful skill that also serves a critical utilitarian purpose under our current economic crisis.
Thus, we reoriented the direction of our project towards learning about how women create community and place through the Neighbourhood art scene and have formulated some further questions as follows:
How do the women of Regent Park experience barriers to creative expression?
What spaces are available to women of Regent Park to participate in art-making and creative expression?
Are these spaces judgment-free? Accessible (addressing language barriers, religious differences, child-permitting, etc.)?
How do creative spaces and the practice that they facilitate build emotional resilience and community bonds for the women of Regent Park, who are unfairly targeted by socioeconomic injustice?
How can arts and crafts be used as a source of knowledge for women who cannot afford to buy store-bought household essentials during this period of economic strife?
With this clear focus in mind, we have targeted three categories of interviewees: creative facilitators, creative participants (i.e. Zahra, Leticia), and general residents of Regent Park. This week, we have already set up five different interviews from those various categories. For example, this week we intend to speak with Heela Omarkhail (the VP of Social Impact at Daniels), representatives from Regent Park Sewing Studio and ArtHeart (both Regent Park art centres focused on “building self-esteem and self-reliance” through crafting), and Jennifer LaFontaine (the founder and facilitator of Community Story Strategies). These creative facilitators work in both corporate and grassroots settings, thus providing us with a wide, multi-layered range of perspectives on how creative expression functions in Regent Park. These expert testimonies across the spectrum will play a key role in fleshing out our investigative journalism piece.
Finally, to target general residents of Regent Park, we have developed a creative intercept survey that will allow us to collect qualitative data from residents we would otherwise be unable to access and provide the medium for a community data quilt that we will be creating alongside our podcast and our journalism entry. The methodology is Sunnie’s brainchild: we will write thought-provoking survey questions using paint markers outside of multiple Muji notebooks written in the languages most represented within Regent Park (ie, English, Arabic, Bengali, and Spanish). We will then duct tape these notebooks around the neighbourhood, particularly in areas where there is a) public art to stimulate creative discussion and/or b) where women are more likely to frequent (ie, childcare centres, community centres). From there, passersby will be taken by their bold covers and, hopefully, be prompted to write responses inside of them. We will leave these notebooks out for about a week and then collect and code the data to inform our podcast and journalistic piece. While our form is still developing, we may focus the podcast on this project and read the responses over the air. All the pages will be kept and collaged together to put on display at our April 10th gallery. A quilt of responses to convey the power of arts and crafts within a cultural mosaic of a neighbourhood—poetic!
Our project focuses on the strong women of Regent Park, but, as the prologue details, we have found strength in the women behind the project as well. After weeks of struggling to align our schedules, we found a direction that we all are excited about and have embraced this new course with clear action written in our group task tracker and a renewed sense of motivation.
The team members of Ars Comnunitas are Sunnie, Leticia, Amie, Angelina, and Avila (Youjia).