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TORONTO IS A "LIVE WITH CULTURE!" A creative culture is the cornerstone of a great city. It's Toronto, 2008... and Creativity is Everywhere! Click here to browse what's NEW in Toronto at the Live With Culture website.
New Public Artwork Celebrating Toronto’s Aboriginal Roots NEW PUBLIC ARTWORK CELEBRATING TORONTO'S ABORIGINAL ROOTS Toronto’s Aboriginal roots will be celebrated with the initiation of a commission of a new public artwork. This legacy of Live With Culture will be carried out a through equitable and objective selection processes with valuable input and guidance from community members and relevant professionals. The awarding of the commission was unveiled at the end of 2006. This multi-project community arts initiative will address social issues in Toronto such as underserved communities and youth at risk. Six to twelve community arts projects, in partnership with community arts groups, will be designed to increase the arts in troubled neighbourhoods (i.e. Malvern, St. James Town, Kingston/Galloway and Jane/Finch). These projects will be documented on video as a testimony to the effectiveness of such projects to promote community pride.
Three projects have been initiated:
HipTix
Blues Harmonica in the Schools 
Rainbow Songs One weekend a year Toronto tells its stories during Doors Open Toronto, a citywide event celebrating buildings of architectural, historic and/or cultural significance. Step inside heritage landmarks, places of worship, hidden gems, modern structures, boardrooms, bedrooms, private clubs, mansions, museums, ‘green' roof gardens, theatres, national historic sites, centres of rail and air travel, campuses, warehouses, banking halls, architects' offices and more. Many of these buildings are not normally open to the public. No tickets or pre-registration required; admission to all buildings is free. The official program guide will be available in the Toronto Star in May
Doors Open Toronto invites you to get to know the city, whether you've lived in Toronto all your life or you're visiting for the first time. See Toronto like you've never seen it before and discover the stories that emerge when doors are opened. Go to www.doorsopen.org for more information.
HUMANITAS FESTIVAL A city-wide expression of Toronto past, present, and future Under themes of gathering place, global village and city soul the Humanitas Festival will animate the ways in which the creative energy of Canada’s international city is deeply rooted in its history and diversity. The Humanitas Festival invites residents and visitors alike to explore our past - and anticipate our future. The Festival will launch with a waterfront-themed Doors Open Toronto (see above) and continue with a Humanitas urban affairs symposium, the Stages of Creativity along Toronto’s central waterfront and a citizen curated exhibition called My TO. The festival is also an occasion to highlight and celebrate the arts, culture and heritage in Toronto that animate the spirit of Humanitas every day The Humanitas Festival will provide a forum to explore issues around sustainable urban development, cultural identity in the 21st century and pride of place in anticipation of its evolution to an iconic facility on Toronto’s waterfront by the year 2015. Envision thousands of canvasses and easels dotting Nathan Phillips Square as Torontonians congregate en masse to paint or sketch. One day to come together and celebrate the creativity we all possess and contribute. Now imagine a whole summer of Everyone Create! events. These single day splash events will encourage active artistic participation. Various venues across the city will host these outbursts of creativity whether people are painting, dancing, singing or reading.
PUBLIC ART/PUBLIC PLACES Designating a group of 10 public art pieces spread out in the City of Toronto as “Stations”, the public will be invited for one day in the Fall to come down to any, or all of the “Stations” and take a picture of the piece of art with a digital camera. The only stipulation is that they must have a living thing in the picture with the art (a family member, friend, household pet, even a houseplant). At each station the photos taken will be immediately down-loaded onto a lap top computer and sent as a digital file to a large public venue (like the Moss Park Armory, or FortYork, etc.). The large public venue will be the Gallery, where every photo will be immediately printed up and put up on a wall in the order that they arrive. By the end of the day there will be hundreds (possibly thousands) of photos of Torontonians and participating visitors to the city engaged with Toronto-based public art. The final product will be a massive public art show open to all.
A book will be produced of the final show, and there may be celebrity judges awarding prizes for best photographs.
SUMMER PERFORMING ARTS SERIES This four week series in the summer will feature four commissioned concerts in four areas of the city. These exciting new works will fuse classical and contemporary art forms with broad ethnic influences, bringing together diverse artistic genres and audiences of multiple generations in a unique cultural and creative exchange.
IRREVERSIBLE BEING: EXPLODING FROM WONDER Irreversible Being: Exploding From Wonder will be a visual art exhibition exploring uncommon curiosities within the urban core of the City of Toronto. The exhibition will run for eight weeks beginning mid-June, 2006. The exhibition utilizes the common garden shed, placed in several strategic downtown areas, where artists expand on interpreting conditions of our natural environment within an urban reality. Ten artists, from Canada and abroad will explore and enchant through their created environments. Inviting artists from various cultural and geographic backgrounds allows for an even greater discussion of nature: how nature and environment have been main thresholds of intersections in relation to artifice, as well as the explosive potential in how stories of both the migrant and the indigenous can unravel the grand narratives that weave in their cultures. The use of the common garden shed counterpoints a common cultural icon found in many backyards. For this exhibition it becomes the dream sphere – an object to capture, framing time – where visitors can experience the narratives and representations constructed by the various artists. The storage sheds will be placed in several locations in the city of Toronto including: Exhibition Place, FortYork, Cloud Forest Conservatory, Spadina Quay, Norway Park and the MOCCA parking lot. The works in Irreversible Being: Exploding From Wonder act as “the magic object” that is an outward and visible sign that reveals the connection between people, between events and between the spaces that the two occur. Like an oral story, the works are an operation carried out on the length of time involved – continually contracting or dilating to the experience of the viewer, while also being an allegory of the extinction of natural live and transitory landscapes.
From sunset to sunrise, Torontonians will be invited to encounter the city in a unique way and rediscover Toronto through public art commissions, all-night exhibitions, live performances and creative programs featured throughout the city. This cultural rendezvous also opens the doors to private and public buildings usually closed after dark. For one sleepless night the familiar will be discarded and Toronto will become the artistic playground for a series of exhilarating contemporary art experiences. Visit Live With Culture.ca regularly for Nuit Blanche updates. |
In its first years, Doors Open Toronto has attracted nearly one million visitors and inspired Doors Open Ontario events province-wide.
In 2006, the 7th annual Doors Open Toronto is a highlight of Live with Cultureand will kick-off the
Paris, France introduced Nuit Blanche to the world in October 2002. This all-night free celebration of contemporary
art was an enormous success and many cities have followed suit. In 2006, Toronto joins the international ranks of Brussels,
Rome, Madrid and Paris to become the most recent Nuit Blanche city.