The Public Gallery is a 2m x 3.5m street-facing gallery, featuring art that explores issues of social justice and anti-oppression. We believe that art should be accessible — created and enjoyed by everybody, — and inspire change. The gallery can be viewed anytime from Lansdowne Ave. at Seaforth in Toronto.
Making pieces from pieces is an installation project that uses objects as metaphors for fading memories, places of belonging, and the never-ending task of staying resilient in difficult times. Assembling objects and materials is a useful strategy to help us envision and create crucial stories and traditions from very little.
The Public Gallery is one of the many ways we seek to re-imagine how the celebration and showcasing of local and marginalized artists can happen. The gallery allows us to create room to redefine who gets to call themselves an “artist” and blur the lines between art, design, and community practice. Our gallery is not funded, and run solely from the profit of our other work, so we also try to create reciprocal relationships through skills exchanges, like supporting artists in the design and set up of their exhibits, concept development, and writing artist statements.
The gallery provides accessible entry points into creating, showing, and viewing art, and it shows how art doesn’t need to be intentionally difficult to understand to be thoughtful and critical. The gallery also invites us to constantly create access in multiple ways, whether it’s by supporting artists through the creative process of their work, providing viewers with plain language hand-outs that explain our exhibits, or engaging in dialogue at our artist community events.
We program the gallery with the understanding that any work that’s shown in a community needs to be able to be read by people in that community. We’re often reflecting on the site-specificity of our space -- a gallery window in Parkdale, on Indigenous land, across from a school, at a bus stop, etc. -- and in these ways, we challenge the conventional role and relationship of a gallery to its surrounding community. Our gallery is also one of our favourite ways of community engagement. We love building capacity with artists to run community engagement and popular education workshops that in turn deepens the connection between their artwork and the community.
November 18th - December 11th 2022
The Justice for Queen and Close Exhibit is an effort to depict the contrast in developer renderings of 1375 Queen Street West and the community ideation of what the site could be used for, a stark contrast of the dreams that Parkdalians hold and their material reality due to the financialization of housing.
Read moreAugust 31st - Sept 30th, 2022
Welcome to our workshop. Here we sit on the floor, pour butter tea for each other, work shoulder to shoulder and we dream up better futures for our children. We share laughter and stories as our hands unleash intricate knots into our looms. Yes, our backs ache, fingers harden and years pass with every piece we weave…this is how we made a livelihood.
Read moreMarch 2022 - June 2022
We Got This!, is a multi-disciplinary community arts program in collaboration Harm Reduction Peer Workers and in partnership with Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre. The exhibition explores the intersection between transformative justice principles and art, while touching on themes of grief, medicine and healing within transformative justice practices and experiences.
Read moreThe Public Studio
58 Lansdowne Ave.
Toronto, Ontario
M6K 2V9
people@thepublicstudio.ca