Toronto Free Gallery

Toronto Free Gallery is a non-profit and activist art gallery in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is dedicated to providing a forum for social justice, cultural, urban and environmental issues expressed through all media. Toronto Free Gallery's role is to be a creative laboratory that aims to provide artists with a space to experiment, explore new ideas, question norms and challenge both themselves and their audiences.

Toronto Free Gallery
Established2004[1]
Location1277 Bloor Street West, Toronto[2]
DirectorHeather Haynes[3]
Public transit accessLansdowne station
Websitetorontofreegallery.org

Toronto Free Gallery's role is to present programming that highlights and offers creative responses to urgent issues such as urban development, social justice and sustainability. They do this by fostering collaboration between creative communities through exhibitions and events that include visual artists, activists, film-makers, performance artists, writers, architects, urban planners, ecologists, and academics, to name a few.

Goals

Provide a forum for social, cultural, environmental and urban issues expressed through all media

Maintain a space where artists, architects, and socially and environmentally conscious organizations can present meaningful projects in an artistic way

Create a venue for dialogue about the communities, cities and world we live in through exhibitions, panel discussions and other events

Offer a space that includes multiple voices and experiences

Provide a space that supports and provides dialogue and exhibition space for young and emerging artists as well as those who are established

Address urgent social and environmental issues in a positive and constructive way

Broaden Toronto's arts audience by: working with diverse communities, creating programming that includes participation from the arts and non-art communities, including youth programming, creating programming that has broad audience appeal and organizing projects with a presence outside the gallery, through past site-specific and public projects

History

Toronto Free Gallery was established in September 2004 by Executive Director Heather Haynes. The inaugural exhibition, Project Toronto, was a group exhibition that aimed to derive new insights into the problems confronting the urban landscape of Toronto. With this exhibition the overall goals and artistic vision of Toronto Free Gallery were established. In 2008 the gallery relocated from Toronto's East End to the Bloor/Lansdowne neighbourhood. The gallery receives funding from Canada Council for the Art, Ontario Arts Council, Ontario Trillium Foundation, and Toronto Arts Council.

Important Exhibitions Include: Project Toronto, The Corporate World, Vacant Lots, The Centre Cannot Hold, Toronto Free Library, All Power To the People: Graphics of The Black Panther Party, Creative Activism, Toronto Free Broadcasting, Strip-mining for Creative Cities, and The Pinky Show.

Artistic Collaborations

Among the gallery's artistic collaborators are: La Pocha Nostra, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Michelle Ceballos, Mammalian Diving Reflex and Darren O'Donnell, The Yes Men, The Arbour Lake School, Luis Jacob, Maiko Tanaka, Action Terroriste Socialement Acceptable, Fuse Magazine, Spacing Magazine, National Film Board of Canada, FADO, 7a*11d, Favianna Rodriguez, Toronto School for Creativity and Inquiry, Au Travail, Creative Class Struggle and Mayworks.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]

References
  1. TorontoFreeGallery.org, About Us
  2. Toronto Star, Weekday Planner, June 18, 2009
  3. Toronto Star, Queen Street artists display their defiance, November 11, 2006
  4. Toronto Star, A bookstore closes and Toronto loses so much more, May 24, 2008
  5. TO: Live With Culture, Toronto Free Library Archived December 11, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  6. Toronto Star, West Queen West's art moves north, October 5, 2008
  7. Toronto Star
  8. Toronto Star
  9. Now Toronto
  10. Eye Weekly "Archived copy". Archived from the original on August 28, 2008. Retrieved December 7, 2009.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  11. Eye Weekly
  12. Eye Weekly

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