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Tackling issues like equity, inclusivity and ecological resilience in the arts sector.
Public art can contribute to thriving public spaces, build community, elevate marginalized perspectives and boost mental health and well-being. It can also surprise and delight.
For all its benefits, we know that public art produces vast amounts of material waste, which ends up in landfills. It can also be hard for Indigenous and racialized artists and arts workers to find stable work in the public art sector, making it inequitable and exclusionary. For public art to truly contribute to great public places, we need to address these systemic issues.
This is the motivation behind the Institute for Public Art and Sustainability (IPAS). As an evolution of the Evergreen Public Art Program, IPAS combines research and practice to support both environmental and artist sustainability.
Let’s imagine bold new ways for public art to be sustainable for the planet and for the people who make it.
Curatorial Team:
Community Directors:
Partners:
Tackling obstacles in the Canadian arts ecosystem.
Create and produce public art that tells the Indigenous, cultural, ecological, and industrial histories of the Evergreen Brick Works site and surrounding ravine system.
Collaborate with community partners to build a more equitable, sustainable and resilient arts sector.
Engage artists and arts workers from Indigenous and racialized communities, sharing land, space, resources and amenities at Evergreen Brick Works.
Use research on public art and sustainability to inform practice.
Use the power of the arts to create better public spaces for all.
IPAS will scale activities that support environmental and artist sustainability in 2024-2026. Here’s what we’re working on:
In summer 2023, we teamed up with Synthetic Collective, Centre for Sustainable Curating and The Bentway to start a dialogue about sustainable approaches to public art. This resulted in “A Public (Art) Notice,” a free poster and downloadable guide promoting more environmentally conscious ways to curate, create and produce public art. We see this as the start of a vital conversation for the field.
For additional information and resources related to this project, please visit Synthetic Collective online.
“Contemporary art is struggling for sustainability. There are these challenges of environmental degradation and the difficulty for racialized artists and artworkers to sustain themselves due to systemic barriers. Indigenous and racialized artists are still not appropriately represented on arts governing bodies in Canada.”
The Institute for Public Art and Sustainability is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and Toronto Arts Council.
The Institute for Public Art and Sustainability is a partnership between Evergreen, Artist Material Fund, OCAD University’s Indigenous Visual Culture Program, Synthetic Collective, Centre for Sustainable Curating and The Bentway.
