This week’s Young Artist of the week is Hasini! Hasini has been coming to Art City for one year now. During her free time she can always be found in the crafts room working on making flowers and other paper crafts. Hasini loves to paint animals and sweets–especially cakes–and draw people and scenes that inspire her. In the short time that she has been here Hasini has also learned and improved her techniques in paining and drawing. She has difficulty picking a favourite colour because she thinks all of them are too beautiful and shows that in her bright art! We see her as someone with a bright and colourful personality and can’t wait to see the amazing works she will continue to make!
March Break – Part II
March Break was an exciting week at Art City! Our young artists worked hard all week to make the amazing art you see here. The students worked on their drawing skills with pastels, painted complicated sculptures, and designed some amazing masks. We had a lot of fun and can’t wait to see what else our young artists will make during regular programming!
Filed under Non Profit
March Break 2016
For the week of March 14-18, Art City will take a break from after-school programming and run March Break classes. Classes will run for the duration of the week from 1:00-5:00 pm. We can’t wait to share in all the fun activities and creative work of the students! Regular after-school programming will resume March 21, 2016. Happy March break to all of our students and their families!
Filed under Non Profit
Young Artist of the Week #2
Come meet Elizabeth! Young Artist of the week! She is one of oldest student who has been coming to Art City for past 4-5 years. Her bubbly personality brings joy and laughter to Art City. Over the years, she has made good friends, especially with Tanya; both of them have performed and showcased their gymnastic skills. Elizabeth loves to paint; she has not only improved her skills and knowledge in painting but also in drawing. She has very unique and interesting style of drawing. We see her as a very confident young artist who can excel at anything she puts her mind to.
Filed under Non Profit
Young Artist of the Week
Every week in the month of February, we will be showcasing the artworks of a young artist from Art City Toronto, for the series called Young Artist of the Week with the #youngartist2016 and #artistoftheweek.
Please like, comment and share and encourage these students.
The very first selected artist for this series is a young inventor named Pranav age 7. Pranav has been coming to Art City for past two years now and we see him creating very unusual sculptures and masks during his free time. He also excels at drawing; even though we often hear him say that he is not good at drawing. He gives away his wonderful drawings and creations to Art City and to other students. He is very independent and likes to solve and do things in his own. We see him as a great creator, inventor and problem solver.
Filed under Non Profit
BE INSPIRED! CROWDSOURCE FUNDRAISER
For the past 15 years, Art City in St. James Town has offered young children in the neighbourhood opportunities to cultivate their own creative powers.
Our mission is to cultivate these skills with youth who do not always have access to the advantages of an arts education because of economic and social barriers. Our programs are FREE of charge, and we provide snacks, field trips and opportunities to work with Toronto-based artists.
Despite Art City’s remarkable ability to provide youth with a sense of agency – a sense that they have the power to build something themselves, and an enduring idea that they can be active, engaged, productive members of their community, we have encountered great hurdles with regard to our funding.
“Our challenge at Art City is to secure dependable funding. We are committed to offering these programs FREE of charge which is why we’ve turned to crowd sourcing as a fundraiser this year,” explains Jared Peters, Executive Director. Our committed volunteers produced a video to demonstrate how Art City has positively impacted the lives of children.
Our goal is $50,000 and we are asking each viewer to contribute a minimum of $25.00. We are certain that as more people watch the video, recognize what we’re about, it will be shared as widely as possible and we will reach our goal.
WATCH OUR VIDEO HERE: https://vimeo.com/147203041
GIVE HERE: https://www.canadahelps.org/en/charities/art-city-in-stjames-town/be-inspired-art-city-fundraiser/
We couldn’t have made it this far, made such a remarkable difference and delivered such exceptional programming without the support of our community of funders.
“I joined Art City as a board member in 2012, because as an artist and art educator, I know the importance of visual arts in a child’s development. Art education is proven to improve creativity, focus, academic performance and decision-making skills,” maintains Alia Toor, Chair of the Board of Directors.
“If we want to make a difference in our children’s future, we have to make it ourselves,” says Toor.
BE INSPIRED. SUPPORT ART CITY.
Media Inquiries: Jared Peters, Executive Director
Contact Information: 416.944.0315
Filed under Non Profit
Mapping the Neighbourhood with Kyla Brown
This year, for the fall 2016 program, students at Art City had the opportunity to work with Resident Artist Kyla Brown. She brought in ideas of working with mapping as a material, an engaging approach that challenged students with new conceptual and artistic ideas.
Students looked at the idea of mapping through their neighbourhood landscape, such as where do they go or visit daily- school, home, Art City etc.
Students did various indoor and outdoor projects with Kyla, including a group drawing of a subjective ‘map’ of their community throughout the 4 weeks of residency. 
Student also went on a walk with their drawing machines around their neighbourhood. This drawing machine was attached to arms and legs, so that marks from pencils and pastels responded to the movements of their bodies as they walked through the community. The students also made rubbings of various textures from buildings and the pavement during their walk.
To complete the residency Kyla had compiled every student’s artwork, and introduced techniques of bookbinding to the students. They added a title, description, signatures and other details to personalize their books. It was a great accomplishment for the kids to make a book consisting of their artworks.
The students learned so much from Kyla. The residency engaged the students with new artistic concerns and practices, and through the creation of artistic maps the students developed new ideas about what moving through and inhabiting their community can mean.
Discover more of Kyla Brown’s art on her website: http://kylabrown.net/
Filed under Non Profit
Goodbye to Summer 2015 and Welcoming Fall
This summer, new chairs/office equipment and freshly painted walls started the exciting summer camp program at Art City. Huge thanks goes to Trillium Foundation for providing the equipment grant.
Throughout summer, we explored a wide variety of artistic practices and materials such as Painting, Drawing, Mixed Media, and Sculpture, and we also had a week of art themed on Animal and a week all about comics. Also, the 6-week camp extended to 7th week with new resident Artist- RadioDress.
This summer we challenged the students to expand their creative horizons and artistic boundaries as actual young sprouting artists. We made them think outside of the box using their imagination to create various artworks, telling a visual and a unique story. Also, the resident artist Radiodress brought relativity new topics for them such as the Indigenous history and the self exploration with family stories to create artworks. Also students loved using and creating sound art and felt accomplished by taking their final recorded CD and it’s cover as an artwork. Summer ended with a wonderful group project called Sandy Knoll lead by the Resident artist.
GOODBYE Summer, we had so much fun!!
Here comes Fall 2015 with new and exciting programs such as Art and Drama with Suitcase Theatre. Art City cannot wait to start the fall after-school program on September 29th, 2015. Hope to see everyone there. 
Filed under Non Profit
First week: Let’s Paint -Summer Camp at Art City
Week 1, Let’s Paint was very successful among kids as they enjoy all different kinds of techniques and materials to finish their masterpieces. Kids arrived at 1 :00pm and 1:30pm they were shown various artist works to inspire them to paint. Daily they created 2 pieces of artwork, and in the between they took a break for healthy snack from Second Harvest and enjoyed outdoor games. (image1)
Some of the techniques the kids mastered over the week are learning and using tinting, complimentary, warm and cold colours in creating various of their artworks. There were various Artists who inspired these kids to create wonderful artwork. For example, they created Sonia & Robert Delaunay’s bright, colourful geometric inspired Paintings (image 2). They also learned to express their feelings through abstract artworks inspired by Jackson Pollock, John Kissick and Mark Rothko (Image 3). They also created landscape paintings inspired by Tom Thomson and Group of Seven (Image 4).
On Thursday we took the kids to a trip to Art Gallery of Ontario AGO. Kids had loads of fun trying costumes, posing with artworks and drawing their favourite work (Images 5-10). They also looked at quite a few artist artworks that they discussed and created paintings inspired by them. Thank you to Kids Up Front for providing us the tickets to AGO..
On the last day, we had wonderful Show Case of all the works and kids were really excited to show all their wonderful work to their parents as they came to pick them up.
Thank you and Hurray to all the volunteers and staff members, who spent their uttermost best to make this week amazing for all the kids.
(Image 1, Lily and Simon preparing Snack)
(Image 2, Bright Geometric Abstract watercolours)
(Image 3, Abstract Expressionism)
( Image 4)
(Images5-10, AGO Trip)
Filed under Non Profit
Food –Draw, Paint, Sculpt but Never Eat
Over the winter programming, kids painted, drew and sculpted their favorite desert /food. The art was inspired my artists Claes Oldenburg’s food sculptures and Wayne Thiebaud’s cake paintings. It became the most fun and interesting art activity for the students as they pretend eating their hand-made sculpted food and paintings.
The sculptures took 2 classes for the students to finish. First class they molded paper into their desired food shape and then taped and glued it to maintain its shape. During the next class they painted the sculptures to bring their food to life. S ome create exaggerated versions of ice creams and sushi with chopsticks. Other students created burgers and chicken legs to munch on.
The desert painting also required two-step process. First the students underlay their paintings with brown under-paint for the shadows and then overlaid with bright colors to make their desert paintings more realistic.
Well, Art City not only had the kids make their favourite, sweet and yummy food but also made them draw and paint some healthy food such as the apple paintings inspired by the artist Paul Cezanne and some still-life fruits and vegetable drawings.
Filed under Non Profit
Art City Toronto 