Tuesday May 14

8:00    30 minute silent meditation in the Fireplace Room

10:00  Trip to grocery and art supplies stores for out-of-towners

4:00    Talk with Samay Arcentales Cajas

6:00    Communal Dinner

7:30    Collage Party

Samay Arcentales Cajas is a (Kichwa) digital media artist and filmmaker based in Toronto. In her creative practice she explores human connection and relationship to land, the meaning of urban indigeneity, and how to meld together indigenous cosmology with technology. Her works have been shown at ImagineNATIVE Film & Media Arts Festival, aluCINE Latin Film + Media Arts Festival, and Mayworks Festival of Working People, among others. Her last short film “In Moment” was commissioned by imagineNATIVE and premiered at their 2017 film festival.

Samay has also facilitated film programs at Sketch Working Arts, including Fluidity on Film, a film program for LGBTQ2S youth. She held her first solo show “Will You Listen?: Latinx Voices in Tkaronto”, a projection based media installation at the Whippersnapper Gallery in 2017. Samay currently works as video designer, production designer, and editor for various indigenous artists and filmmakers across the country, including the experimental film Dreams Untold, written and directed by Jamie Whitecrow, the futurist documentary The Ceremony, directed by Taina Da Silva and Rebecca Redden, and short film Paladin, directed by Lu Asfaha. She has worked as a videographer and editor for Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and video production assistant with the Chocolate Woman Collective.

Wednesday May

8:00   30 minute silent meditation in the Fireplace Room

4:30   Meet in Kitchen to head over to the AGO as a group.

6:00   Feminist art tour of the AGO with docent Maureen Da Silva 

Maureen Da Silva is a Toronto-based second-generation Portuguese settler and cis-gendered community-driven artist and art professional committed to an intersectional feminist practice. She is a printmaker specializing in silkscreen and lithography and dabbles in bookbinding as well. She has taken her love of print into the founding of the not-for-profit artist group The inPrint Collective, of which she is the Managing Director. Through the inPrint Collective, Maureen has been proud to showcase work in Scotiabank NuitBlanche (2012), Printopolis (2010), Culture Days (2010-present) and across the GTA as well as engage in a number of community-based projects with partners such as The Scarborough Museum, East End Arts, First Story Toronto and more. A 2008 graduate of York University’s B.F.A program, Maureen has also completed her Master’s of Arts at the University of Toronto (2009), as well as her Certificate in Museum Studies from the Ontario Museum Association (2013). Her research in her Women and Gender Studies Master’s program focused on the politics of inclusion within feminist art collectives, an interest which brought Maureen into the Feminist Art Conference committee. Her own practice in feminism and printmaking, as well as the artistic wealth of her print community has inspired Maureen to (hopefully) a lifetime of creativity and non-stop learning.

Thursday May 16

8:00   30 minute silent meditation in the Fireplace Room

4:00   Decolonization of the Islands Workshop with
           First Story member Trina Moyan

7:00 Community Art Share
Meet in the kitchen to go off in small groups to share and get feedback on your art project from your fellow residency artists

Friday May 17

8:00   30 minute silent meditation in the Fireplace Room

10:00  Meet Jen in the kitchen for a nature walk and tour of the island

4:00   Talk with Justine Abigail Yu

6:00   Communal Dinner 

Justine Abigail Yu is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Living Hyphen, an intimate journal that explores the experiences of hyphenated Canadians and examines what it means to be part of a diaspora. She and the publication have been featured on national and local media outlets including CTV National News,
CBC Metro Morning, CBC Ontario Morning, and CityTV’s Breakfast Television.
Justine Abigail is a fierce advocate for diversity and representation in Canada’s arts and literature scene. Her mission is to stir the conscience and spur social change.

Jordana Franklin is a curator and writer whose love of art, feminism, and collaboration brought her to FAC. She has an MA in Art History, where her research focus was on the individual, institutional, and collective memory. Jordana has worked for art galleries on land and sea and sat on the board of a public art gallery and non-profit arts organization. She was recently a jury member for the Ontario Society of Artists and is a member of an international curatorial collective known as 7×8. She also co-founded a blog that examines critical curatorial practices. Jordana has curated exhibitions in Canada, Hungary, and Italy

Sunday May 19

8:00   30 minute silent meditation in the Fireplace Room

12:00 Critiques with April Hickox for photography and video artists

April is also known as a landscape photographer explores notions of the wild and what we know wilderness to be. Over the years she continues to documented the overlapping layers of human and natural histories, as nature with our help reinvents itself. Here work can be found in numerous public and privet Canadian Collections has been supported by all levels of funding throughout her career and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Hickox is currently associate professor of photography at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto. An active community leader, the founding director of Gallery 44 Center for Contemporary Photography, and a founding member of Tenth Muse Studio, and Artscape Toronto. For the past five years she has been a member of the curatorial board of Art with Heart Casey House.

Notable exhibitions include the, Harbourfrount Centre, Winnipeg Art Gallery, The Maclaren Art Centre, The Oakville Galleries, Tom Thompson Memorial Art Gallery and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. Most recently her video work was shown at the Surrey Gallery in B.C.

Monday May 20

8:00   30 minute silent meditation in the Fireplace Room

11:00  Talk with Ilene Sova followed by critiques with painters /illustrators/collage artists

6:00   Communal Dinner

Ilene Sova is an Artist Educator with Afro-Caribbean Mixed Race, Seminole Indigenous and settler ancestry, who lives with a disability. As such, she passionately identifies with the tenets of intersectional feminism and has dedicated her career to art and activism. Ilene Sova is the founder of the Feminist Art Conference and Blank Canvases, an in-school creative arts programme for elementary school students. Sova is the Ada Slaight Chair of Contemporary Drawing and Painting in the Faculty of Art at OCADU University.

She holds an Honours BFA from the University of Ottawa in Painting and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Windsor. With extensive solo and group exhibitions in Canada and abroad, Sova’s work has most notably been shown at Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and Mutuo Centro de Arte in Barcelona. Her exhibit, Missing Women Project, garnered much attention around issues of violence against women in our local communities. Sova’s work has been featured on television, the internet, and in print media with features in Metro, Toronto Star, CBC Radio, CTV Canada AM and The Toronto Standard. Sova was invited by two Members of Parliament to bring her work to Ottawa for a national Women’s Forum on Feminism and the state of women’s rights.

Tuesday May 21

8:00   30 minute silent meditation in the Fireplace Room

Open Studio Day 

Wednesday May 22

8:00   30 minute silent meditation in the Fireplace Room

4:00   Talk with Apanaki Temitayo Minerve

Born in Toronto and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Apanaki Temitayo M is an author, spoken word poet, actor, multimedia artist and teacher. She is currently the 1st Artist-In- Wellness for CAMH. Was the 2017/2018 Workman Arts Artist-In-Residence. As part of Workman Arts Art-Cart Program at CAMH, she teaches art to participants with mental health and drug addiction. She has had pieces featured at Workman Arts, Being Scene 18th Annual Juried Exhibition 2019 at the Toronto Media Association Gallery and with a current solo show Oju Olurun: Eye of God at Full of Beans Coffee House & Roastery. She has made her international debut at the North Charleston Cultural Arts Department, 9th Annual African American Fiber Art Exhibition: Maya Angelou, with her original artwork, Mama’s Watching in South Carolina. Her New York debut at The Amazing Nina Simone Documentary Film by Jeff Lieberman, with her piece Nina Simone Fragmented. She honored to be the first woman of color to be in the Room Magazine: Woman of Color Issue for 2016. Her artwork Oshun Blooming was the face of Grow Room Feminist Literary Festival 2018 in Vancouver and now part of the private collection of Donna Slaught, of The Slaught Family Foundation.

Thursday May 23

8:00   30 minute silent meditation in the Fireplace Room

7:00   Community art share
Meet in the kitchen to go off in small groups to share and get feedback on your art project from your fellow residency artists

Friday May 24

8:00   30 minute silent meditation in the Fireplace Room

1:00   Meeting: planning space use and performance schedule for Open Studio

Saturday May 25

8:00     30 minute silent meditation in the Fireplace Room

10:00   Prepare for Open Studio and Exhibition (all day)

6:00     Open Studio and Exhibition

Sunday May 26

8:00    30 minute silent meditation in the Fireplace Room

10:30  All day group critique on final works 

6:00    Final Communal Dinner and Optional Beach Party / Camp Fire