Past Projects

Harvest Festival

Harvest Festival is an annual neighbourhood event at Fred Johnson Park. For the last four years, Community Arts Guild has partnered with Scarborough Village Community Garden to bring art and performance activities, games, and veggie/plant giveaways to the Scarborough Village community.

Transformations

Our fifth interactive gallery show, SCARBOROUGH TRANSFORMATIONS, was an open creation, rehearsal and making studio for our new theatre production in development. The gallery offered opportunities for participants to contribute by helping make lanterns, shadow puppets, giant ice age creatures and tiny puppet stages telling stories of Scarborough’s past, present and future.  There were many performance workshops which included dance, theatre, puppetry, stiltwalking, singing and more. 

Unfolding

Presented in 2019 on the grounds of Cedar Ridge Creative Centre, UNFOLDING was a community-engaged play inspired by history and stories of Scarborough. Co-created by residents and artists over three years, the production explored themes of home, change, departures and arrivals, transformation and hopes for the future.

Interlacing: Weaving Stories of Scarborough

Interlacing was part of our early investigations into the official and unofficial histories, personal and collective memories, and changing identities of East Scarborough. It explored how the threads of our lives and stories are interwoven with the fabric of where we live and come from. Where do these strands form a tight weave? Where do the threads get lost? Where do they unravel?

We had two installments of this project in 2016 and 2018.

Lost & Found Triptych

The Lost & Found Triptych was the Community Arts Guild’s first independent project.  A series of three performance-based artworks inspired by stories told by local Tamil Seniors from the Scarborough Centre for Healthy Communities’ health and wellness programs, the artworks are all related to stories of people and things lost and found.

Plant Love was a participatory visual arts, storytelling, movement and music project that we offered during the COVID-19 pandemic, in partnership with Art in the Parks. The project investigated and celebrated the plants grown in the Scarborough Village Community Garden, and encouraged participants to exchange plant knowledge and stories through artmaking. We made activities accessible for folks to participate in from their own space by offering printable templates, mail-out art kits, and phone & video conference workshops.

Plant Love

Art Across the Distance

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we created and shared art activities to bring our community together while isolated. We shared printable templates for simple art projects that could be done from anywhere. We also offered art kits by delivery; music and storytelling activities by phone; and arts workshops over video chat.