Alt-Arts:The Public Studio on Lansdowne Avenue
A series of profiles, written by Ashley Culver, highlighting alternative art spaces in Toronto and the people who make them.
Oasis Skateboard Factory, Parkdale Push, installation view, The Public Gallery.
Heading south down Lansdowne Avenu on the 47 bus, I get off at the Seaforth Avenue stop and arrive steps away from The Public Studio, an activist design firm with a storefront gallery. I dodge a dog walker and squint, stunned by the sun reflecting off the window of the two-floor red brick corner building just a block north of Queen Street West. I am curious, what does it mean for a small design business to run a window gallery in Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood?
This is a question the nonhierarchical team of The Public — Sheila Sampath, Nat Saveedra, LJ Robinson, and Erin McPhee — consider often and from various aspects. The Public is, in its own words, “a community-centered, social justice design studio” offering graphic design, web development, co-creative workshops, strategic branding, and creative campaigning for clients “working to change the world.”
The gallery began in December 2016 when The Public relocated after losing their office space on Wolseley Street when the building sold. The previous location had no public-facing access, so the window gallery was a new venture. Flavio Trevisan, who is the owner of The Public’s current space at 58 Lansdowne and Sampath’s brother-inlaw, had co-run Convenience Gallery in the window space with Scott Sorli from 2006 to 2011. Trevisan continued operating the gallery alone until 2016, when The Public began renting the ground floor. Before Convenience Gallery, the building housed a family-run convenience store, likely with a similar aesthetic to the dry cleaners with multiple handwritten signs in the window sitting kitty-corner.
The Public Studio, Common Threads, 2016, installation view, The Public Gallery.
“The Public is a container that exists and is shaped by the people who are in it,” says McPhee. “I’ve never experienced a work environment where the actual physical shape and the nature of the work shift to accommodate the people within it.” Wanting to “settle down roots in a place,” she recently switched from part-time to full-time work with The Public. Its shape-shifting “ball of slime” approach — in Sampath’s words — informs both the operation of the gallery and the studio’s design work. We’re sitting in the room behind the two-by-threeand-a-half-meter window gallery that functions as an office and meeting hub, complete with large Mac desktops and plywood furniture. “There’s power in naming the space as a gallery,” Sampath says. “How can we leverage that?”
Accessibility over obscurity. Art as activism. Challenge binaries: art and design, artist and non-artist, or this and that. Interrupt traditional hierarchical modes. “The gallery is an extension of our core personal values,” says Saveedra. The team works to democratize art by considering both who is invited to exhibit at their gallery and who occupies the sidewalk as the audience. In the nearly eight years of programming, the window has featured exhibitions by ad hoc collectives, architects, community leaders, local residents who immigrated from Tibet, members of the youth advisory board for Shameless (the award-winning independent Canadian feminist magazine for girls and trans youth, of which Sampath is the editorial and art director), organizers, professional artists, social justice activists, students of Oasis Skateboard Factory (an alternative high school program of the Toronto District School Board), the studio's own team members, and workers from Sistering (a multiservice agency for at-risk women and trans people experiencing homelessness), among others. This curatorial approach intentionally broadens the scope of who receives recognition as an artist.
Sheila Sampath, Conditional Design Workshop. Installation view, The Public Studio.
While preparing programming, The Public team converses with each exhibiting artist about the window gallery’s many potential audiences; the space, after all, is viewable around the clock, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. They work to ensure clear entry points into the work and to prevent potential audience members from feeling excluded. Through this process, The Public aims to make their window gallery relevant to their community. A bus turning the corner from Seaforth Avenue onto Lansdowne interrupts our conversation. Transit riders make up a regular and recurring portion of the viewership, along with parents and children on their way to Parkdale Junior and Senior Public School, which is across the street.
“When Parkdale Legal Clinic was facing eviction [in 2018] there was this feeling we should do something,” says Robinson. In response, they created a “display of solidarity with what was happening, responding to a moment.” From December 17, 2018, to January 31, 2019, cardboard microscopes floated in the window gallery, examining a line drawing of West End Toronto’s quintessential nineteenth- century Victorian buildings, complete with gable roofs and bay windows. Hot pink lettering around the lenses reads: “Who was here before? Who is free? Who is safe? Who has power? How does it all connect?”
From April 8 to May 30, 2017, artists Tzazná and Queso exhibited Art and Tomatoes as part of the Justice for Migrant Workers’ Harvesting Freedom Campaign, which marked the fiftieth year of legislation denying migrant farmworkers access to citizenship, and in conjunction with the Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts. Large round red cutouts of tomatoes, a vegetable tied to the farmworker movement, hung in the window with messages reading “50 years justice now,” “harvesting freedom,” and “decent housing status now.” The exhibition exemplified The Public’s disposition toward work that derives authenticity and sincerity from lived experience. “Nothing about us without us,” says Sampath. “Nothing in the gallery is about a community without it being from that community.”
Gentrification Tax Action (GTA), Gentrification Tax, installation, The Public Gallery.
The Public’s responsibility to their community is on full display in their zine Art, Design & Gentrification: A Primer. It is the eleventh in The Public’s Creative Resistance How-To Series of zines, available for free from their website, which aim to share The Public’s skill sets as a form of creative resistance. Sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification in 1964, and yet, as stated in the zine, “if you approach gentrification from a decolonial lens, these processes derive from a framework of settler colonialism that has been occurring for over 400 years.” The concept has long been and continues to be relevant to The Public’s neighborhood, which has undergone several transitions, from affluent summer homes on the shores of Lake Ontario to dwellings of working-class to middle-class families, including newcomers from the Caribbean, Vietnam, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, China, Hungary, Tibet, and Syria. With short-, mid-, and longterm strategies to build and maintain relationships in their neighborhood, it is clear The Public strives to be a conscientious neighbor.
Since the window gallery is supported financially solely by The Public’s client work, the team is beholden only to themselves and their community. This allows them complete independence, yet they occasionally feel uncertainty about decisions. Sampath was nervous about the current exhibition: a wall-to-wall installation of computer-printed protest posters declaring “Free Palestine” and “Let Gaza Live.” She shared her feelings and concerns about vandalism with her teammates. It was important to “articulate those anxieties without them being misconstrued as a lack of solidarity,” says Sampath. Her peers' ability to hold these worries and remind her of their insurance policy allowed them to proceed with the exhibition. Despite screaming passersby during installation, it remains in the window. Sampath says, “We didn’t have to deal with the consequences alone.”
I say goodbye to the team and let them enjoy the reminder of Friday. Across the street, waiting for the bus to take me home, my eyes rest on the red, black, and green signs in the window gallery.
Tzazn. and Queso, Art and Tomatoes, 2017, installation view, The Public Gallery.
by Ashley Culver
Ashley Culver (b. 1986) is an artist and writer based in Tkaronto/Toronto.
