Mayworks 2017 Festival

The 32nd annual Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts – Art Against Precarity – opened to a packed house at Carleton Cinema for the screening of A Day’s Work, followed by an equally successful multi-art presentation, A Journey to Belong, on Sunday at Alliance Française Toronto. The Festival continued with multi-disciplinary events that thematically highlight the state of precarious work and workers’ struggles against precarity.

THANK YOU FOR MAKING #MAYWORKS2017 A BIG SUCCESS!

Thank you to our fantastic sponsors, community partners, board and staff, and of course, our audience, for making the 32nd annual Festival – Art Against Precarity – very successful! Special thanks goes out to the 2017 artists, performers, and other contributors, for sharing their works with us.

ART aND TOMATOES

Opening Reception & Festival Launch:
Monday May 1
7 pm – 9 pm
Steelworkers Hall
25 Cecil Street

Exhibitions
April 8 – April 30, The Public Window Gallery, 58 Lansdowne Avenue
Dates TBC, Steelworkers Hall, 25 Cecil Street
May 1 – 28, Whippersnapper Gallery, 594b Dundas Street West

Art and Tomatoes is a visual exhibition and public installation that highlights and reflects on the Harvesting Freedom campaign, one of the most important workers’ rights, anti-racist, migrant justice mobilizations of 2016. Exhibiting at three distinct spaces – a contemporary art gallery, an activist design studio and a workers union hall – this fluid intersection of art, design and activism carries a deep intentionality about the artworks and their impact. Art and Tomatoes also serves as a conduit for its young, queer cultural workers of colour’s unapologetic demand to be recognized as artists and leaders in their communities.
Join the artists and Mayworks for the opening reception and festival launch at our home venue Steelworkers Hall following the May Day Toronto rally and march on the International Workers’ Day.

Artist statement By Tzazná + Queso

2016 was the 50th year of the migrant farmworker program. 50 years of workplace abuse, accidents, deaths, and of black and brown people putting food on our tables yet actively being excluded from our communities. It also marks 50 years of farmworker survival and resistance in the face of repressive immigration, labour and housing laws. The Harvesting Freedom Caravan (HFC) was launched by Justice For Migrant Workers (J4MW) to mark this anniversary and call for permanent residence for farmworkers and all migrant workers in this stolen land we call Canada. J4MW is a political collective made up of mostly migrante women and people of colour who are farmworkers, unpaid organizers and allies. This exhibit is a way of giving back to the workers and community members who supported the HFC and continue to fight for fair working and living conditions.

Tomatoes have a long relationship with the farmworker movement. It was a wildcat strike of tomato pickers 16 years ago in Leamington, Ontario – the “Tomato Capital of Canada” – that gave rise to this movement (as memorialized in J4MW’s logo). The visual identity of the HFC was based on images taken in Leamington by farmworker organizers. Campaign materials evoke the fields sowed with tomatoes, vegetables, and tobacco, and the raised fists of workers who toil and resist. Hundreds of red bandanas were used by farmworkers to protect against reprisals and deportations. The oversized vegetables and giant red fabric tomato disrupted daily life as the caravan crossed Ontario. Additionally there are pieces of new original artwork by community artists that were involved in the campaign.

The campaign brought up very important issues around work, racism and immigration; however the fight against sexism and homophobia within the movement was invisible, with some organizers feeling that they had to hide their gender/sexual identity. Like many movements, this one struggles with how to include those issues in the continuous work. In that context, building this project from the young, female/gender nonconforming, queer perspective of the curators is itself an act of resistance and of taking up space.

Co-presented with Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative – Toronto, No One Is Illegal, Opirg York

Co-sponsored by STAC, USW 1998

STRIKE A CHORD 

Opening Reception & Performance:
Thursday May 4, 6 pm – 8 pm
Exhibition: April 20 – May 27
Gallery Hours: Tuesday & Wednesday: 10 am – 2:30 pm, Thursday & Friday: 12 – 6 pm, Saturday: 11 am – 5 pm
Sur Gallery, 39 Queens Quay East, Suite 100

Sur Gallery is Toronto’s first gallery dedicated to the implementation of art projects, which showcase and promote contemporary Latin American practices. A project of Latin American-Canadian Art Projects, Sur is envisioned as a platform of innovative ways to interpret and showcase Latin American art, and opportunities for audiences to understand its relevance in today’s global context. Strike A Chord resonates with Mayworks’ artistic vision and this year’s theme in its insistence on the activist role of art and its call on artists to produce meanings in times of injustice and uneasiness.

Curatorial statement By Tamara Toledo

To ‘strike a chord’ is to create or trigger an emotional negative or positive response to an action. In this exhibition, artists respond to times of peril by presenting scenarios of violence, responding with the action of protest and healing while conjuring an atmosphere of resistance. At times when our role as citizens seem to ever more bluntly demonstrate that actions need to be taken in order for there to be change, Montreal-based artist Claudia Bernal, Toronto-based artists Coco Guzman, Julieta Maria and David Salazar, use performance, video, installation, sculpture and drawing to position themselves as activists in a society that has revealed its ultra-right wing ideology.

Artists in Strike a Chord present multiple perspectives and offer the possibility of change through the use of various tools to activate social integrity, social justice, and respect. While both Claudia Bernal and Coco Guzman tackle performance and drawing as change catalysts and see the power of individuals capable of redefining the course of history, David Salazar exposes the vulnerability we all share and the obstacle that blocks our paths exposing our precarious lives. Julieta Maria takes us home, a comforting and nurturing encounter with our mothers, exposing our true nature to survive despite sentiments of fear and isolation lingering in the world today. During times of uncertainty and anxiety, it is artists who create meaning and a sense of purpose when all else seems to be crumbling. Artists raise their voices; they elicit and provoke those who do not want to change.

Co-presented with aluCine Latin Film + Media Arts Festival

BOOK LAUNCH AND PANEL | THE STORY OF ALBERT JACKSON

Wednesday, May 3, 7 pm – 9 pm
A Different Booklist, 777-779 Bathurst St
This event will see the launch of a new picture book by and for children about the story of Albert Jackson, Toronto’s first black postal worker who faced racism from the other postal workers. Following the book launch is a panel discussion moderated by Itah Sadu (A Different Booklist) and featuring Maryama Ahmed (Jane Finch Action Against Poverty), Mark Brown (Canadian Union of Postal Workers), and Kingsley Kwok (Ontario Public Service Employees Union).

FILM SCREENING I A DAY’S WORK

Friday April 28, 7 pm – 8:30 pm (Doors open 6:30 pm)
Carlton Cinema Auditorium 9, 20 Carlton St
Wednesday May 3, 6 pm – 8 pm
Driftwood Community Centre Room 6, 4401 Jane St

About the case of Day Davis who was killed on his first day of work as a temporary employee at the age of 21, A Day’s Work provides a strong analysis of the $100-billion temporary staffing industry that is putting millions of workers at risk in the U.S. Through a multitude of experts’ opinions, it offers a closer look into the industry, along with an incisive critique of the many corporate employers driven by profit over responsibility, and their complicit politicians. Balancing its traditional documentary storytelling is the film’s gripping portrait of Day’s family in their earnest search for answers, as narrated by his 17-year-old sister Antonia.

MULTI-ART PRESENTATIONS | JOURNEY TO BELONG
Sunday April 30, 2 pm – 4 pm
Alliance Française Theatre, 24 Spadina Rd

Journey to Belong features the drag performance Sarap by Patrick Salvani aka Ms. Nookie Galore, the short film The Sunflower Man by Monica Gutierrez, and the visual exhibit My Journey on the “Pathway” by Kara Manso, aka Kristina Torres. These bold and beautiful works are brought together for their common thread of migrant activism, their shared investigation of the power of art to empower, express, and create change, and their connection to our deep desire to belong. Following the presentations is a panel discussion facilitated by Monica Gutierrez, featuring Patrick Salvani, Heryka Miranda, Juan Luis Mendoza de la Cruz, and Kara Manso.

WORKSHOP | WRITING WHILE BLACK: Exploring Urgency Access and Intersectionality

Workshop 1: Saturday May 6, 11 am – 1 pm
Workshop 2: Saturday May 6, 2 pm – 4 pm
The Public Studio, 58 Lansdowne Ave

Part group discussion, part reading salon, part creation lab, Writing While Black engages participants in a discussion on zines written by people of colour and specifically the means in which indie print-culture can galvanize movements for racialized people. This workshop is facilitated by Whitney French, founder ofFrom the Root.

LIVE MUSIC AND PERFORMANCE | PACKINGTOWN
Sunday May 7, 7 pm – 8:30 pm
Steelworkers Hall, 25 Cecil St

The video ballad Packingtown shares the vibrant people’s history of North Edmonton through original songs and video interviews with people who worked at the meatpacking plants and lived in the community during the height of the meatpacking industry there (early 1900s to 1980s). The 60-minute live music and video performance weaves music and lyrics written by Juno-nominated songwriter Maria Dunn, with video footage, historical photographs, and video interviews collected and edited by videographer Don Bouzek of Ground Zero Productions (GZP) and historian-curator Catherine C. Cole with the support of northeast resident Janice Melnychuk. The performance will feature Maria Dunn accompanied by Shannon Johnson and Jeremiah McDade of the Juno award winning Celtic-world fusion band, The McDades.

ART VS ALT

Art vs Alt is a day of conversations and a platform for presentations of work by concerned artists, a day to come together to work out how to collectively confront the dramatic rise of the right.
Culture has always been a major part of the left, and for the present it may be our most important intervention strategy. Let’s move it forward. Let’s ask what we should be doing.
The conference is open to anyone interested in the culture and politics of the left. Discussions and plenaries on subjects chosen by partici- pants will be held throughout the day. Artists are also invited to give a 3-minute presentation of their work during four half-hour segments scheduled throughout the afternoon.

An undertaking of the CultCom of the Socialist Project, Mayworks and ASpace.