Dear Readers, My 10-year-old Maya spends up to 5 hours an evening on schoolwork but mostly reading for pleasure. I often have to remind her to eat at the dinner table by saying “Stop reading!”  It takes me back to my days of 4th Grade so immersed in a book, and makes me think ….. When was the last time I was “hooked on books”?  Much of what I read nowadays is strategic and far from “reading for pleasure” for which I miss the feelings! My only contribution to Maya’s reading for pleasure is to follow her lead when she completes it with full understanding and satisfaction—ready to embrace the next one.   To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries. (A. C. Grayling) Reading for pleasure is delighting and informing at the same time. It’s always our hope that we’ve done a bit of that with each issue. Summer is upon us! What is your summer reading list? Cheers,   Keiko Honda, Ph.D. Editor-in-Chief Chair, Community Engagement...

            By Patrick McGuire Photo credit: Noriko Nasu-Tidball, Keiko Honda, & Albin Sek              If spray paint is the brush of the times then the stencil artist is king.               Banksy and Shepard Fairy are among the most popular and influential artists in the world and the street art movement they’ve lead has created the images that have captured the spirit of our times. Both honed their craft on the streets, using stencils and spray paint to reflect and shape their urban environment. Robert Naish is not a street artist because that is not where he shows his art, but his stencils are from the street but his art encompasses the whole urban environment.                Naish finds his stencils everywhere. In thrift stores, junk shops, roadside stands and garages sales, they are the fly swatters, the kitchen tools, the plastic railroad tracks and children’s toys, the ones we throw away, the ones with interesting shapes that he can pin to the canvas and spray. He uses them for their shapes, for the lines they create when he places them with precision. He sprays on top of them with bright colors on giant canvasses to create intricate works that are stunning to behold. He has thousands of stencils to choose from.               “It’s endless,” says Naish, “I have more stencils than I could use in a dozen lifetimes. The things people throw away are like gold to me.”   Naish first began to paint with stencils and spray guns after painting extensively with oil and brush and exhausting all his ideas with them. He needed to do something different and found his answer in the city around him.               “Stencils allow me...

  By Sean Yoon Photo Courtesy of Colleen McLaughlin Barlow   Despite exhibiting artistic talent early in her childhood, artist Colleen Barlow had been channeled towards becoming an English teacher or journalist by her family based upon her aptitude in reading and writing with the idea that an education should lead to a job. Colleen would follow this thought process throughout the early stages of her education, going on to pursue a bachelor’s degree in journalism at Carleton University in 1976. What she encountered in studying journalism was that the field of journalism quickly proved to be an extremely rigorous and competitive environment as Colleen recalls, “Fifty percent of your mark in 3rd year reporting was running the C.B.C. News Room for one afternoon in Ottawa and you were being watched by professional journalists who at the end of the day, would say whether you passed or not. You might’ve been working for three years on a degree and you could have just been cut right then.” Ultimately surviving the competition, Colleen began her career as a journalist at the age of 21 after graduating in a class of only 42 students from a starting pool of near 400 first year students.   The stress that came from a rigorous, competitive environment would persist throughout Colleen’s career as a journalist, which culminated in instances where her moral values were skewed negatively. Colleen recalls a particular instance of this phenomenon stating, “It’s very stressful and you start to get some very odd values like I actually remember being in a war zone in the Bekaa Valley. Nothing had been happening for about three or four weeks and then suddenly there was some skirmishing going on and I thought to myself: ‘Great we’ve got something for...

  By Kenta Motoike   Purpose and Overview  The goal of the intergenerational creativity project, led by Vancouver Arts Colloquium Society, is to strengthen the connection between youth and seniors through the sharing of their experiences and stories in a collaborative manner. These stories and experiences are conveyed and expressed through multidisciplinary formats in order to facilitate interactions between youth and seniors. The project chose “placemaking” as multidisciplinary format to inspire people to collectively reimagine and reinvent everyday spaces as the heart of every community, including public and semi-public spaces such as boulevards and front yards.  The Placemaking Team comprised of all ages is directed towards addressing the intergenerational and intragenerational distance faced by youth and seniors due to their differences in age, culture and experiences. While youth and seniors at times have trouble relating to each other due to their perceived differences, this distance is further exacerbated by the fact that we live in an increasingly privatised world. Public sites; places for people to converge and congregate such as parks and public parks are dwindling. This matter is compounded by the systemic tendency to prioritise personal and corporate privacy at the expense of the community. Some may say we live in a state of communal limbo, where people are in proximity to each other physically, yet we remain emotionally distant and disconnected. Large scale systematic change on society is daunting yet achievable, but it must begin locally with a social ripple. The article intends to elaborate on the progress in the Placemaking Team through the process involved in the completion of one boulevard located near 23rd and McKenzie St, namely Oliver’s boulevard. Concept and Execution On Sunday March 31st, work on Oliver’s boulevard commenced, however prior to actually working on the garden itself,...

By Amy Cheng   This spring I had the pleasure of being invited as a participant of the Weaving History Together: Making a Collaborative Blanket project led by Vancouver Arts Colloquium Society, which is an interactive and collaborative scheme designed to bring our neighbourhood together as a community through weaving a community blanket. Not community in the way it is used to describe a target market where conversations are only grazing the surface level. I’m talking about a real community of diverse people, of all ages and backgrounds, invested in each other. With that in mind, I spoke with the project facilitator, Debra Sparrow, an eminent weaver on her vision and inspiration for the project, and some of the other participants, like myself, on the process and the significance they have found through this initiative.   “I wanted to facilitate art that both the young and the old could easily participate in, because I believe art can be created by everyone—we are all creative,” says Debra. Of her own work with textiles, Debra describes, “The art of weaving is familiar to every culture, making it an ideal tool in creating communication. Conversations and understanding can’t help but manifest across a loom.”   Also inspired by the her affectionate memory of the Kerrisdale Community Centre as a child, Debra says, “I think it would be really fun to weave stories from the threads of our experience and communicate our stories with others. Binding our stories together in creating a beautiful community blanket.” She hopes to demonstrate the way our stories reflect the knowledge and wisdom that are part of every generation. “We need to listen, then listen some more,” Debra explains. “We just have to pay attention.”   “This project will do just that. As others...

By Ellen McLaren Photos by Keiko Honda When I arrived at the Marpole-Oakridge Community Center, the mood was busy and the people were bustling, making last minute rearrangements in the gymnasium, where the Vancouver Regional Heritage Fair Showcase would soon be taking place. After the giving the room one final sweep, Wendy Hallinan led Keiko and I toward the rows of projects, explaining that though the Heritage Fair has been an annual event since 2004, last Saturday (May 16) was its public debut. By taking place in the community center, members of the Marpole-Oakridge community were able to share in the knowledge that participating students, grades four through ten, had been readying for presentation since January. An adjudicator herself, Wendy would soon have the difficult task of determining especially standout projects. Hallways made from poster-board stretched from one end of the gym to the other, each one different from the next, covered in carefully lettered titles and bright illustrations. There were photographs and dioramas, miniature mansions and handmade brochures – some students even dressed for the part: I met a viking, a Scout, a basketball player and a young lady who had drowned on the RMS Empress of Ireland.  Giddy with anticipation, students darted here and there, eyeing their peers’ projects, reevaluating their own, and staying on the lookout for Janet Morely to ask her any last minute questions. Janet, coordinator of Vancouver Heritage Fairs, was doing some juggling of her own, fixing nametags and speaking with fellow organizers, like Marpole-Oakridge Community Association President Mike Burdick, who gave opening remarks at the kickoff ceremony. Before he welcomed and congratulated participating students, setting the rest of the afternoon into motion, I had the chance to speak with Janet (albeit briefly, her list of things to...