July Issue No.1
Where to go, what to see, and who to hear — your guide to what’s happening across Southern Ontario
There’s a lot going on in this one. We launch two new series: ARTchitect and Upstream, the latter featuring Hamilton’s Mayor Andrea Horwath. Elsewhere, we spotlight Camille Turner’s long-overdue retrospective at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the opening night of Toronto Summer Music with Les Arts Florissants at Koerner Hall, and ten must-see events across the province, from a punk and emo festival at the Lithuanian House to Ali Cherri’s first Canadian solo show in Oakville. The Cannopy List, the job board, and Notes From the Recording round out what is, as always, your guide to what’s happening across Southern Ontario.
Results from our previous poll:
You spoke and we are listening — it looks like your top priority for expanding our coverage is uncovering the artistic layer within the culinary arts through in-depth profiles of celebrated restaurants in the province. On it! In the meantime, get a headstart on our coverage of the culinary arts with our Frameable Series, featuring frameable recipes for an Arugula Wild Rice Salad and Slow Cooked Bolognese.
For this issue of the Arts Near You Newsletter, we’re launching two new series: ARTchitect, which presents an artistic lens on Ontario’s architectural highlights; and Upstream, which explores the upstream and downstream relationships between art, culture, and politics. The first iteration of ARTchitect revisits our coverage of The Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts for a look at the early days of its design by Diamond Schmitt Architects. And Upstream begins with an excerpt from our interview with Mayor Andrea Horwath of Hamilton, speaking on how her office is supporting the city’s artistic industry.
Cast your vote in this week’s poll:
In our last issue, we took a close look at what an NDP government might mean for arts and culture in Canada, arguing that the most powerful cultural policy can be disguised as an economic one. Economic platforms that put money back in people's pockets, lower the cost of living, and extend safety nets to freelancers and gig workers don't just benefit artists; they create the conditions for audiences to exist in the first place. But the NDP is only one piece of the picture. Which federal party do you think would be the most effective champion for Canada's arts and culture scene? Cast your vote below—we’ll be looking at the other parties in the issues ahead.
Camille Turner: Hometown Queen offers the first in-depth retrospective of the artist’s nearly 30-year career. Raised in Hamilton (born in Jamaica), and now living internationally, Turner has developed a formidable body of work in performance, installation, photography, video, and sculpture. Her practice powerfully addresses racial and social politics, offering a critical analysis of the enduring systems of oppression in Canada and abroad. Her works are at times very stark and poetic, while at other times she uses irony and humour to underscore the injustices of anti-Black discrimination.
This exhibition traces her trajectory, from foundational works such as Hometown Queen and Miss Canadiana to recent large-scale video installations that draw on her research into Newfoundland’s ties to the transatlantic slave trade. Across 6000 square feet of media—including the interactive Afronautic Research Lab, audio walking tours, and archival documentation—the exhibition unveils her persistent conceptual and narrative threads on anti-racism.
Les Arts Florissants returns to Toronto for a breathtaking performance that tells the story of Orpheus’s descent into the underworld to rescue his lover, Euridice, from the grasps of Pluto, the god of the underworld. In addition to this powerful journey, the ensemble also performs their namesake work, Les arts florissants, celebrating the radiant spirit and expressive brilliance that have defined them for decades.
Your Guide to this year's Toronto Summer Music Festival
In Conversation with Artistic Director William Fedkenheuer
“Last year, I visited Taiwan for the first time with my grandmother, where her siblings’ families resettled after the Vietnam War. Not dissimilar to conflicts of fifty years ago, my conversations with relatives and strangers alike often turned towards plans for an uncertain future. These fragments form the basis of a text and light installation that pays tribute to those who leave, those who stay, and those who don’t quite have a choice.” – Lan “Florence” Yee
From the Archives: Issue 10
CANNOPY x Lan Florence Yee
Your recent works that challenge racialized and gendered expectations often involve the intersection of text and embroidery textile. How did you arrive at this unique cross-section, and what other possibilities would you like to explore with it?
LFY ── I come to text mostly through the media of signage, templates, and forms. They are everywhere and yet invisible to those who have normalised the ways they guide people’s behaviour. Everything from the font, size, colour, placement, but especially the repetition, are taken for granted. Growing up in Montreal as a trilingual person, the hierarchy of language was a prominent feature in my environment.
At the same time, I was doing research into early Cantonese history in so-called Canada. From the nineteenth century onwards, the conditions of economic and political survival for Cantonese migrants were tied to their labour. As “hard work” became a measurement of value, I got interested in the contradictions of recognition and desirability. I became interested in “working” through the restrictive belonging we may seek from labour, language, and family with hand embroidery and other kinds of intensive creation processes.
Through embroidery, the text that I add onto fabric becomes texture. It mirrors the embodiment of my process by logging the time spent with the object. That heavy marker of time narrows the chasm I often feel between myself and the viewer, who spends a relatively short moment in front of it. It’s a willfully inconvenient method of working because I want to slow down.
Little One | Till July 12 | TORONTO ─ Adopted siblings Aaron and Claire—one “normal,” one not—unravel alongside their unsettling neighbours in a real Toronto condo building, in this psychological thriller about how well you really know the people next door. Leroy Street Theatre & Dresser Drawer Productions | The Burroughes Building | Theatre
میں اپنی ماں کی بیٹی ہوں | I am my mother’s daughter | Till Jul 18 | ST. CATHARINES ─ Farheen Haq weaves video, sculpture, textile, and installation into a meditation on her mother’s arrival in Canada in the 1970s and the intergenerational relationships that followed. Niagara Artists Centre | Video/Textile Installation
Sugar Road | Till July 25 | PORT STANLEY ─ Kristen Da Silva’s romantic comedy follows a country music star and the small-town woman he left behind twelve years earlier, reunited on the site of a fading amusement park. Port Stanley Festival Theatre | Theatre
Hard Black love potions from a golden glass | Till Aug 1 | HAMILTON ─ Toronto-born, UK-based photographer Deion Squires explores Blackness in visual culture through an Afrosurrealist lens, blending photographic sculpture and image work. Curated by Christina Oyawale and Kelsey Myler. Hamilton Artists Inc. | Cannon Gallery | Photography/Visual Art
New Friends Fest 2026 | Jul 31 – Aug 2 | TORONTO ─ Now in its seventh year, this DIY punk and emo festival brings together international and Canadian acts including Rainer Maria, Carissa’s Wierd, and Tomb Mold. New Friends DIY | Lithuanian House | Punk/Hardcore Music
Blood Brothers | Aug 6–16 | TORONTO ─ Sheep’s Clothing Theatre stages an immersive, site-specific adaptation of Julius Caesar inside a University of Toronto fraternity house, presented through SummerWorks and Outside the March’s new Expansion Pack initiative. SummerWorks Performance Festival | Delta Upsilon Fraternity | Theatre
The Great Lakes | Jul 9 – Aug 29 | TORONTO ─ Michael Belmore, Robert Burley, Bonnie Devine, and Shelley Niro present sculpture, photography, and installation exploring deep, enduring connections to the Great Lakes watershed. Curated by Penelope Smart. Stephen Bulger Gallery | Photography/Sculpture
Windfall Light | Till Aug 30 | GUELPH ─ Contemporary artists’ work is paired with historical pieces from the gallery’s collection to consider how summer frames time, growth, and change. Art Gallery of Guelph Visual Art
Ali Cherri: To Fall, Patiently | Till Oct 3, 2026 | OAKVILLE ─ The Silver Lion-winning artist’s first Canadian solo exhibition presents sculpture, watercolour paintings, and film exploring how political violence resonates through bodies and landscapes. Oakville Galleries | Gairloch & Centennial Galleries | Sculpture/Film
Always in Fashion | Till January 3, 2026 | TORONTO ─ Curated by Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, this exhibition brings together more than two dozen Indigenous designers reclaiming cultural narratives and redefining fashion on their own terms. Textile Museum of Canada | Fashion/Textile
Issue 16 invites you to take a long, slow walk — through boardwalks, backstreets, and creative nooks — where the coffee is hot, the leaves are turning, and your favourite song plays on loop. Across 100 pages, and spanning twelve editorial series, we encounter over 30 artists who redefine presence: from Toronto’s dance and jazz scenes to London’s Afro-fusion rhythms and Paris’s experimental stages.
Upstream
If politics is downstream of culture, and art is upstream of culture, then it is important to trace the ways that political decisions and operatives shape the art that we see (and don’t see) in our publicly-funded institutions. This series would spotlight specific political trends and how they intersect with the art industry.
Mayor Andrea Horwath on Bringing Hamilton out of Toronto’s Shadow
INTERVIEW BY MICHAEL ZARATHUS-COOK | CHIEF EDITOR
When most people in Ontario think about the arts, Toronto comes to mind first. Hamilton has spent years being described as Toronto’s creative backyard—affordable, gritty, full of potential. At what point does a city stop being defined by its proximity to somewhere else and start being the destination?
Subscribe to The Cannopy Newsletter for the full interview.
ARTchitecture
Art and architecture go hand in hand, so with this series we want to capture some of the architectural marvels and blunders that contribute to Southern Ontario’s increasingly dynamic cityscapes. Along the way we hope you’ll discover new buildings worth travelling to, or perhaps a new lens on places that you’ve always overlooked.
The Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts
WORDS BY EMILY PITTMAN & ISABELLA ELIAS | PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF DIAMOND SCHMITT
The Four Seasons Centre remains one of Canada’s most compelling examples of the power of architectural design to seamlessly contextualise a world-class hub within a city’s bustling downtown core. Designed by architect Jack Diamond, who passed away in October 2022, it is the first building of its kind in Canada to be built specifically for opera and ballet performances.
From its sleek lines to soaring glass walls that invite a glimpse of the amphitheatre within, the structure communicates an openness that deviates noticeably from the more enclosed designs of its European counterparts. The most striking feature at first sight of the FSC is the way in which it is cohesively integrated into the immediate landscape, despite its impressive proportions.
The four-storey Isadore and Rosalie Sharp City Room lobby was conceptualised as a lantern, with the external glass facade allowing natural light to flood the interior during the day, in service of visual continuity with its surrounding structures. In the evening, the FSC swaps transparency for a dominating opacity, emanating a grid of warm light from its wide squat at the southeast corner of the University Avenue and Queen Street intersection.
Inside, the building’s genius resides in its subtleties. Washed in neutral-warm tones, the interior design imparts a sense of presence without competing with the dramatic colours of the ballets and operas on its stage. The liberal distribution of open spaces, and an uninterrupted floor-to-ceiling view, is one of the few grand gestures of the simultaneously awesome and intimate interior, aside from the expansive auditorium. The 2,071-seat horseshoe-shaped auditorium, named the R. Fraser Elliot Hall, is astounding in its ability to impose complete sensorial immersion within the art on stage, despite being mere metres away from the subway beneath and the cacophony of downtown traffic on all sides. Diamond’s design prioritised state-of-the-art acoustic technology that accentuates the palpably cathartic sound for every seat in the hall.
Notes From the Recording
The Arrival of Spring on Vinyl
What can Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony teach us about acceptance?
In the second instalment of Notes From the Recording, Cannopy turns toward Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony through the lens of vinyl culture featuring a recording by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Moving between personal listening reflections and broader musical history, this instalment considers how recordings of the Sixth Symphony have long wrestled with Beethoven’s own resistance to overt programmatic storytelling, while also reflecting on the nostalgia and visual language that surround classical records themselves. As with the series’ first entry, this entry treats the act of listening not simply as consumption, but as a lived ritual shaped by memory, collecting, and the physicality of recorded sound.
Executive Director | July 10 | KITCHENER ─ The Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery is seeking an Executive Director to lead the region’s public art museum through its next chapter, overseeing curatorial direction, fundraising, and community engagement. The role reports to the Board of Directors and leads a team of roughly ten staff, with a projected start date of January 2, 2027. Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery | $125,000–$140,000
Development Coordinator | July 12 | LONDON ─ The Grand Theatre is hiring a Development Coordinator to support fundraising operations, donor relations, and CRM data management for southwestern Ontario’s leading producing theatre. Duties include donor receipting, sponsor contract administration, and reporting on campaign performance. Grand Theatre | $45,000–$50,000
Accounts Payable Coordinator | July 13 | NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE ─ The Shaw Festival is seeking an Accounts Payable Coordinator to manage vendor invoices, reconciliations, and financial reporting within its Finance department. The position sits at one of the Niagara region’s twenty largest employers. Shaw Festival Theatre | $43,000–$46,800
Executive Director | July 19 | TORONTO ─ The Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre is searching for an Executive Director to lead strategic planning, fundraising, and cultural programming at the Toronto institution, which has served the Japanese Canadian community since 1963. The role oversees more than thirty staff and roughly 1,200 volunteers. Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre | $160,000 + bonus (up to $30,000)
Director/Curator | July 20 | TORONTO ─ York University is seeking a Director/Curator to lead the newly reimagined Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery, formerly the Art Gallery of York University, into a new standalone building designed by Hariri Pontarini Architects. The role oversees exhibitions, acquisitions, and public programming. York University (Goldfarb Gallery)
