Community Arts Project - Helping the Homeless!

For our community arts project, I was paired up with two other girls in the class. We decided to collaborate our project with Covenant House, a place where homeless teens are able to come and seek help. For our project we decided to create a hypothetical video supporting covenant house, trying to get people aware. In our video we would capture people's attention at Dundas Sq. by telling them about Covenant House. We would then distribute candles to everyone and would lite one for the next person to pass along the flame to the next. We would then lead a march towards Covenant House with our candles and our supporters. Once we reached Covenant House there would be candles lit everywhere on the steps. We would ask people to donate and to be aware of homeless teenagers and try and get them to come to covenant house so that they have a place to live.

I think our presentation went really well! There were a few mumbles in our speech, but that was just because of nervousness. I think we presented our idea to the class in the best way that we could. We distributed candles to the class for them to take home which read on the side "shed a light," meaning shed a light for homeless teenagers. I think that during our presentation we could have spoken slower and spoken louder.

We only heard back from the teacher what she thought our presentation was like. She told us that it was a great place to support and wondered how we would get people's attention if no one was going to come up to us at first to see what we were doing at Dundas Sq. We told her that we would have family and friends that would help us and would hopefully bring crowds of people to the square. We heard back from our friends that we did an amazing job and that they thought the candles were a great idea to do and to give out. The teacher asked us if the candles were cheap, and we told her that yes that they were cheap so it wouldn't cost a lot of money and that you could even get them at the dollar store. The next day I heard back from a friend on facebook that she really liked our presentation and thinks that we will get a great mark for how we presented it!

Guerilla Art - Sidewalk Art!

"Look Up The Sky Is Falling"

I did this art activity with a friend. We went out onto the streets of Toronto and used chalk to write "Look Up The Sky Is Falling." We wanted to see if people would stop to read it or if they actually looked up into the sky. When we first started doing the art piece a man came up to us and started talking to us about what we were drawing. The next person that came up to us was a lady. She made a somewhat rude remark to my friend that said "How old are you?" Meaning that we shouldn't be drawing with chalk on the sidewalk at our age. I felt as though she didn't know what exactly we were doing and that she didn't need to make such a rude comment.

Once we were finished drawing the words, we walked across the street to start to take photos of people's reactions. We got a lot of people looking down and reading what it said. We got a few people who actually started looking up to see if there was something going on, it was quite funny! Unfortunately there were no children around to see our drawings, but it would have been really interesting to see how they would've reacted to a colourful sidewalk. I think that since children love to play with sidewalk chalk, introducing them to different types of drawings/art works would get them more interested in what they can do. I would ask them what they though sidewalk art is to them, and if it is even considered art. I would let children draw whatever they wanted with the sidewalk chalk and let them explain what they drew. I loved playing with sidewalk chalk as a child and to be honest, I had fun when doing this art activity!

Here are some people's reactions: