Art Not Shame is a Guelph based charitable organization that provides creative workshops with a view to talking about and reducing shame.
Our team was together the day the lockdown was announced; sitting around our communal lunch table (imagine?!), we were getting ready to launch one of our main program offerings, “F*ck Perfect,” as news of Covid-19 updated by the minute. We felt lost and deflated. We left that day with a vague and sinking feeling that we might not see each other for some time.
A couple months into lockdown, we were searching for ways to build community and speak to what was happening as we witnessed intersecting crises come to the fore, including increased isolation as a result of Covid-19, overdose numbers rising in our local community, and calls to rise up against white supremacy and anti-Black racism both here and around the world.
The Mural Project, the brainchild of social artist Melanie Schambach, emerged as one possible way to engage people across distance, and to act as a megaphone of sorts to voice issues of local and global relevance during this time. Melanie piloted her first virtual mural while stuck in Guatemala as a result of travel bans. We approached her about running one for Guelph and surrounding areas, with the intention of amplifying the voices of those who identify as Black, LGBTQ2I+, Indigenous, people of colour, newcomers, street-engaged, living with developmental exceptionalities, or struggling with mental health and addictions.
When she said yes, together with project partners Guelph Neighbourhood Support Coalition and Guelph Community Health Centre, we got to work reaching out to eleven local community service organizations to spread the word. We launched with over 65 participants, kicking the process off with an online hangout where all participants were invited to listen to the words of local Knowledge Holders.
Each week participants receive an email describing the weeks’ activities, with goals ranging from learning how to use metaphor, to learning about ourselves and each other through the process. The first week’s activities asked participants to name possible themes for the mural. Among the themes identified were: racial inequality, homophobia, mental health stigma, police brutality, disability advocacy, gender equality, culture, social action, uncertainty, equal access to food, shelter, and income, knowledge sharing, community connection, integrity, love, faith, empathy, transformative justice, creation, and being in relation to difference. Once the initial sketch of the mural was complete, Melanie broke it up into one massive paint-by-number project and handed it over to the Art Buddies to work more intimately with smaller groups of participants.
Art Buddies are a group of 10 local mentors/artists who remotely assist participants in filling out their section of the mural using different mediums, including printmaking, acrylic painting, photography and watercolour, to name a few.
In addition to the Art Buddies we have three paid positions who joined us through the Guelph Black Heritage Society with the intention of exchanging facilitation ideas and skills, as well as adding their voice to the project. And to our great fortune, beloved local musician Joni NehRita is witnessing the entire process and creating powerful musical soundscapes and songs based on what she is experiencing.
The process, and the final mural is, admittedly, hard to describe without witnessing it: but imagine one giant mosaic composed of many individual visual stories, using many different art mediums. Up close there is a richness of detail and specificity; from afar the stories are contained within one larger visual narrative that was co-created by Melanie, the Art Buddies, and participants. Additionally, each participant will record themselves explaining their piece and telling their story. Both the mural and the individual stories will be available online when it is complete. We are hopeful that the finished mural will be projected or displayed publicly in Guelph when completed.
We are so excited that we have been able to build bridges with so many wonderful artists, musicians, and participants from all of Guelph’s diverse communities, from Guelph to Guatemala. It has made this time rich and fruitful with art and stories. We have truly come to believe that our differences are what make us strong!
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LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
