Critical Distance Program Type Community Projects

This year, Critical Distance is turning 13, and while some might call it an “awkward phase,” we’re choosing this moment to celebrate how lucky we’ve been over the past 13 years.

It’s been our good fortune to collaborate with over 350 guest curators, artists, and co-presenting partners on 70+ exhibitions and curatorial projects, 30+ public art billboards, and well over 100+ art and educational events including screenings, performances, workshops, field trips, talks, and tours since opening our doors in 2013!

As we look ahead to our next 13 years, we’re asking for your support to keep the momentum going. If Critical Distance has ever supported, engaged, challenged, enriched, or inspired you, now is a great moment to give back. As a small arts organization facing real sustainability barriers, every dollar makes a huge difference in helping us continue to both provide, and thrive.

Click HERE to DONATE NOW!

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Critical Distance is pleased to welcome you to STUDY HALL, our newest initiative in support of critical curatorial inquiry, community, and practice. This Winter we’re opening up our space and our program to explore more nimble, flexible, responsive and mutually supportive frameworks for curatorial commoning and collaboration. 

All are welcome to drop in and visit, ask questions, peruse our featured publications, and join in the conversation on curating today. Outside public hours, visit our Instagram page @critical.distance for links to our survey, e-Shop, and newsletter subscription form, so you can be in the know on upcoming programs, events, and other ways to get involved.

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In 2023, we embarked upon a yearlong research and community consultation process under the banner of New Directions for Critical Distance. Still reeling from pandemic-related setbacks, we had identified strategic and financial planning as key to our recovery. Thanks to the Government of Canada’s Community Services Recovery Fund, we were able to design an integrated, multi-phase process that began in consultation with key mentors, curatorial peers, and stakeholders from across the sector. Through an in-depth survey developed in collaboration with senior market analyst and consultant Marina Mandić, plus over 40 hours of face-to-face community consultations between CDCC Director Shani Khoo Parsons and emerging, midcareer, and established curators from across Canada, we engaged a representative sampling of ~150 curatorial colleagues in conversation and critical questions…Find out more

As part of Ontario Culture Days at 401 Richmond Street West, Burnt Sugar artist Bushra Junaid will share her collage practice in a drop-in hands-on workshop. Junaid will describe how she has treated turn of the twentieth century photographs of Caribbean sugarcane workers as family portraiture; renaming and reinventing them to resist erasure. By collaging period ads onto the subjects’ clothing, she complicates understandings of Black Atlantic history.

Materials will be provided. Using paint and found materials (i.e. magazines, fabric, matte board, etc.) workshop participants will create one-of-a-kind collages that engage with the themes of the Burnt Sugar exhibition. We also encourage you to bring your own family photos, mementos, and interesting images — the better to make something truly meaningful to you.

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Diasporic Futurisms is excited to announce the launch of the virtual database Temporal Tempest at Critical Distance Centre for Curators on January 18, 2024 at 5pm. 

This project has been developed to understand and disseminate how artists and organizations are utilizing and engaging with themes of diasporic futurisms in Canadian arts culture. The database showcases visual art, sound art, media art, and documentation of curatorial projects that materialize the genre of diasporic futurisms.

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