It’s All Right Now

Summer 2020

It’s All Right Now is a public art project and a collective movement that confronts and captures our varied perspectives, experiences and understandings of life in COVID-19.

When entire communities, cities, or nations are tested, specific symbols and slogans tend to emerge as points of connection or collective rallying cries. The repeated chorus that “we’re all in this together” offers comfort in unity, but doesn’t necessarily reflect the spectrum of experiences, sentiments, and thoughts that we each hold. 

In May, twenty Toronto-based artists were commissioned to respond to a simple inquiry: “What words are you living by?” The artists each created powerful textual responses in their own visual styles that, together, speak to the diversity and multiplicities of this complex moment: hopeful, fearful, forward-looking, introspective, joyful, even rousing.  

Amidst the ongoing strain of COVID-19 — which disproportionately impacts BIPOC communities — and concurrent, widespread protests against violent injustices specifically targeting Black and other racialized peoples, The Bentway recognized the importance of foregrounding those communities’ voices within this ongoing project. 

It’s All Right Now Curatorial Take Over, featuring BSAM Canada Artists

In collaboration with Quentin VerCetty (featured in the first phase of It’s All Right Now), The Bentway invited Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM) Canada to curate the next phase of It’s All Right Now, selecting ‘artivists’ from impacted communities to consider the prompt, “What words are you living by, right now?” from their own perspectives, unified under their own curatorial statement: 

BSAM Canada Institute curated this continuation of The Bentway’s #ItsAllRightNow campaign, which recognizes that what is happening, overwhelmingly, is all right now. It simultaneously addresses that, what is occurring is not alright, especially for the Black community. Through the lens of six talented Toronto-based Black and Afro-Indigenous creators, this collaboration aims to highlight that there are visions being planted for a better future. Representing various disciplines, each creator was selected for their already existing efforts in sharing speculative messages of hope and uplift during these times. The created works reflect attributes that are pushing folks to move, feel, and exist beyond what we see happening. Collectively the message is: Know that it’s going to be more than alright and that we are living proof of the Black future! 

The City as Canvas 

It’s All Right Now manifested first on generously-donated digital billboards across the city (including along the Gardiner Expressway and at Yonge-Dundas Square). Sites that had, in “the before”, been platforms for consumer marketing, used to share mass directives on public health safety and social distancing guidelines, were re-tuned for a newly honest and artist-driven dialogue. 

In the weeks that followed, this project has continued to roll out on Toronto’s streets, walls, civic landmarks, and digital public spaces with a social media take over, led by Quentin VerCetty of BSAM Canada Institute (July 9th – 19th), as well as along the Waterfront and The Bentway itself; claiming the city itself as a canvas and reaffirming the importance of the public realm. (Find and see this project in person!

participate

We hope that you too will add your voice to It’s All Right Now by joining us in building a collective time capsule. 

Let’s not forget this experience; let’s confront and capture it. 

artworks

  • Anne Michaels
    Anne Michaels
    Summer 2020

    Anne Michaels is a novelist and poet. Her books are translated into more than fifty languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the Lannan Award for Fiction. Among many other honours she is a Guggenheim Fellow, has received honorary degrees, and has served as Toronto’s…

  • Ani Castillo
    Ani Castillo
    Summer 2020

    Ani Castillo is first and foremost a Fellow Human. She was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. It was pouring rain on that summer day and she loved life from the first breath. Ani became a newspaper cartoonist at age 20, by pure accident. For the next 14 years her cartoons were published in Mexican and Canadian…

  • Dan Bergeron
    Dan Bergeron
    Summer 2020

    Dan Bergeron is a public artist who employs a range of styles, themes and materials to activate and explore the meaning of our shared public spaces. The shape, texture and location of a site and its history or current uses dictate the form and content of his projects. Dan’s projects are sometimes commissioned and sometimes…

  • Bekah Brown
    Bekah Brown
    Summer 2020

    Bekah is a multi-disciplinary artist of Anishinaabe and mixed European descent who grew up in northern Alberta on Dene territory. Her work reflects what she sees in society. She is continually learning her Anishinaabe culture, using her creative practices to connect and heal. She aims to use the platforms she can access to amplify the…

  • Esie Mensah
    Esie Mensah
    Summer 2020

    Esie Mensah is someone whose work – every performance, project, and partnership – embodies the multifaceted artist, and whose creative footprint extends to many genres, disciplines and regions. As a dancer, choreographer, movement director and speaker, Esie brings her mastery in storytelling to audiences as diverse as her experience. From working with megastars like Rihanna,…

  • A.F. Moritz & Blaise Moritz
    A.F. Moritz & Blaise Moritz
    Summer 2020

    A. F. Moritz’s most recent books of poems are As Far As You Know (2020) and The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018), both from House of Anansi Press. Blaise Moritz is an artist and writer living in East Toronto. He is the author of two books of poems, Crown and Ribs (Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2007) and Zeppelin (Nightwood Editions, 2013).

  • Mahlikah Awe:ri
    Mahlikah Awe:ri
    Summer 2020

    A Canadian Poet Of Honour, Mahlikah Awe:ri, Enml’ga’t Saqama’sgw, (The Womxn Who Stands and Walks In The Light) is an award-winning; Haudenosaunee Kanien’kéhà:ka & Mi’kmaw L’sitkuk of the Wolf Clan, from the Territory of Kahnawá:ke and the Unceded traditional homelands of the Mi’kma’ki of Kespukwitk, with 9 Generations of Black Loyalist, African American, Afro-Caribbean and…

  • Daniel Rotsztain
    Daniel Rotsztain
    Summer 2020

    Daniel Rotsztain is the Urban Geographer, an artist, writer, and cartographer whose work examines our relationship to the places we inhabit. The author of All the Libraries Toronto, Daniel is a frequent contributor to CBC Radio, and has had work featured in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and New York Magazine. He is the co-lead of plazaPOPS,…

  • Quentin Vercetty
    Quentin Vercetty
    Summer 2020

    Quentin VerCetty is an award-winning multidisciplinary visual griot (storyteller) and art educator. VerCetty’s artistic work explores ideas around the Afrotopia and Afrofuturistic public art and the use of semiotics to tell metanarratives about society and politics. VerCetty’s art has been in numerous media outlets and publications. Along with showing his work in countries on every continent from Japan, Haiti, Peru, Ghana, Australia,…

  • Tessar Lo
    Tessar Lo
    Summer 2020

    Born in Jakarta, Indonesia and raised in Toronto, Tessar Lo works in a variety of mediums and employs diverse approaches toward surface and story. Lo is keen on language, time, the unplaceable and the preposterous. He is motivated by the transitions synonymous with world-building and wishes to engage in modes of mythology.

  • Christine Brubaker & Cathleen Sbrizzi
    Christine Brubaker & Cathleen Sbrizzi
    Summer 2020

    Christine Brubaker is a director, writer, and performer and is a dual citizen of Calgary and Toronto. Cathleen is a Costume Designer, Cutter, and illustrator working out of Calgary, AB, Canada. Cathleen’s formal training began at Trozmer Universidad de Diseño in Puebla, Mexico where she learned the basics of patterning and construction.

  • Queen Kukoyi
    Queen Kukoyi
    Summer 2020

    Queen is a Black Bajan of Nigerian Ancestry, Queer, Femme presenting, Mother, Author, Educator, Scholar, Activist, and International Artist as well as the Executive Director of Operations & Finance with Black Speculative Arts Movement Canada. As a creative, Queen Kukoyi explores spoken word poetry, digital collage, and animations along with installation work that explores concepts…

  • Shawn Micallef
    Shawn Micallef
    Summer 2020

    SHAWN MICALLEF is the author of Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness, Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto and The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure. He’s a weekly columnist at the Toronto Star, and a senior editor and co-owner of the independent, Jane Jacobs Prize–winning magazine Spacing.  Shawn…

  • Adeyemi Adegbesan
    Adeyemi Adegbesan
    Summer 2020

    Adeyemi Adegbesan is a Toronto based photographic artist whose practice aims to examine the intersectionality of black identity. Reflecting on blackness through pre-colonial – colonial – present day and future timelines; across regions, religions, varying levels of income, and political lines; Adegbesan interrogates the dichotomy of the richness of black experiences with the imposed societal…

  • Hazel Meyer
    Hazel Meyer
    Summer 2020

    Hazel Meyer is an artist who works with installation, performance, and text to investigate the relationships between sexuality, feminism, and material culture. Her work aims to recover the queer aesthetics, politics, and bodies often effaced within histories of infrastructure, athletics and illness.  

  • La-Vane Kelly
    La-Vane Kelly
    Summer 2020

    Hazel Meyer is an artist who works with installation, performance, and text to investigate the relationships between sexuality, feminism, and material culture. Her work aims to recover the queer aesthetics, politics, and bodies often effaced within histories of infrastructure, athletics and illness.  

  • Levyi-Alexander Love
    Levyi-Alexander Love
    Summer 2020

    Levyi-Alexander Love is an Artist born in Toronto, Ontario. He is passionate about forwarding those of African descent in the Queer and Trans community by creating spaces for folx to be free. As a man of trans experience, he holds to the strength of those in the Black and Queer community who have paved the…

  • Max Dean & Andrew Savery-Whiteway
    Max Dean & Andrew Savery-Whiteway
    Summer 2020

    Max Dean is working and staying at home where he continues to ponder how to make and exhibit his large scale sculptural installations and photographs. Andrew Savery-Whiteway was born and raised in Trenton, ON. After extensively studying Jazz performance through his adolescence, Andrew enrolled in the Ryerson School of Image Arts and pursued a photography…

  • Sean Martindale
    Sean Martindale
    Summer 2020

    Sean Martindale is an internationally recognized and award-winning interdisciplinary artist and designer based in Toronto, Canada. His interventions activate public spaces to encourage engagement and often focus on ecological and social issues. His playful works suggest alternate possibilities for existing spaces, infrastructures and materials found in urban environments. Frequently, Martindale uses salvaged goods and live…

  • Ness Lee
    Ness Lee
    Summer 2020

    Ness Lee draws upon history and personal narratives to create tender and surreal illustrations, paintings, sculptures and installations. Exploring states of mind during intimate stages of vulnerability, Lee’s work takes form as an effort in seeking comfort, forgiveness and desire for an end of a self-perpetuated state. Based in Toronto, their work has been featured…

  • Bruce Horak
    Bruce Horak
    Summer 2020

    Canadian artist Bruce Horak lost 90% of his eyesight to cancer as a baby and identifies as Legally Blind. His work seeks to explore the unique way he sees the world, experimenting in visual art, performance, storytelling, and music/sound design. He delights in shifting perspectives and inspiring others to do the same.

  • Hiba Abdallah
    Hiba Abdallah
    Summer 2020

    Deeply rooted in a socially engaged ethos, Hiba Abdallah’s work examines and responds to issues directly experienced in diverse communities. Her practice aims to re-imagine the cities and places that we encounter by using locality, civic narratives and political structures as tools for fostering collective agency. She has created work across media – from public…

  • Malcolm-Emilio
    Malcolm-Emilio
    Summer 2020

    For the past 10 years Malcolm-Emilio has consistently created work that inspires new perspectives on how to communicate and navigate in diverse cultural landscapes.

  • Anahita Dehbonehie
    Anahita Dehbonehie
    Summer 2020

    Anahita Dehbonehie is an Iranian performance designer, creator and installation artist. Currently based in Toronto, her practice is founded on the principle that truths are communicated most powerfully through evocative sensory experiences. She is drawn specifically to work that questions form and content while creating space for contemporary conversation. The evolving relationship between participant, creator…

  • Peter Morin
    Peter Morin
    Summer 2020

    Peter Morin is a grandson of Tahltan Nation ancestor artists. Throughout his artistic practice, Morin investigates the impact zones that occur when Indigenous practices collide with Western-settler colonialism.

  • Nicole Taylor
    Nicole Taylor
    Summer 2020

    Nicole “Nico” Taylor is the Executive Director of Governance & Communications for the BSAM Canada Institute. Nicole is a writer, scholar, dancer, cosplayer and activist who uses feminism and critical race theory to dissect social constructions surrounding race and representation, especially as they pertain to how we make sense of the images that surround us.

  • Will Kwan
    Will Kwan
    Summer 2020

    Will Kwan is a Hong Kong-born, Toronto-based artist and educator. In 2018, he completed a half-kilometre long public mural along Toronto’s lower Don River valley for Evergreen’s public art program.

one year later

It’s ALL (Still) Right Now 

March 2021 marks one year of COVID-19. One year of lockdowns. One year of Zoom parties. One year of physical distancing, masks, remote working, parents under strain, and the unchanging everyday of the pandemic. One year where stark social inequities have been magnified for all to see.  

We are taking this opportunity to look back at It’s All Right Now – our 2020, COVID-responsive public art project that captured shared hopes, gratitudes, fears, melancholies, and joys, our “truths of right now (then)”. More than thirty Toronto-based artists and the general public were asked to respond to a simple inquiry: “What words are you living by?”.  

Now, one year after the first lockdown, we’ve gone back to some of these same voices to ask them to reflect on their submissions. In a time when every day feels the same, how have their feelings, hopes, and thoughts changed? What words are they living by, now? 

Displayed together, the original works and reflections remind us of where we were then and uncover the tremendous impact of one year living with COVID-19.  

Unfortunately, for the time being, It’s ALL (Still) Right Now.

supporters

It’s All Right Now confronts and captures our varied perspectives, experiences and understandings of life in COVID-19.

Coproduced by:
The Bentway and Cossette

Presenting Partner:
Waterfront BIA

Media Partners:
Astral Media
Outfront Media
Hivestack
Grassroots
Branded Cities
Pattison

Supporters:
Barbara & Dougal Macdonald
Whitman Emorson
Concord Adex
Craft PR

Cultural Partners:
Sketch Working Arts
Tangled Art + Disability
Outside the March
Workman Arts
Black Speculative Arts Movement