Presented at the CLM
Spring Has Sprung!
March 23, 2025
The CLM celebrated the arrival of spring with artist Leah Gold, who helped visitors create their own personalized Toronto street signs. Guests also enjoyed our exhibit Between the Signs: 150 Years of Language in Toronto and co-curator Jocelyn Kent spoke about its development.
My Language, My Home
September 4 to December 4, 2024.
University of Toronto linguist Dr. Ai Taniguchi displayed comics based on her interviews with multilingual students about their experiences in Toronto.
The Museum hosted a reception to celebrate the exhibit on November 2, 2024. Professor Taniguchi gave a talk on the utility of comics in linguistic communication, and drew the portraits of three lucky raffle winners (including Director Elaine Gold) in her comics style.
Heritage Languages: Extending Variationist Approaches — book launch
Chair of the University of Toronto Linguistics Department, Professor Naomi Nagy introduced her essential new work at the CLM.
The book investigates the variations and changes that have occurred across generations in eight heritage languages spoken in Toronto.
September 29, 2024
The Macedonian Language Exhibit
Created by University of Toronto student Margaret Todoroska and University of Toronto linguistics professor Christina Kramer, this exhibit discussed the history of the Macedonian language and the community in Toronto.
Professor Kramer presented remarks at the event.
Todoroska and Kramer also created a booklet based on the exhibit.
June 23, 2024
Toronto Voices: Language and Identity at The Spot
This special CLM exhibit was created by youths from The Spot at the Jane-Finch Community Centre, with support from linguists, Vidhya Elango and Dr. Derek Denis, and York University students from the Public History course.
For our first outreach project, Professor Denis and Elango led sessions with the youths on perceptions of slang, and their own language use. The exhibit presents insights from the youths on English in Toronto and photographs they took in their community. See some of the panels below.
May 4 to June 18, 2024
In addition, the York students Melissa Douglas and Shiyan Liang created a dictionary based on the discussions with the youths, and with Douglas and Liang’s friends and family.
The dictionary contains examples of words in use. Check out the YouTube playlist of songs.
Toronto Landscape Observatory
Created for the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art, award-winning University of Toronto Professor Jane Wolff brought her interactive exhibit to the Museum.
The Observatory seeks to develop and decolonize landscape observation through engaging visitors with the surrounding environment with a collection of tools and walks.
Visitors were encouraged to contribute their own observations to the exhibit to build a new vocabulary of landscape.
January 17 – April 13, 2023
For the Sake of the Credit River
Created by York students in the Art et Peinture class at Glendon campus under the guidance of Professor Julie René de Cotret.
Each student contributed a piece inspired by conservation efforts on the Credit River in southern Ontario.
March 7 – April 13, 2023
TRANSFORM: Exploring Languages of Healing
TRANSFORM seeks to deconstruct what artist Alanna Kibbe calls “The Language of Healing.”
A creative expression of breast cancer survival, living with chronic pain and long term injuries, and transformation through the spiritual navigation of chronic illness, this exhibition walks one through different versions of healing the artist has moved through to survive and rise towards thriving.
Each of the pieces represents different versions of healing: The cocoon. Transformation. Rising through metaphorical death. Grief. Finding home within. Releasing the costume. Discovering flights of freedom. Re-becoming stardust.
Exhibition attendees were invited to participate in an interactive activity representative of the interdependence and community care the artist identifies as core components to the healing languages communicated through the work. Throughout the exhibition, the artist will collect the interactive components completed by attendees, to weave them into the piece itself, thus having interactive participants become part of the work.
March 23 – April 28, 2022; launch event on March 31, 2022
Coolie Hauntings
Professor Amar Wahab addresses the silence on indentured labour systems in the colonial Caribbean.
The exhibit reflects on the question: how do we creatively re-imagine the productive presence and voices of ghosts in the coolie archive? It offers a creative “archival ethnography” to think about questions around coolie transience and the in/visibility of absented presences in the official record by offering a visual language of the dead. The exhibit appears the embodied “coolie” as a ghostly figure who hovers over and under history from a certain disruptive positionality and therefore performs a strategic fetishism of (post)colonial power relations.
The exhibit presents images and installations featured in his book Disciplining Coolies: An Archival Footprint of Trinidad, 1846 (2019). The book critically and creatively engages with the transcripts of a British inquiry into the the torture, misery, and death of the labourers called “coolies” in official colonial discourse.
The exhibit and book were both launched at the Museum on October 24.
October 24, 2019 – November 25, 2019.
gravity/grace/fall
gravity/grace/fall is a meditation in poetry, gesture, and motion. Themes of gravity, levity, seasons, passages, and time cycle through this contemplative trio.
A physics definition of ‘gravity’:
“the force of attraction between all masses in the universe, especially the attraction of the earth’s mass for bodies near its surface.”
That’s us.
“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Renowned choreographer Carol Anderson, accompanied by celebrated dancers Terrill Maguire and Claudia Moore, presented her work gravity/grace/fall, which combines movement and spoken word.
November 22, 2018 and October 3, 2019.
An Evening with…
Prize-winning illustrator Vladyana Krykorka shared her experience illustrating Inuit stories. She collaborated with author Michael Kusugak to bring these stories to life. She also shared stories and slides from visits to Nunavik where she led book-making workshops for Inuit educators.
October 23, 2018
From Smoke to Cyber Signal
Abenaki artist Carmen Hathaway presents paintings and sculptures that combine traditional methods with digital technologies, including contemporary interpretations of the cultural heritage of Abenaki weaving.
This exhibit is part of the “Indigenous Art as a Sign of Resilience and a Means for Reconciliation” project. The closing event featured Nadine St. Louis, Indigenous entrepreneur of Mi’kmaq and Acadian heritage. St. Louis is the founder and executive Director of Sacred Fire Production, which works to promote Indigenous art and artists, and to raise awareness, break stereotypes, and foster cross-cultural dialogue for the inclusion and advancement of Indigenous artists.
January 9 – 26, 2018
The Best of All Worlds
A collection of seven multilingual stories written by Canadians for Canadians.
Local children’s authors read in their mother language, English, and French.
February 20, 2016
A Newfoundland Treasury of Terms for Ice and Snow
Marlene Creates’ exhibit explores the relationship between language and the natural landscape. The exhibit won the 2013 BMW Exhibition Prize at the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.
Creates published a book adapted from her documentary video-poem, From the Ground-Tier to a Sparrow Batch: a Newfoundland Treasury of Terms for Ice and Snow, Blast Hole Pond River, Winter 2012-2013 (2014). The first part of the book is a long poem in 40 parts, which proceeds chronologically through a winter, following the changes along the Blast Hole Pond River. The seasonal phenomena are recorded with over 50 named varieties of ice, snow, and winter weather. The second part documents sea ice in Conception Bay with many more terms.
Photo and video exhibit: February 1 – March 31, 2014