Portraits from a pandemic
AGO, ROM showcase Torontonians’ artwork.
Two of Toronto’s biggest attractions want to showcase your pandemic art.
The ROM has leaned on its function as a family museum, asking children and teens to “help create a portrait of life during the pandemic” by submitting their original artwork. #MyPandemicStory began accepting submissions in April and is accepting them until the end of June.
“Art helps us cope with life’s great challenges by telling our stories through colour, sound and texture,” said Justin Jennings, ROM senior curator of archeology. We all have experienced the pandemic in our own individual way. “My big feeling may have been boredom. But other people had a lot of hardship, a lot of tragedy. So let’s bring those together.”
He mentions a photograph of raindrops titled “The Clouds Cry With Us,” submitted by Jordan from Courtice, Ont. There’s a melancholy to it. And then, it’s nice, he says to juxtapose that with the thoughts of a five-year-old whose artwork is sometimes quite happy.
Some of the artwork will be part of an in-person exhibition “in the fall, hopefully,” by which time the pandemic will, with any luck, be in the “rearview mirror a little bit. And we can move past the moment of dealing with the day-to-day to saying ‘Let’s come together,’” Jennings said.
Submissions to #MyPandemicStory can be made until June 27 at www.rom.on.ca/en/mypandemicstory. The Art Gallery of Ontario, too, has been inviting the community to submit artworks that “depict resilience in their everyday lives.”
“Portraits of Resilience” launched on March 16 with a call for submissions, which could be created in any medium — there are paintings, sculptures, Plasticine models, coloured-pencil drawings — as long as the image could be captured in a jpg file.
Since then the AGO has received more than 2,000 submissions from around the world, including from Hong Kong, Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea, the U.K., the U.S. and Turkey. The oldest entrant is 99 years of age and the youngest is three.
The deadline for submissions has been extended to June 25. Some of the work will go on display in the AGO next spring and the online exhibition will be accessible at ago.ca until the spring of 2022.
To see the exhibition or to submit your work, visit www.ago.ca/portraits-resilience and follow #PortraitsAGO.