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May-June 2018

Nine Canadian LGBTQ artists you need to know this Pride Month

Writers, poets, singers, and more!

Madi Haslam

In honour of Pride Month, we’ve compiled a brief list of LGBTQ artists from across the country who are changing Canada’s arts landscape. Know someone who should be on the list? Tweet us @thismagazine! DAYNA DANGER is a queer, Two-Spirit, Métis/Saulteaux/Polish visual artist based in Montreal. Danger’s medium shifts to capture her ideas, whether that […] More »
September-October 2016

Hey, Canada: Pay your artists fair wages

Artists deserve fair pay for their work, too.

Thomas Colford@TLColford

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, […] More »

The power of hip-hop

How music brings social change

Dina Lobo

“Having a message should be cool,” says Toronto hip-hop artist Rich Kidd on the power of rap. Kidd hosted First Out Here: Indigenous hip-hop, a documentary by Noisey, in which Kidd visited Winnipeg, Regina and Toronto to meet with Indigenous hip-hop artists. Kidd, born to Ghanian parents, says he drew a lot of parallels between […] More »
March-April 2011

This45: Sky Gilbert on sex workers’ rights group Big Susie’s

Sky GilbertWebsite

I moved to downtown Hamilton, Ontario, in 2005. We bought our three-storey Victorian home near Copps Coliseum at a price that would have been unheard of in Toronto. The corner we lived on had been labelled “the most dangerous corner in Hamilton.” But my shaved head and tattoos stood out less here than in the […] More »
March-April 2011

Michael Lewis’s grimly funny paintings evoke the great economic unravelling

Jackie WongWebsite

The hotel hallway is empty, save for trays of dirty dishes stacked on the muted blue carpet and on a room-service cart along the beige walls. A man in a loose tie bends over the cart, holding a glass of red wine and stooping tentatively over a half-eaten plate of food. He reaches for a […] More »
January-February 2011

Marites Carino’s film HOOP is a mesmerizing duet for camera and dancer

Amy Reiswig

Dance is an art form often discussed in terms of its complexity and mystery. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” W.B. Yeats famously asked. One wonders, then, what he would make of dance film. For when you add a second layer—the dance of a director’s eye and viewfinder around the dancer—you get […] More »
May-June 2010

A graffiti artist ditches toxic spray-paint for eco-friendly DIY pigments

Rob Thomas

Pablo Picasso had his so-called blue period. Ottawa artist Stefan Thompson is exploring a green period. Thompson first made a name for himself on the streets of the capital as a graffiti artist. Working under the pseudonym Maki, Thompson populated nooks and alleys throughout the city’s downtown with a menagerie of dazzlingly rendered and brilliantly […] More »
July-August 2008

An Alberta sculptor fights oil companies to exhibit art on his own land

Amy FungWebsite

As you walk through Peter von Tiesenhausen’s land, artwork emerges as if summoned from the ground up. Ships and nests made of willow branches appear along well-worn paths. Statues carved from logs stand watch from between the trees. In Tiesenhausen’s studio, small canvases that resemble the cracked earth of recent droughts are propped across the […] More »
September-October 2009

Postcard from Marfa, Texas: Southern lights

Souvankham Thammavongsa

When you drive into Marfa, Texas, from El Paso the first thing you come across is a tiny Prada store. No one works there and no one shops there—it’s a sculpture, built in situ by artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset. Marfa, current population 2,121, became an unlikely modern art destination when the famous minimalist Donald […] More »
January-February 2010

For artists embedded in Afghanistan, propaganda concerns linger

Nick Taylor-VaiseyWebsite

Young-adult novelist Sharon McKay has visited some rough parts of the world in search of material for her stories. When she was writing War Brothers, a book that follows five child soldiers through war-torn Uganda, she travelled to that country to interview kids on the ground. For an upcoming book about girls in Afghanistan, titled […] More »
July-August 2009

Listen: Tim Hecker’s sonic geography

Graham Lanktree

Quebec artist’s electronic soundscapes are rooted in our home and native land LISTEN: “200 Years Ago” from Tim Hecker’s An Imaginary Country On September 30, 2006, as part of Toronto’s interactive art celebration Nuit Blanche, Montreal musician Tim Hecker hid 10 speakers in the branches of a tree across from the Mercer Union art gallery. […] More »