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The Visual Arts Centre’s Outreach Programme is mandated to facilitate public engagement with the visual arts, to move art more fully into the centre of our lives and to reach those who might otherwise not have the opportunity to participate in the visual arts. We have been actively involved in community outreach programmes and projects for the last twelve years, either on site at our School of Art and gallery or out in the larger environment. The Outreach Programme operates on a project by project basis; we work collaboratively with other educational institutions, community organizations, independent artists and social workers, lending our expertise to projects that embrace art as a means of social or individual well-being, conflict resolution, etc. As a non-profit organization, we seek individual funding per project from foundations, corporations and government agencies; projects are dependent on receiving adequate funding. In addition, we contribute ten percent of the Centre’s fundraising revenues to these projects.
The Visual Arts Centre has worked with a wide range of partners to provide, for example, specialized ceramic programmes and workshops to youth and teens with learning disabilities and emotional and intellectual challenges. We work with teens at risk or with special needs partnering with such organizations as Dans La Rue, L.O.V.E., and numerous teen community centres. Through generous funding from various foundations, we have worked with the Montreal Institute for the Blind and the MacKay Centre for the Hearing Impaired. Through partnering with socially engaged multi-discipline artists, other projects have embraced adult populations; the visual arts are employed as a tool for conflict resolution and the promotion of multicultural understanding.
This past year, the Centre’s community outreach initiatives extended across the city, from Ecole Louisberg in Cartierville to John Bosco School in Ville Emard, where students created a multi-media mural to creatively enliven an empty school corridor.
Last year the Centre collaborated with the Montreal Association for the Blind in a
Project sponsored by the Webster Foundation. Our teacher, Helga Schleeh, worked with visually impaired teens to create self-portraits out of clay. In the accompanying photo you can see the truly rmarkable results of that project, in which teens used their sense of touch to shape their facial features and hands in clay. The portraits were mounted and are now permanently installed for all to admire. It was a particularly fulfilling project, as the teens reveled in this opportunity to express themselves through this three-dimensional material.
We are deeply grateful to the EJLB Foundation who have generously supported our Outreach programmes for the last eleven years. We have also received funding from The Chawker’s Foundation, le Fondation Jean & Marcel Coutu, the Zeller Family Foundation, CRB Foundation, TD Bank Financial Group and the City of Westmount. To all our sponsors, the Centre is deeply grateful.
If you would like more information or would like to sponsor a project, we would like to hear from you. Please contact us by telephone: 514-488-9558 or e-mail: outreach@visualartscentre.ca
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