Newcomers participate in two art exhibits at Nocturne

Art has the ability to bring people together. On Saturday night, October 13, thousands of people gathered in Halifax and Dartmouth to take part in the annual Nocturne: Art at Night festival.

Newcomers from across the Halifax Regional Municipality spent the past three months working with local artists as a part of Welcome to this Place to create two art exhibits for Nocturne.

Welcome to this Place is a national art project, taking place in five cities across Canada: Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax. The goal is to create a series of collaborative projects and events that promote urban parks and public spaces as places of arrival, where newcomers to Canada can find friendship, cultural and creative expression, connect to their new country and other Canadians. This project is coordinated by Mabelle Arts.

Exhibits

Welcome to This Place Gathering: Picnic Table Prints

Location: McFee Centre for Creative Learning, 50 Queen St, Dartmouth.

Picnic Table Prints was an outdoor, collaborative printmaking project to explore place and build connections between newcomers and other community members. Participants worked together to create large-scale relief woodcuts based on their own unique experiences at Glen Garden community garden in Clayton Park. This project was lead by artist and educator, Charley Young, and presented as part of Welcome to This Place.

Beading Treaty

Location: Treaty Space at NSCAD port campus, 1107 Marginal Road.

Beading Treaty is a community collaborative project – beading the individual words of the Peace and Friendship Treaty of 1725. This project encouraged participants to engage in dialogue about the Treaties of Peace and Friendship, giving non-Indigenous participants space to contemplate their role in reconciliation and shared responsibility and providing Indigenous participants space to share their individual perspectives.

We would like to thank the artists who gave their time and facilitated the art projects for this year’s Nocturne: