COMMUNITY ART GROUP

The Power of Community & Healing with Art

Community Art Group - Art Binding People

“POV: Points Of View on Poverty; Two Sides of the Coin” is a Community based art program utilizing Art as the Universal Language: The Visual as Voice to Empower People in Poverty as visual expression transcends the boundaries of language, gender and ethnicity while empowering people with the opportunity to concretize their personal voice within a safe environment free of the fear of having to verbally speak. The group will create projects incorporating titles, which inform and clarify viewers about contemporary views and attitudes surrounding poverty and homelessness.

Community Arts Group

Toronto, Ontario

This series of process- driven workshops designed by Shelley Batcules and Imre Torma, founders of SMART SCKOOL focus on building community and empowering participants to describe and address their experiences living with poverty and hunger.

Participants create both individual and group art pieces from the perspective of folks who are traditionally thought of as struggling on the margins.
The call for social change now will be the binding theme across these collective works, and exhibitions.

Art is the universal language that transcends the boundaries of language, race and gender. It also is the
language of creativity, compassion, and a place. For millennia, people have communicated with images and
symbols as a form of dialogue since ancient times when hieroglyphs and wall paintings were the principal source of communication.

The principal goal of the Community Arts Group is to empower people who are confronting poverty in their own lives by using the visual as their voice to express their personal experiences around their struggles, their stories. This endeavor is undertaken in a safe environment free of the fear of having to verbally speak.