{"id":24075,"date":"2014-05-30T19:26:16","date_gmt":"2014-05-30T23:26:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artoronto.ca\/?p=24075"},"modified":"2014-06-28T21:13:35","modified_gmt":"2014-06-29T01:13:35","slug":"sketch-has-a-new-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/?p=24075","title":{"rendered":"SKETCH has a new home"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interview with Rudy Ruttimann (R.R), Executive Director of SKETCH by Ella Gorevalov (E.G)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Staff of SKETCH<\/p>\n

SKETCH is a community art\u00a0organization engaging Toronto\u2019s homeless and marginalized youth. It provides studio spaces to participate in a variety of activities such as textile art, culinary arts, music production, dance, theater, digital media, printmaking and fine arts. May, 2014 marks\u00a0the completion of construction of SKETCH\u2019s new 7,500 square-foot studio space in the heart of Queen West at 180 Shaw Street. Rudy Ruttimann, the Executive Director of SKETCH, gives us a tour of the new facilities and tells us about how after 17 years in Toronto\u2019s art scene, SKETCH is ready to move on.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span>The entrance at 180 Shaw Street. Photo: Carter Brown<\/span><\/p>\n

E.G:\u00a0SKETCH is an organization which has spent almost two decades breaking through a mold of community partnership in the arts by starting on a grassroots level to target those who typically do not have access to art. Can you tell us about the history and the\u00a0roots of SKETCH; how did the initiative grow to be what it is now?<\/span><\/p>\n

R.R: It started all\u00a0as a small pilot project at the Yonge Street Mission. Artistic Director, Phyllis Novak, a graduate of\u00a0York University’s theater degree program, started SKETCH in 1996. She had a real interest in youth\u00a0and a\u00a0passion for art, so she\u00a0was volunteering at the Mission. It was there\u00a0that she came up with the concept of using art to engage young people who were living\u00a0with poverty and facing\u00a0immense social barriers.\u00a0She created a three-day art festival, called the Fix Festival, with the young people she had met at the Mission. It\u00a0involved a\u00a0parade down Yonge Street and\u00a0some workshops in an old empty factory on Lakeshore Blvd.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>An activity room. Photo: Carter Brown<\/p>\n

E.G: How\u00a0did Fix\u00a0Festival helped SKETCH\u00a0to have a studio space?<\/span><\/p>\n

R.R:\u00a0Novak\u00a0decided that there needed to\u00a0be a space somewhere for the youth to engage in programs, and was able to secure a 900 square foot space at Dovercourt and Queen, which was really just a little storefront space. It was there where the project has\u00a0really began. She and a group of\u00a0 participants\u00a0came together to combine their passion of theater and visual art. They began to look into issues surrounding addiction and homelessness,\u00a0 the main problems of the youth they worked with. Eventually one of\u00a0artists came up with the concept of\u00a0“artist in residence”.\u00a0Novak developed a program for her, so she could\u00a0become a peer facilitator\u00a0while she\u00a0was simultaneously developing her own body of work in order to have her own show. It was really then that the door opened to the public.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Life Drawing class. Courtesy of SKETCH.<\/p>\n

E.G: You have\u00a0came from a 900 square foot space to a 7500 square foot space. How did that happen?<\/span><\/p>\n

R.R: After the Artists in Residence and the daily programs were established, the energy really took off. Three days a week we held an open studio. One day was around visual arts,\u00a0the next\u00a0called metal-morphosis [working with sculpture and metal], and\u00a0the third\u00a0day people could work on whatever they wanted. Soon we were running art programs all over the city. We moved to King Street, to a space that were very community oriented. It was good for us to spend ten years developing what we wanted, what we see now as\u00a0our methodology. The space we\u2019re in now is brand new at Queen and Shaw.<\/p>\n

E.G:\u00a0<\/span> It seems\u00a0that SKETCH is ready to\u00a0stretch\u00a0in this\u00a0new space. Can you tell me more about your programs?<\/span><\/p>\n

R.R: \u201cUpping\u00a0our profile\u201d allows us to bring a lot more people into our space but we also want to\u00a0remain faithful to the roots and the principles of our original intentions.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The “future” Gallery. Photo: Carter Brown<\/p>\n

This is a space with many possibilities.\u00a0It has an industrial kitchen, studios for music production, spaces to produce art work\u00a0in any medium, and a gallery space to showcase it.\u00a0There are three layers\u00a0in our programs, such as\u00a0SKETCH programming; Community engagement – in which members of the community come in and run workshops or our youth are leading workshops;\u00a0and finally\u00a0rentals,\u00a0a new opportunity that allows us to rent out the space when it is\u00a0not being used.\u00a0Participants hear about SKETCH primarily through word of mouth and through referrals\u00a0from other community organizations that provide direct primary services such as shelter systems, health care, and legal aid.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A volunteer is\u00a0leading a textile making group. Courtesy of SKETCH.<\/p>\n

E.G: In your ideal world, what do you see SKETCH becoming? What are your goals?<\/span><\/p>\n

R.R: One of our dreams is to see SKETCH grow provincially. We are\u00a0already working in Ontario with different groups that are looking at the concepts we use and are implementing the idea of building a program for troubled youth within their communities. I would love to see somebody to\u00a0adopt us, somebody who really understands and\u00a0loves what we do and could invest in the vision and be a champion.\u00a0 The way that we are running SKETCH is\u00a0very similar to an alternative school. People get a chance here to play and to\u00a0explore but\u00a0it is also\u00a0a place of learning. We are\u00a0in\u00a0a discussion\u00a0with a few post-secondary institutions and hope to get an accreditation system set up between our programs and their credit system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Ella Gorevalov<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a space with many possibilities. It has an industrial kitchen, studios for music production, spaces to produce art work in any medium, and a gallery space to showcase it.<\/p>\n

Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24094,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[148,143,4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-carter-brown","category-ella-gorevalov","category-features","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24075"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24093,"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24075\/revisions\/24093"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}