« Please join us on Sunday, November 2 from 5 to 10 PM for Viva Creatividad! a party, exhibition, performance, and fundraiser at The Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen Street West, Toronto.

This exciting event launches a new and major endowment for the arts at York’s Faculty of Environmental Studies. Over time, this fund will support students and local artists, program development, collaborations with community-based partners, special events and research support.

The party also celebrates ten years of the faculty’s work in environmental and community based arts, activism and social justice. As we mark the 10th anniversary of the Community Arts Practice (CAP) certificate and the 20th anniversary of the faculty’s Eco Arts and Media festival, we would like to celebrate you and the contribution of your organization to the growth of our program. At the same time we will be honouring Professor Emerita Deborah Barndt whose work on environmental and community based art has been seminal to our faculty for many years and who has recently retired.

The party brings together alumni and students, community artists and organizations with whom we have collaborated over the past ten years. The visual arts exhibit will include “From Spark to Fire: A Community Arts Retrospective” which features a dozen of the local community arts projects with which our students have collaborated. So this is a good chance to connect with the creative pulse of environmental and community arts in the GTA.

If you can attend Viva Creatividad! on Nov. 2, please RSVP online http://fes.yorku.ca/viva, so we can plan for food.

This gathering will connect us across generations and promote the creative and committed work of former and current students, community partners, and friends. »

-submitted by Deborah Barndt