Rachel Burns | Art Talk 9
Rachel speaking at Art Talk 9.
Filmed April 6, 2018, in the OCAD University Auditorium.
Insta: esa_contemporary_art + @esa_contemporary_photography
We are a small high school art department in the suburbs of Toronto Canada. A powerful community that works together to create a safe space and positive understanding of the world in order to create and make the most of amazing local, national, and international opportunities.
We changed our name to Contemporary Art a few years ago to reflect the diversity of interest and output of our community members. We do not follow a traditional approach to learning the same specific techniques and art history that is still common around the world, but help everyone to discover what it is that they are good at and like to do and help them become an expert at that thing or those things. This requires a great deal of trust and risk taking, honesty and perseverance. The process allows us to practice the sorts of skill sets normally discussed with corporate leaders - comfort with ambiguity, creativity, clarity, vulnerability, collaboration, working effectively with a variety of teams on each aspect of a project, ability to identify and make use of patterns, relationship building, empathy, risk taking, transformative mindset and a willingness to take part in the evolution of our program by explaining to others when something is learned or understood so that we can include it in both our common knowledge and within our curriculum.
We regularly participate in exhibitions, with as many as 230 in a year, in countries in Europe, the US and Canada. Our students have shown at Saatchi Gallery in London UK, the Albright Knox Museum in Buffalo NY, and dozens of commercial and community galleries around the world.
We are perhaps best known for Portfolio Day, which has generated at time of writing more than $110 Million Dollars CDN in scholarship offers to our grade 12 students. Portfolio Day at ESACA may be the largest portfolio event of its kind in history, with up to 150 post-secondary school representatives participating in a day long process where as many as 85 of our schools' grade twelve students install curated solo exhibitions throughout the first floor of our school. We have had more than four thousand visitors - members of the public, collectors, gallery owners, press, family and friends join us in the evening to see the show, which includes several thousand art works.
Please consider donating and support our small high school art program and our amazing and brave and talented young art students with their portfolio development and art school and art world dreams. Our annual school art department budget is $7000 with our department being responsible for several hundred students at a time - meaning that we are given about $10 per student per year. The remainder of our funds are acquired from private donations and we require them to continue. You can donate and receive a Canadian tax receipt here: https://tdsb.schoolcashonline.com/Fee...
We also sell a fair bit of our grade 12 student work on our website www.contemporaryartcommunity.com
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Thank you!
@esa_contemporary_art + @esa_contemporary_photography