Once again we are gearing up for a busy summer season of outdoor festivals and art exhibits. June is shaping up to be a crazy busy month. Fresh on the heels of our successful Exhibit at Toronto’s iconic Gladstone Hotel, we continue to expand our profile into the Toronto area with a new Exhibit opening at the Steam Whistle Brewery’s Art Gallery. We will be displaying our most recent artwork along with old favourites for the entire month in its wonderful Roundhouse.
Shortly after the Steam Whistle opening, we will be in downtown Sarnia on Saturday June 5th and 6th participating at its big outdoor festival called ArtWalk. It will be our first time participating and we are excited to bring our unique message of art and social consciousness to this part of Ontario.
While some of us are still in Sarnia, Hendrikus Bervoets, the Executive Director of Art for AIDS International, will be back in Toronto displaying our wares for four days throughout the child welfare conference of the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies.
The last weekend of June (the 25th, 26th, and 27th) finds us back in our hometown of London Ontario for the International Food Festival. It will be our first year participating at this event. There will be music along with lots of interesting food from all over the world and we always find that a conducive environment for communicating our message and selling our artwork.
Summer in the city will find us once again participating in London’s premier outdoor festivals at Victoria Park. Sunfest occurs the second weekend in July the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th. Sunfest, with its multicultural theme of music from all over the world, is a wonderful place for us to meet people from differing cultural backgrounds. They make a very receptive audience for our international artwork that has been created in six countries from around the world.
We have two weeks to recover before we participate in London’s well-known and loved Ribfest that runs from July 29 to August 2. Ribfest is always a popular destination for Londoners to visit during the Civic holiday weekend and we certainly have a great time being part of it.
We are particularly pleased to have such a busy summer schedule because it provides us with multiple venues in which to display all the new interesting and dynamic artwork that we have created in the last several months. We are looking forward to showing off our new collages from recent workshops in Johannesburg South Africa, schools here in Ontario, and artwork from Katimavik young people from all over Canada who are participating in Canada’s number 1 volunteer program.
Please come visit us. We hope to talk to as many people as possible this summer about what we do at Art for AIDS. We remain committed to our unique style of social justice that expresses itself through art as a way to raise much-needed funds for a serious global issue.