Art Cart Launch “Art Cart” Takes Community Art to City Streets
Art Cart Launch
“Art Cart” Takes Community Art to City Streets
Fri Mar 23, 2012 – 11:00am Oppenheimer Park, 400 Powell Street (@ Jackson)
VANCOUVER BC, Coast Salish Territories – Gallery Gachet and Oppenheimer Park are cutting the ribbon on the Art Cart. This is a community red ribbon cutting, so please join us!
The Art Cart is a mobile art gallery and vending cart. With its light, aerodynamic design it is attached to a bicycle or pushed by hand, and features art by people facing barriers to accessing resources and space.
“Art Cart takes the ‘art gallery’ concept into the community at large,” says Lara Fitzgerald, Gallery Gachet’s Programming Director. “It can roam freely into neighbourhoods, encouraging the public to engage with art in new ways, while allowing emerging community artists to reach a wider audience.”
The Art Cart launch is timely. Artists and collectives continue to lose studios and gallery spaces to gentrification in the Downtown Eastside; Gallery Gachet itself may be losing its longtime home at the end of 2012. The Art Cart underlines the precarious existence of many artists, while celebrating community engagement with a vibrant local art movement. It will also serve as a roving hub for curated exhibitions, community workshops and public events.
“The launch of the Art Cart shows the determination of local organizations to serve the residents of the community, and to provide them with a imaginative and exciting mobile gallery,” says Terry Hunter, Artistic Producer of the DTES Heart of the City Festival. “This is community art in action. And dollars in pockets for low income residents. And community pride!”
The Art Cart is a collaboration between the Oppenheimer Park community and Gallery Gachet’s artist collective, providing alternate means for creative exchange, empowerment and art sales. Through a collaborative ideation process, it was designed by industrial designer Dean Bennett, and manufactured by Toby’s Cycle Works. The project was made possible by the City of Vancouver’s Great Beginnings Program and with support from the Community Arts Council of Vancouver.
About Gallery Gachet: Gallery Gachet is a unique artist-run centre located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside established in 1992. Through artistic means, Gallery Gachet aims to demystify and challenge issues related to mental health and social marginalization, to educate the public and promote social and economic justice. http://gachet.org
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