Join MOCA for our May Family Weekend! Bring your friends and family and find your inner poet with this series of creative workshops for both adults and children. Join us for family friendly tours all weekend, plus both child and adult-centric programming on Saturday.
Saturday Workshops
Abstracting the Greater Toronto Area
Saturday, May 4
Join artist and poet Ali Pinkney for two hour-long workshops that explore the mapped borders of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Through a series of interactive poetry-based activities and paper-and-pigment-based crafts, participants will relate maps of the GTA to star constellations. They will also learn the foundational skills of poetry.
About the Artist
Ali Pinkney is a writer, educator, and literary curator with an MA English Literature in the Field of Creative Writing from the University of Toronto (2023), an MA English Literature, and a BA Honours English Literature and Creative Writing from Concordia University (2021, 2017). She assists in the instruction of literary arts at UofT.
Child-Centered Workshop:
Participants will work together to draw a map of the GTA onto tracing paper in a connect-the-dots activity, creating their own constellations using watercolours, chalk pastels, and collage. Following this, each participant will have the opportunity to reflect on their experience through writing a poem related to the workshop.
Adult-Centered Workshop:
This workshop considers erasure poetry as a technique that artistically teases out the abstract nature of the lines that make up a map.
Participants will develop unique constellations by tracing their personal paths on a map of the GTA. Using newspapers as collage material and inspiration, participants will create poems responding to the prompt: “is this my GTA?” This process will allow participants to consider how borders can be arbitrarily drawn.
TD Community Sunday
Sunday, May 5
Welcome poets and poets-in-the-making for a family workshop this TD Sunday. Drop by MOCA and try your hand at making a collage through gathering words and phrases from newspapers and magazines to create imaginative visual poems.
This all-ages activity is designed to help participants gain confidence in their writing and gain a deeper understanding of figurative language and poetry.
Family Weekend Schedule
Saturday
1 & 3 pm Family-Friendly Tour
2 pm Child-Centred Workshop*
4 pm Adult-Centred Workshop*
*There is a fee of $5 per person. General Admission to the museum is not included. MOCA Members at the Individual level and above can access these workshops for free.
Sunday
12–4 pm: All Ages Drop-in Workshop*
1 & 3 pm Family-Friendly Tour
*Admission and workshops are free for all visitors on TD Community Sunday
