WEDNESDAY MORNING: STUDENTS READY FOR THE ROAD IN 2022

Ready for the Road 2022

9th Annual Walk With Excellence Celebration 

By Stephen Weir

2019  walk photograph by weir

For all the Grade 12 students in the Jane Finch corridor’s four High Schools who have successfully completed their final year it is almost, and we stress the word almost, all over. The last “No more pencils, no more books no more teachers’ dirty looks” have been sung, it is now time for 500 teenagers to end their high school days by dancing in the street.

 

Get on your walking shoes kids, a 9-year tradition is about to start a new.  Postponed for two June years in a row because of the Covid shutdown, the Walk With Excellence Celebration will once again hit Sentinel Rd the morning June 8^th to introduce the new grads to nearby York University and their next level of higher education.

 

All are welcomed to celebrate this year’s graduates from the four high schools: CW Jeffreys, Westview, Emery and Downsview High. All four institutions are within walking distance of York University (north of Finch Avenue and Sentinel Rd.),

 

“The event begins at 10 AM inside CW Jeffreys with a kick-off of student presentations on school auditorium,” organizer Itah Sadu explained to the Caribbean Camera.” Following this is the 5km graduating parade of approximately 500 students to York University where a celebratory lunch and student awards will be shared.” 

 

The Celebration March begins at 11am. The teenagers will carry school banners and signs will head up the street to York.  Making sure the graduating students arrive safely CUPE 4400 union members and volunteers from the Toronto Caribbean Carnival will act as parade marshals along Sentinel Road.

 

Once at York the students will gather in a courtyard and listen to live music and listen to brief speeches from organizer Itah Sadu and senior officials of the university.

After all the formal speeches have been given and  student friendly meals are served there will be Caribbean music in the air. “We are also pleased to welcome Pannist Earl La Pierre Jr with his vivacious musical energy to the celebrations,” said Itah Sadu.

The point of the annual parade is to mark the graduation of the students and to encourage them not to end their studies after Grade 12.  Many of the students have probably never toured York – this event will give them that opportunity.

The Walk With Excellence was started by Itah Sadu and the  Blackhurst Cultural Centre (Formerly A Different Booklist Cultural Centre). 

CLAIRE WEISSMAN WILLKS EXHIBITION OPENS TODAY HELICONIAN CLUB 1PM

Major Celebration and Retrospective
Of the Challenging Drawings and Monoprints of 
Claire Weissman Wilks, 1933–2017

 

Toronto, June 4th – The Heliconian Club is presenting this retrospective The Genius of Claire Wilks. The official opening is at 1pm in Yorkville

The  official opening will take place today. There are several poets, artists, writers, and musicians who will take part in the opening. Two well known poets Anne Michaels, and Jessica Hiemstra, will read from their works.

Hiemstra will also read briefly from one of the late Claire Wilks’ books.   Curator Christian Bernard Singer will talk briefly at the works of art on display.  Wilks’ longtime partner, writer and publisher Barry Callaghan will also speak. 

Performing through the show will be jazz composer pianist Joe Sealy and Juno Award winning guitarist Dominic Mancuso.

 

This exhibition and a second exhibition of Wilks work that opens a few days later at the Gevik Gallery are presenting a mini survey of the startling, emotional drawings, monoprints and sculptures of the celebrated Toronto artist Claire Wilks (1933-2017). 

Wilks was a figurative artist and once called women’s bodies her 'chosen landscape,' but she did not consider this a political statement: "The female form is my line, the form lives in the brain of my finger." Yet, during the 1970s her erotic images of women were rarely accepted in conservative Toronto galleries because of their intense, carnal imagery. These drawings nonetheless contributed to a new dialogue about sexual desire from a female perspective, which happened to coincide with the first major wave of Feminism.

Wilk’s devotion to the naked female form kept her largely out of most Toronto galleries in the70s and 80’s. The novelist Timothy Findley wrote: “Looking at these drawings, women are going to know what it is to be a man; men are going to know what it is to be a woman. Nothing greater can be achieved but that we enter one another’s flesh through one another’s eyes. This is the ultimate compassion.”

Poet Anne Michaels writes: “Her figures embody every kind of dispossession - through sensation, communion, solitude, loneliness, muteness, grief, banishment. Ecstatic; bereft. Every kind of love.” 

 

The Toronto Heliconian Club, a non-profit association of women involved in the arts and letters It operates out of Heliconian Hall located in Yorkville. In existence for over 110 years, the Heliconian Club remains steadfast in its commitment to women living and working in the arts. It is located at 35 Hazelton Lanes in Yorkville.

 

Gallery Gevik, is devoted to exhibitions of established artists who represent Canadian art at its best. The Gallery is located at 12 Yorkville Avenue just down the street from Heliconian Club, the exhibition opens on June 11 at 1pm. 

 

Space is limited.

 

Heliconian Club 

35 Hazelton Ave, Toronto, ON M5R 2E3

(416) 922-3618  Issued by Stephen Weir 416-801-3101

stephen@stephen weir