Summer of Love at The Winter Garden

The Summer of Love at the Winter Garden

*The Creative Art Works team at the Winter Garden in Brookfield Place*

Public Artists

ArtsBrookfield has a history of supporting the arts at the Winter Garden Atrium and Brookfield Place, which have hosted ballets, concerts, and even a performance by the Big Apple Circus. This summer, a team of nineteen CAW Youth Apprentices and three Teaching Artists took up residence at the Winter Garden for a different sort of performance art. These young artists were commissioned to create four large canvasses for our long-standing supporter, RBC Capital Markets. They executed the paintings on the second-floor balcony overlooking the food court, where passersby were encouraged to ask questions and observe the paintings progress.

Anything But Boring

A focus group of RBC team members told our Youth Apprentices that they wanted art that would reflect RBC's core values of:

community
collaboration
diversity and inclusion
accountability and integrity.

What they didn’t want was anything boring. Tenjin Ikeda, a member of the RBC focus group and a professional print-maker, challenged our Youth Apprentices to design something unexpected.

“Corporate art can be very boring, because there’s a perceived expectation of what corporations want, which can be interpreted as sterile or somber. So, don’t give us what you think we want. Don’t give us stock photos. Be real. Be bold. Be honest. Challenge our expectations.”

— Tenjin Ikeda, RBC

A Groovy Thing Going On

The Youth Apprentices took the advice of their RBC clients to heart and began brainstorming ideas. The team, which included a mix of veteran painters and first-timers, had great chemistry, which fostered both fast friendships and an openness to new ideas. They turned their workspace, a vacant storefront scheduled for renovations, into an artist studio and covered the walls with sketches, color comps, and Post-It notes. When inspiration flagged, they would recharge with twenty minutes of dancing before returning to work with renewed energy.