Building community by making art together
The Artists in Communities program makes our neighbourhoods more vibrant. We use art as a catalyst for engaging individuals and communities, inspiring participation, and building relationships.
We host artist residencies each year in participating community centres to support artists working in neighbourhoods and encourage a wide variety of interactions between artists and residents.
Artists collaborate with community members (who may not see themselves as artists) as creators, producers, performers, and active audiences.
The residency projects leave lasting physical or social legacies in the community, such as learning new creative processes, developing collaborative skills, creating an artwork.
Mapwork Quilt Project
Toni-Leah C. Yake, artist and community facilitator
Mount Pleasant Community Centre
Toni-Leah is an interdisciplinary artist and community arts facilitator dedicated to creating inclusive, experimental, and collaborative spaces for youth. Their current work at Mount Pleasant Community Centre focuses on exploring sound and visual art as tools for creative expression, skill-building, and community engagement.
In 2025, Toni-Leah is leading a series of innovative workshops that integrate sound mapping, modular synthesis, stop-motion animation, and visual experimentation. These programs invite youth to investigate their environment through deep listening, field recording, and interactive media, culminating in a collective digital sound map of the Mount Pleasant area. Additional workshops explore the intersection of sound and image through stop-motion animation, liquid light show techniques, and found footage manipulation, providing hands-on opportunities for young artists to develop their creative voices.
Rooted in a commitment to accessibility and artistic experimentation, Toni-Leah’s practice encourages youth to push the boundaries of traditional media, embracing both digital and analog tools to create work that is immersive, meaningful, and reflective of their own experiences.
Toni-Leah C. Yake (European; Kanien’kehá:ka, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, Turtle Clan) resides on xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm, Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ territories. As a composer-performer, she is informed by kanyen’keha (Mohawk language), her embodied response to the land, and both conscious and unconscious realms. Guided by dreaming and Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) epistemology her work engages with liminality and spatialization, illuminated with archival recordings, synthesis, and noise.
Toni-Leah is a recent recipient of the First Peoples Cultural Council Individual Artist Award (First Peoples Cultural Council 2024),Bill Jeffries Award for Indigenous Students in the Arts (2025), and the Southham Prize (Canadian Music Centre - 2025).
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Aaron Friend Lettner Makes Unusual Books
Dunbar Community Centre
Working primarily with photography, Aaron Friend Lettner traverses the crossways of culture, memory, and place. His work is distinguished by its esoteric flair and he sees bookmaking as a ritual act, where seen and unseen worlds elide. He has a natural ability to make artmaking approachable for all ages, creating excitement and curiosity though storytelling in unique ways.
Aaron received the inaugural Burtynsky Grant in 2016 for Doorway. In 2022, he won a Canadian national book design award for his work on anglepoise, which toured in Canada, Japan, and Germany. His books are held in special collections at the National Library of Germany and Simon Fraser University.
With over a decade of experience in various forms of storytelling, as well as a plethora of public works and arts-based programming, Aaron will now work alongside older and younger generations at the Dunbar Community Centre for the next 2 years. Through a series of community-based workshops and longer-term projects, Dunbar residents will have an opportunity to learn new creative languages, specifically related to hand-binding books, weaving, and ritual theatre.
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Contact us
Email: arc.info@vancouver.ca