You’re invited to join East End Arts, Native Women in the Arts, and Indigenous, 2-spirit Artist Adam Garnet Jones for BYOBeads Online, taking place every second Thursday evening each month!
BYOBeads Indigenous ONLINE Beading Circle
Online Using Zoom & Registration via EventBrite
Thursday Evenings in Sept-Dec 2020
7-9pm – tune in any time!
FREE
Led by Queer Metis bead-artist, novelist, & film-maker, Adam Garnet Jones and hosted by East End Arts, BYOBeads is an intimate opportunity for traditional bead artists, hobby-beaders just learning their craft, experts, elders, and enthusiasts to gather and work together on current project(s), share skills, and show off the beautiful things they’ve been working on!
For the Fall and Winter of 2020, we are thrilled to be partnering with Native Women in the Arts to present an amazing selection of Indigenous guest artists as part of BYOBeads! Each month, we invite a special Indigenous guest artist from a multi-disciplinary art form to share their work at one of our beading circles, and to have a discussion with our participants, making it a true celebration of Indigenous artistry & talent! Guest artists are drawn from Indigenous arts communities all over Canada, featuring music, playwrights, actors, storytellers, visual artists and more, celebrating the broad range of Indigenous artists from east Toronto and beyond.
So come meet online, bring a cup of your favourite tea, share your bead work, share your tips, enjoy a performance, and gather socially (from a distance!) with people who share your love of this traditional craft.
NOTE: Participants are not required to call in with video – We all know how zoomed out things can get these days, so please, feel free to join us however you feel comfortable (though we would LOVE to see your work!)
UPCOMING BEADING NIGHTS:
- December 3 – Joshua Whitehead
REGISTRATION:
For those interested in joining us, please register through EventBrite! This program is entirely free to join. If you have questions, or are having difficulty accessing the Zoom link, email Adam Barrett our Programming Coordinator at Adam@eastendarts.ca!
CIRCLE SCHEDULE:
BYOBeads is a very casual vibe, but for those of you looking for a bit of structure this is the approximate schedule for the evening:
7:00-7:15 – Welcome, Introductions
7:15 – Show and tell/update on Beadwork Projects
7:30-7:45 – Presentation by Guest Artist
7:45-8:00 – Discussion
8:00-8:45 – BEADS, BEADS, BEADS!
8:45-9:00 – Final Presentation by Guest Artist & Closing Thoughts
ABOUT THE LEAD FACILITATOR, ADAM GARNET JONES:
Adam Garnet Jones (Cree/Métis/ Danish) is a Two-Spirit screenwriter, director, bead-worker and novelist from Amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta.) Although he had been making short films for quite some time, Adam came into his own as a filmmaker with the release of his first feature, Fire Song, at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015. Fire Song went on to win the Audience Choice Award at ImagineNATIVE, before picking up three more audience choice awards and two jury prizes for best film at other festivals. Before going into production, the script for “Fire Song” won the Writer’s Guild of Canada’s Jim Burt Screenwriting Prize. Adam was nominated for a Canadian Screen award for Best Original Screenplay for his second feature Film, Great Great Great, which also won Best Script, Best Performance, and Best Film at the Canadian Film Festival.
Adam has recently shifted his artistic practice away from writing and directing film and is focusing on writing fiction and creating custom beadwork, primarily for Indigenous artists. His first novel, Fire Song (based on the film) was published in the spring of 2018. Publisher’s weekly called it “striking and remarkable” while the Globe and Mail said “Fire Song is unquestionably necessary . . . because of its subject matter, perspective and voice.” The book received a starred review from Kirkus, and was named an honour book from CODE’s Burt Award for First Nations, Inuit, and Metis Literature. It also won a bronze medal for Young Adult fiction from the Independent Publisher’s Book Awards. Fire Song has topped innumerable “best of” lists of the year’s LGBT YA literature in the US and Canada.
To learn more about Adam Garnet Jones, the lead facilitator, visit his Instagram page, or his website.
PAST GUEST STARS:
Joshua Whitehead – December, 2020
Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-nêhiyaw, Two-Spirit member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is the author of full-metal indigiqueer (Talonbooks 2017), Jonny Appleseed (Arsenal Pulp 2018), the editor of the anthology, Love after the End (Arsenal Pulp 2020) and is currently working on a creative non-fiction manuscript interrogating Indigeneity, queerness, and mental health, slated to release in Fall 2021 with Knopf Canada. Currently he is working as an ABD doctoral student in Treaty 7, Mohkinstsis.
Lindsay Nixon – November, 2020
Lindsay Nixon is a Toronto-based Cree-Métis-Saulteaux SSHRC doctoral scholarship recipient, a McGill University Art History Ph.D. candidate, and an assistant professor in Ryerson University’s Department of English. They previously held the position of Editor-at-Large forCanadian Art and twice served as the Arts and Literary Summit programmer for MagNet. Nixon’s first book nîtisânak (Metonymy Press, 2018) won the prestigious 2019 Dayne Ogilive Prize and a 2019 Quebec Writer’s Federation first book prize, and has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and an Indigenous Voices Literary Award.
Nixon is the co-founder of gijiit: a curatorial collective that focuses on community-engaged Indigenous art curations, gatherings, and research dealing with themes of gender, sex, and sexuality. They are a REVEAL Indigenous Art Award recipient, and have been awarded national Magazine Awards in the Essay category for “Stories Not Told” and in the Best-Editorial Package category for “#MeToo and the Secrets Indigenous Women Keep.” For their work as lead editor for the summer 2017 issue of Canadian Art, an issue on the theme of “Kinship,” they were also nominated for a National Magazine Award in the “Best Editorial Package” category. Nixon’s writing has appeared in The Walrus, Malahat Review, Room, GUTS, esse, Teen Vogue, CV2/Prairie Fire, The New Inquiry and other publications.
Caitlyn Bird – November, 2020
Caitlyn Bird is an Anishnaabe bead artist from Naotkamegwanning First Nation. She developed her passion for beading at the age of sixteen drawing on inspiration from her culture, elder objects, family history and knowledge. She continues to hone her craft by exploring new techniques and methods of articulation with materials such as: Czech seed beads, antique/vintage seed beads, and smoked brain tanned hide. In 2018, she was the recipient of the Native Women in the Arts “The Barbara Laronde Award” She recently graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she earned her BFA in Museum Studies. She currently lives in Thunder Bay, Ontario where she continues to practice beading having recently shown her beadwork at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery exhibit “Their Breath in Beads” (2019).
Iskwē – October, 2020
Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify | YouTube
iskwē | ᐃᐢᑫᐧᐤ is, among many other things, an artist – a creator and communicator of music and of movement, of pictures, poetry and prose. And through it all, she’s a teller of stories that have impacted our past and will inform our future. acākosīk | ᐊᒐᑯᓯᐠ is the culmination of her creation and collaboration to this point. It’s a collection of seven sonic explorations that not only blur lines between sources and styles, but also between the actual and the ideal, the real and imagined. acākosīk has received critical praise since the release on November 8, 2019. The video for “Little Star” garnered a JUNO Award for Best Music Video in 2020, the album was nominated for Adult Alternative Album of the Year, and “Breaking Down” was nominated for a Prism Prize and SOCAN Songwriting Prize. Building on the foundation of potent, cross-cultural electro-pop established on her self-titled 2013 debut and the Juno-nominated, Polaris Music Prize Long-Listed 2017 follow-up The Fight Within, acākosīk incorporates more intense and urgent tinges of alternative, post-rock, and even industrial. The cohesive-yet-combustible result tips a cap to modern innovators like Florence + The Machine and FKA twigs while simultaneously borrowing sounds accumulated over centuries by iskwē’s cree and Métis ancestors.
SAGE PAUL – September, 2020
Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
Sage Paul is an urban Denesuliné tskwe based in Toronto and a member of English River First Nation. Sage is an award-winning artist & designer and a recognized leader of Indigenous fashion, craft and textiles. Her work centres family, sovereignty and resistance for balance. Sage is also founding collective member and Artistic Director of Indigenous Fashion Week Toronto. Her art and design practice is conceptual, creating narrative-driven garments, crafts and costumes for artistic presentation, fashion, film, TV and theatre. Sage Paul is a sought after and artistically diverse designer; She is creatively curious and informed, with excellent and resourceful craftsmanship. Sage has a strong, broad understanding for how she and her audiences interact with and feel fashion. Some of Sage’s art and design has shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s First Thursday, Harbourfront Centre, The Centre for Craft, Creativity and Design (North Carolina, USA), and a curated program at Western Canada Fashion Week by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective. She has designed costumes for Kent Monkman, Darlene Naponse, Danis Goulet and more. Sage speaks about Indigenous fashion including engagements at Canada House (London, UK), The Walrus Magazine, Ryerson University, Toronto Women’s Fashion Week and South Africa Fashion Week. Most recently, Sage presented her collection “Giving Life” at Festival de Mode & Design (Montreal) and Ohtaapiahki Fashion Week (Calgary).
Sage received the Design Exchange RBC Emerging Designer Award (2017) and was recognized as a Woman of Influence(2018), a Change Maker by the Toronto Star (2018), top 100 talented & driven Canadian women by Flare Magazine (2017), a Toronto “cool girl” by Vogue (2018), and was honoured by the Ontario Minister of the Status of Women as a trailblazing woman who is transforming Ontario (2017). In 2019, Sage was nominated for the Virginia and Myrtle Cooper Award in Costume Design and the Indigenous Arts Award, both at the Ontario Arts Council.
Sage sits on the Ryerson School of Fashion Advisory Board, sits on the Board of Directors for Red Pepper Spectacle Arts and is developing an Indigenous Fashion elective course for George Brown College.
CHRISTA COUTURE – July, 2020
Christa Couture is an award-winning performing and recording artist, non-fiction writer, and broadcaster. She is also proudly Indigenous (mixed Cree and Scandinavian), disabled, queer, and a mom. Her seventh recording, Safe Harbour, was released on Coax Records in 2020. As a writer and storyteller, she has been published in Room, Shameless, and Augur magazines, and on cbc.ca. In 2018, her CBC article and photos on disability and pregnancy went viral. Couture is a frequent contributor to CBC Radio and is currently the weekday afternoon host at 106.5 elmnt fm in Toronto. Her memoir How to Lose Everything publishes in 2020 with Douglas & McIntyre. Couture lived for many years in Vancouver, BC, but now calls Toronto home.
BOOK BLURB: HOW TO LOSE EVERYTHING
Through her son’s heart transplant, his death, his brother’s single day of life, the amputation of her leg as a cure for bone cancer, abortion, divorce, and a move across the country to start over after it all, Christa Couture has come to know every corner of grief – its shifting blurry edges, its traps, its pulse of love at the centre, and its bittersweet truth that resilience is borne of suffering. How to Lose Everything is a collection of personal, vulnerable essays, invitations, into how Couture knows that place of exile-and how she survived it.
The stories connect dots of sorrow, despair, reprieve, and hard-won hope; part portrait of grief and part frank revealing of the emotional and psychological experiences of motherhood, partnership, and change.
It’s a book for people who want to know about losses they haven’t had; an insight into extreme experiences and emotions. It’s a book for people who want their own losses to be named. and it’s a book that aims to be a friend to anyone who’s experienced loss of any kind.
FALEN JOHNSON – June, 2020
Join us on Thursday June 25th to experience a special performance from Falen Johnson! Falen Johnson is Mohawk/Tuscarora (Bear Clan) from Six Nations Grand River Territory. She is a writer and podcaster. Her plays include Salt Baby, Two Indians, and Ipperwash have played across Canada. Her writing has been featured in Brick, The Canadian Theatre Review, and Granta Magazine. She co-hosts The Secret Life of Canada (CBC Podcasts) with Leah Simone Bowen. She has written for Urban Native Girl and Merchants of the Wild on APTN and was scripted the 2020 Inspire Awards which will air on CBC in June. She was named one of Maclean’s 20 to watch in 2020.
