Initially created for the Toronto Public Art Strategy, the City of Toronto’s Artist in Residence (AiR) program embeds creativity as a core element in city-building and centralizes the effort across various City divisions to bring visibility to the arts as a significant part of the civic process. The AiR has a unique opportunity to create lasting impacts on departmental practices, improve relations between civil servants and citizens and increase visibility for marginalized populations while providing meaningful integration of art into everyday city-building.
Kendra Yee is the City of Toronto’s Artist-in-Residence (2025 to 2026). During her first six months of the program, she is doing embedded research with the City of Toronto Archives. Afterwards, she will develop a temporary, public-facing project that will be announced in 2026.
Yee is an arts practitioner who seeks to materialize the truths and fictions of memory. Yee pulls tales from personal stories, lived experience and collective narratives to develop site-specific installations that carve alternative archives. In her residency, Yee will explore the topic of Chinese Immigration at the City of Toronto Archives. Using fonds, photographs and records relating to the Chinese Immigrant experience, Yee will connect archival materials discovered in the database to physical locations throughout the city. Engaging with the assembled photographs, documents, maps and other objects, the memorabilia will lead to sites and networks where wild clay will commemorate untold experiences. Throughout the residency, clay will be forged from places connected to the sourced archival materials. Located in urban and natural environments, refining, sampling and categorizing the found clay resembles techniques implemented to prepare a fond for the Archive.
Yee has programmed and exhibited with: The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), Patel Brown (Toronto), Hearth (Toronto), Namara Projects (Toronto), Heavy Manners (Los Angeles), and Juxtapoz (New York City). Yee holds a BDes. in Illustration from OCAD University, and is currently based in Tkaronto/Toronto.
The City of Toronto Archives holds a wide variety of historical documents related to Toronto. The collection contains municipal government records, which include Council minutes, departmental files and reports, and non-government records, which include photographs, letters and architectural plans created by private individuals.
Maria Hupfield was the City of Toronto’s inaugural Artist-in-Residence (2023 to 2024) with the City’s Urban Forestry team. Her project Nkweshkoodaadidaa Ekobiiyag brings her creative force to bear in exploring and highlighting perceptions of, and pressures on Toronto’s ravines.
Location: Bridge on Taylor Creek
Nkweshkoodaadidaa Ekobiiyag is a public artwork that transforms a bridge on Taylor Creek into an art destination and meeting place. Taylor Creek is a tributary of the Don Valley and the bridge marks the fourth crossing point at a tranquil unique meeting site situated amongst two bodies of water at different elevations. The title of this work translates from Anishnaabemowin as a request to “meet me by the water.”
For this project, the bridge was hand-painted in a dynamic diagonal surface pattern design in bright yellow as a signal of visibility and wayfinding for guests and visitors to the park. Hupfield states: Yellow paint has become a signature colour used throughout my work. When applied to the wooden armatures and support structures that display my creations the bright colour renders them easy to navigate when further activated in live performances. By painting the bridge, I seek to focus on the people who use the bridge, the bridge itself, and the site as essential elements in meaning making and the creation of public artwork.
Nkweshkoodaadidaa Ekbiiyag alters the current landscape and functions as a visual disruption to unsettle perspectives that heighten the act of looking. Bridges bring people together and connect isolated places to one another. Rather than build a new bridge to unify places or people that are otherwise separated, Hupfield looked to this occasion as an opportunity to work with the existing structure to build on the image of the bridge as a powerful connection and symbol of previous and ongoing work and hope. During her time and research throughout the residency, the ravines continue to present themselves as a meeting place, a site of return to be in contemplation and conversation with land and waters.
Experience a version of the artwork anywhere in the world by entering the Meet Me By the Water augmented reality experience , without having to download an app. It was created by Hupfield in collaboration with the DARKFRAME Media And Design team.
Learn more about Nkweshkoodaadidaa Ekobiiyag and hear the song Meet Me by the Water by Brenda MacIntyre from the Awakening CD by Spirit Wind.
