Walking in the City

In September 2020, I worked collaboratively with the Art Gallery of Windsor to jump start a series of art walks throughout the downtown core of Windsor, Ontario. The goal of these type of walks were to encourage participants to explore, wander, and contemplate their surroundings through a different perspective. We discussed the history of psychogeography and the impact walking has on learning more about the neighborhoods we live in. We observed, reflected, and questioned the buildings, pathways, and other elements that make up the city’s changing built environment. These walks gave us an opportunity to re-imagine the places in which we live, work and play while taking into account our lived experiences and shared ideas.

While walking participants were also encouraged to express their experiences creatively through photography, drawing, painting and poetry. As a result, we created a collection of artworks that represented our emotive responses to the downtown core of Windsor. The following year the artwork was exhibited in an exhibition called Walking in the City, a community display that showcased documentation of these walks and more walks lead by the Vanguard Youth Arts Collective, a group of creatively driven youth who act as a voice for an emerging generation of the arts within the Windsor Essex region.

Cover photo credit: Art Gallery of Windsor, Education Program Coordinator

Land Acknowledgement: Recognized as one of Canada’s most diverse and multicultural communities, Windsor was developed on land that is the traditional territory of the Anishnaabeg people of the Three Fires Confederacy (Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa). Before Europeans arrived, the land along the Detroit River was referred to as Wawiiatanong by the Indigenous populations. Due to Windsor’s unique location along the Detroit River many different groups have called this area home including: Haudenosaunee, Attawandaron (Neutral), and Huron (Wyandot) peoples. Today, many indigenous people and Métis across Turtle Island call this area home. We are thankful to be able to share our history in this area.