From 2010-2020 FAG Feminist Art Gallery was home to over 50 artists from all over the world who came to craft, publish, create, disseminate, and rest. FAG has been seen as a breath of much needed fresh air and an important touchstone in the community.
FAG has been featured significantly in feminist history anthologies that are often some of the first cohesively “archived” and published queer feminist histories, including in Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (2017), edited by Heather Davis (see “A Speculative Manifesto for the Feminist Art Fair International: An Interview with Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue of the Feminist Art Gallery” by Amber Christensen, Lauren Fournier, and Daniella Sanader), Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist histories (2017), edited by Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (see our interview with curator Helena Reckitt), and The Art of Feminism: Images that Shaped the Fight for Equality, 1857-2017 (2018) by Lucinda Gosling, Hilary Robinson and Amy Tobin.
In 2020 it became crystal clear that continuing to build and keep meaningful space in a hyper-gentrified and intensified city like Toronto was untenable, and that a way forward, beyond the Feminist Art Gallery, must be found.
While an ethos can remain the same, strategies must adapt.
Located less than two hours from Toronto and easily accessible via a cross-country train line, bus routes and a main highway, FAR is part of a constellation of long-practicing artists and curatorial initiatives that have deliberately decentralized from urban settings, in order to expand the connections between artists of all generations and locations.
As such, the FAR and FAG sites are both rooted in the kinds of sustainable, community based curatorial and generative practices and relations.
Like FAG, at FAR we host, we fund, we advocate, we support, we claim, we feed, we cultivate, we compost.
Set deliberately outside the conventions and restrictions of traditional gallery, museum, institutional and classroom settings, FAR expands on the intentional, intergenerational and queer feminist community building mandate of the FAG Feminist Art Gallery (Toronto) run by Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell from 2010-2020.
While FAR is feminist, it is not a women’s art project; it is equally engaged with gender, race, class, and ability and focused on its goal: to realize, enact, and support an alternative artist economy and relation.
Since 2020, FAR has existed as an expansive site for queer and feminist artists, educators and activists. FAR provides sanctuary and respite for artists and activists wishing to simply develop ideas, plan, write, research if desired but predominantly – to rest and recharge. They can also come to conceptualize and produce art projects in a rural setting, especially those requiring connection to the land, expansive space requirements and those with specific connections to the local histories of both Black and Indigenous communities.
Located on 64 acres of conservation protected land, current FAR resources include shelter(an independent private cabin with indoor composting toilet and woodstove), sustenance (a large organic vegetable garden, grapevines, apple and pear trees, wild black raspberries and fresh water), space (access to nature forests, streams, meadows, trails, insects, birds and other critters) care (including meal provision, mentoring, close attention to all forms of access and centering the needs of artists).
FAR is run by a connected group of people including Syrus Marcus Ware, Emelie Chhangur, Tracy Tidgwell, Johnson Ngo, Kalale Dalton, Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell.
Allyson and Deirdre lead the project and live on site. To date we have hosted, supported and mentored over 30 artists, activists, musicians, writers and curators, ranging in age from 12-68 yrs.