A few years ago, a young artist contacted me about coming to see a collective gallery/studio space he and some friends, all recent University of Toronto graduates, had set up in an old light-industrial bay. I do these kinds of things all the time, so I was happy to accept. Then he gave me the address: 1345 Morningside Ave. In Scarborough.

The cognitive dissonance alone was enough to lure me outside my usual downtown parameters. Artists were urban creatures, thriving in dense, dilapidated spaces, weren’t they? Could a suburban strip mall really do?

When I arrived at Y+ Contemporary, then all of a few weeks old, my perspective changed. Daniel Griffin Hunt, who had invited me out, was, like his partners, dead serious — not only about their work but about fostering a creative community in the great beyond of big-box stores and cookie-cutter houses.

It’s important to understand, though, they were hardly starting from scratch. On Saturday, for the first time, Nuit Blanche will include a Scarborough component as part of its all-night art frenzy. But that is less a legitimizing turn for the former borough than it is an attempt for Nuit Blanche to claim some of Scarborough’s burgeoning cultural currency for its own.

The myopic downtown view of the suburbs has never been kind — and to Scarborough in particular, both the country’s oldest and most-maligned burb, with whispers of “Scarberia” still lingering in the air. But only wilful blindness could allow one to miss not only what Scarborough is in the midst of becoming, but what it has always been.

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For years, driven, like so much here, by the rising property market, immigrant populations traditionally drawn to the city’s core have been building lives and communities in the suburbs. Drive along Lawrence Avenue east of Victoria Park and you’ll find deeply ensconced Afghan, Pakistani and Indian communities tucked into the low-slung 1950s strip malls that line the broad boulevard for kilometres.

It’s hectic, a bundle of difference set against the city centre’s increasing sameness. It’s also the exact kind of fertile territory artists need to mine to make work that’s meaningful. The Art Gallery of York University, which has always had a close-up view of that great beyond — its catchphrase is “Out There” — made a show of bubbling suburban creativity last year with Migrating the Margins, a knockout exhibition of artists loosely from the city’s fringes (with a few exceptions; Tau Lewis, a rising star, grew up in Chinatown).

Less important than the specifics of borough was the intention of the gesture: That the city was changing, driven both by property value and a generational shift. Young artists, the children of immigrants ensconced in the suburbs, saw a different Toronto than the old-school downtown scene, and their work, like their concerns, would reflect it.

It’s a lot to suggest that anyone particularly makes “Scarborough art” — among other offences, that’s a tiny box for a dizzying breadth of difference and experience, which is the area’s strength. More to the point, a new generation of artists, driven by the difference all around them, doesn’t need downtown, and maybe finds it a bit past its sell-date.

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“I know, Scarborough’s hot right now,” laughed Nep Sidhu, an artist based there whose family immigrated from India. Sidhu, who’s featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s inaugural show Believe, has never really felt like a part of the downtown circuit, so he has nothing to miss. From his vantage point, a sprawling studio inside his family’s Scarborough metal shop business, the borough as a platform for his global audience sits just fine.

Let’s not mistake this all for a new phenomenon. Toronto culture, historically, has been what grows up between the cracks while the sanctioned efforts dominate. Through the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, that found expression with a rigorously independent downtown art scene battling institutional indifference and the bigfooting legacy of painters like the Group of Seven.

In Scarborough, new communities over that same span have needed a generation to find its feet. One generation on, its coming-out party — for the rest of us — is now. Nuit Blanche, curated by Scarborough native Alyssa Fearon, confirms for the downtown set what Scarberians have always known.

“There’s a lot of resilience, a lot of creativity,” she told me last year, when the city announced her appointment. “That’s what I want to illuminate — the great things that are there already.”

Correction- Sept 29, 2018: This article includes a photo that originally misidentified artist Bishara Elmi, whose work is appearing in Nuit Blanche.