For the next three months, Toronto art lovers are going to get something they’ve been hoping for for years: an art extravaganza with exhibitions, performances, tours and workshops, all for free.

When Patrizia Libralato set out to build a new art festival for Toronto, she was told it would take three to five years to get a from-scratch biennial off the ground. A bit dismayed, the cultural entrepreneur, who had then just recently left the Tecumseth St. gallery she’d co-founded, thought: “Three to five years? The idea could be dead in five years.”

But after precisely that period — and scads of hard work in between — the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art opens its doors Saturday.

From 259 Lake Shore Blvd. E., (most recently a car dealership and service department) to Mississauga’s Small Arms Inspection Building in the west, and at a dozen more partner venues and sites across the city including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Power Plant, the biennial will present more than 200 pieces of art by 60-plus exhibiting artists and artist groups.

Add to that a slate of more than 100 talks, tours, workshops, performances and other programs and there’s a heck of a lot of art to experience over the event’s run. For Libralato, the biennial’s executive director, and many more in the city’s arts communities, it is a decades-long dream realized: Toronto now has a biennial of its very own.

“I’ve always felt that Toronto needed a big moment for its visual arts community,” Libralato says. She imagined an event that would raise the visibility of Canadian artists, who “are making some of the most exciting work around,” while also bringing home broader conversations in the international art world.

Since Toronto is one of the most artist-, institution- and donor-rich cities in Canada, it’s difficult to imagine why it’s taken so long. Vancouver has a biennial. The Bonavista Peninsula in Newfoundland has a biennial. For a time, Montreal had two. The dream of a splashy arts extravaganza Toronto could call its own has been batted around since at least the 1980s, when a group here lobbied for a sculpture biennial. It came bubbling back up in 2010, when the Power Plant and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art jointly held a symposium to envision and rally support for an art biennial. More than 200 people attended, but still no biennial. Until now.

Canadians make up roughly half of the exhibition roster, says senior curator Candice Hopkins. Among them are the Inuit video collective Isuma, Canada’s representative at the 2019 Venice Biennale, and 2018 Sobey Art Award winner Kapwani Kiwanga. There’s also a significant contingent with a Toronto connection, including AA Bronson, Luis Jacob, Syrus Marcus Ware, Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, Curtis Santiago, Abbas Akhavan and Jumblies Theatre. Homegrown talents rub elbows here with international darlings of the art world such as Sao Paulo’s Maria Thereza Alves and London’s Shezad Dawood.

Programs director Ilana Shamoon considers it critical that the biennial engages Toronto as a place, and tells stories unique to it. It would be a failure to treat the city simply as an anonymous backdrop for international art stars to be parachuted into, she says. The programming therefore takes up urgent conversations within the city, thinking about issues such as livability and accessibility.

A majority of the events and exhibitions will be organized on or near the waterfront, making the city’s shoreline the focus. It becomes a sort of curatorial device, Hopkins explains, to explore the histories of people on this land, its present-day use as an active corridor of redevelopment in the city as well as a site — what with Sidewalk Labs’ proposed Quayside smart neighbourhood — projected with visions of how the city imagines itself into the future.

For example, Jacob, a Toronto-based artist, curator and educator whose work will be on view at 259 Lake Shore and at Union Station, will present a series of photographs accompanied by select texts from his personal archives, including maps, monographs, reports and magazines. The collection documents how, at various times in its history, Toronto has told its own story. He is excited for the opportunity to share his work with the very subject he’s been so busy researching. Toronto audiences, he says, are fairly well-served by its cultural institutions when it comes to international art. “One pitfall is that the international oftentimes sacrifices the local.” That makes the prospect of this biennial — which proposes to make local conversations international and international conversations more local — compelling to him.

Longtime collaborators Steele and Tomczak are likewise interested in what the event might mean for local art and art-makers. “I guarantee it will change the art scene in Toronto,” Tomczak says. The thinking once was that you had to leave home for Berlin or New York or Paris, Steele explains. “Now perhaps you can be in Toronto and be seen in an international context. It’s a sign of maturity for the art scene here.”

The sounds of power tools, video tests and warning beeps from reversing machinery heard at 259 Lake Shore are reminders that the hard work of building the first Toronto biennial continues until the very end. So, on the eve of its opening, are organizers ready to do it all over again in two years’ time? It is, after all, right there in the name — the Toronto Biennial of Art.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“One-hundred per cent,” Libralato says gamely. In fact, she adds, there are already artists at work on 2021.

The Toronto Biennial of Art run Sept. 21 through Dec. 1 at venues across Toronto. For more information, visit torontobiennial.org.