Music student Melanie Wright is hoping that a move to the Windsor Armouries building will mean more space to practice.
Student Experience
Fine Arts: A Dynamic Cultural Community
Being an artist in Windsor is to experience the best in creative culture, says Susan Gold, a practicing artist and professor of visual arts at the University of Windsor.
The community provides a critical mass of support for artists, helping them to develop and encouraging cross-fertilization between disciplines, genres, and values.
The only thing better than to be an artist is to be a patron of the arts and enjoy the many strands of Windsor's rich cultural tapestry.
The LeBel Gallery—located in the LeBel Building, home to the School of Visual Arts—is a student -programmed exhibition space, with displays changing weekly during the school year. A $40,000 renovation in 2007 added new lighting, ceilings, walls and floors to create a professional space to show works by students and faculty.
The Art Gallery of Windsor collects, conserves, interprets, and presents Canadian art. Its riverfront building in downtown Windsor is a place to view significant works of art by local, regional, and national artists. The gallery's collection of more than 3,000 works of art—including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures, illustrations, and videos—covers the period from about 1750 through to the present day.
The Arts Council - Windsor & Region is an umbrella organization representing and promoting all artistic endeavour within Windsor and Essex County. It operates the Artspeak Gallery in the heart of Olde Walkerville, as well as ArtsNotes, one of Windsor’s most comprehensive events listings.
Artcite artist-run centre maintains a balanced and diverse program of visual art exhibitions and events, including performance, film and video screenings, artists' lectures and workshops, and presentations of experimental music and interdisciplinary art production by local, regional, national and international artists. It is located in the Capitol Theatre and Arts Centre in Windsor's downtown core.
Common Ground is an unjuried exhibition space available to all interested self-motivated artists. It is located about one-half kilometre west of the UWindsor campus, in the Mackenzie Hall Cultural Centre.
The Odette Sculpture Park is a museum without walls, a unique showcase of more than 30 large-scale, internationally-recognized works of contemporary sculpture on the shores of the Detroit River, stretching from the University of Windsor campus to the Art Gallery of Windsor.
Both the city and the county are home to commercial galleries, with particular concentration in Windsor's downtown core, Walkerville, and Riverside.
The city also boasts a number of festivals celebrating visual arts, including
- the annual Art in the Park, which features exhibitors from all over Ontario displaying their work on the grounds surrounding Willistead Manor;
- Art by the River, set on the grounds of Amherstburg’s historic Fort Malden; and
- the Chalk and Chocolate Festival, pairing evanescent creations for a family-friendly weekend.
As well, just across the river, southwestern Michigan is home to a burgeoning arts scene, with flagship institutions including the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and creative centres like Ann Arbor and Birmingham.