Creative Commons Collective
A socially engaged art initiative cultivating multidisciplinary rituals for times of transformation.
Rooted in community, ancestral knowledge, and public space, we activate underused sites through collective care, artistic intervention, and spiritual practice.
We Begin with Water
The Creative Commons Collective emerged on the banks of the Cobechenonk (Humber River) — a sacred gathering place and trade route that has nourished generations. We acknowledge this land as the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabeg, and the Wendat peoples, and recognize it as part of Treaty 13.
Our work flows from this place.
We honour River, Land, and the Indigenous stewards who continue to protect them.
Everything we do begins with Water — with offering, with listening, with breath.
Formed by a constellation of multidisciplinary artists, curators, cultural workers, and community organizers, the Creative Commons Collective is rooted in decolonial, interfaith, and participatory practices.
Many of us are queer, trans, disabled, racialized, and shaped by migration, memory, and resistance. We bring together lineages from documentary film, theatre, performance art, herbalism, spiritual practice, and community-based cultural programming.
We came together in Weston to meet a need: for creative gathering spaces, public rituals, and artistic infrastructures that reflect the people who live here.
What began as informal gatherings—with food, stories, and resource-sharing—has grown into a collective practice of socially engaged art. Through our Artist Supper Club, Community Garden, Virtual Multi-Faith Prayer Circle, and seasonal offerings, we cultivate participatory artworks that reimagine public space as a site for care, memory, and transformation.
Artist Supper Club
The Artist Supper Club is a relational art practice. Rooted in food, ritual, and co-resistance, it gathers artists, neighbours, and kin for evenings of storytelling, nourishment, and emergent conversation. Each meal becomes a participatory score — a performance of collective care — where recipes carry memory and tables become altars for shared futures.
Hosted monthly in Weston, these gatherings spotlight local artists while holding space for vulnerability, laughter, and unpolished brilliance. It’s not just dinner — it’s an invitation to reimagine cultural infrastructure from the ground up, one bite, one story, one breath at a time.
Creative Commons Community Garden
A land-based sculpture and sacred site for collective care.
The Creative Commons Community Garden transforms a once-vacant municipal lot in Weston into a living artwork rooted in ecological ritual, ancestral knowledge, and public participation. Located at 6 Elsmere Ave, this 100 m² site was secured through sustained advocacy by local residents, in collaboration with the Weston Village Residents’ Association, UrbanArts, Crossroads Theatre, and the City of Toronto.
From the beginning, this garden was never just about food. It is a communal altar, a sculptural canvas, and a seasonal classroom for intergenerational learning, grief tending, and creative co-creation.
In its first year, the garden will host a series of multidisciplinary workshops and installations led by members of the collective and guest artists including:
- Maureen Norton (Beausoleil First Nation) – Opening Ceremony & River Blessing
A sacred welcome honouring the land and water, incorporating harvesting, prayer, protection wreath-making, and offering songs of gratitude to Mother Earth. - Agnieszka Forfa – Kurpie Weave: Basketry as Ancestral Ritual
A tactile, diasporic weaving workshop using garden plants to explore treaty responsibility, interdependence, and ritualized care. - Carrie Perreault – Phytograms: Botanical Filmmaking & Ecological Storytelling
A participatory film project using 16mm techniques and foraged plants to co-create living memory loops that will be projected back into the garden. - Amanda Schoppel – Living Sculpture
Process-based installations using organic materials like rye grass and apples, exploring decay, care, and seasonal change as forms of public art and spiritual inquiry.
These activations will unfold across the growing season — from Maureen’s opening ceremony in the spring to a fall harvest exhibition and projection night featuring Carrie’s phytograms and Amanda’s site-based sculpture.
Here, a compost bin becomes a monument. A garden bed becomes an altar.
Art is grown, not just made.
More than a garden, this is a site of artistic ritual, ecological repair, and cultural continuity — co-created with the land and shaped by those who tend it.
Call to Prayer
The Virtual Multi-Faith Prayer Circle is a socially engaged ritual and evolving public artwork. Co-led by Creative Commons Collective members Dori Midnight and Safiya Randera, this monthly gathering brings together artists, musicians, poets, spiritual leaders, and cultural workers from across traditions to offer sacred incantation as collective resistance.
Rooted in prayer, dhikr, chant, and spoken word, each gathering is both sanctuary and score — a space for grief, resilience, remembrance, and ancestral invocation. What began in Weston as an offering of solidarity with Palestine has become a flowing current — where art and spirituality converge, and where River carries our prayers and intentions outward into the world.
Call to Prayer is an extension of this work — a public, transmedia project that gathers artists, writers, musicians, and visionaries in both virtual and physical space to amplify sacred calls for justice and liberation. Prayers are recorded and archived, creating a globally accessible ritual repository — a wellspring of collective care and resistance.
Through this practice, Dori Midnight, Safiya Randera, and a growing circle of prayer leaders invite communities to listen, soften, pray, and witness together. From the banks of the Cobechenonk (Humber River) to sanctuaries and screens around the globe, this work carries our shared breath — as art, as resistance, as devotion
Prayer Archive Access
Each circle is lovingly documented and archived. You can access recordings of past gatherings at the link below:
[Multi-Faith Prayer Circle Archive]
*(Please engage with care and respect — these offerings are sacred gifts shared in trust.)*
Open Community Dance Nights
A ritual of rhythm, resistance, and public joy.
Each Thursday in July, the Weston Commons Square becomes a sanctuary of movement, memory, and collective breath. Open Community Dance Nights is a participatory activation rooted in joy and cultural resilience, co-created with choreographers, artists, and access practitioners.
Here, dance is not performance — it is ritual.
A method of remembering. A way to move grief, ignite joy, and reclaim public space as a site of transformation.
Led by artists like Percy Anane-Dwumfour and Shay Erlich (Pushmakers), these gatherings welcome all bodies into an open, accessible dance floor — from line dancing workshops to chair-based rhythms rooted in disability justice. Each night includes care stations, free movement sessions, and on-site documentation by emerging photographers.
Inspired by The Bentway’s Dance Nights and queer line dancing traditions, this offering responds to a longing voiced at our Artist Supper Clubs: the need to reconnect with each other, with our bodies, and with joy in motion.
This is public art as living memory.
A dance floor as archive.
A square reactivated through rhythm, laughter, and shared sweat.
A culminating exhibition co-presented by UrbanArts and Crossroads Theatre will feature photographs and community reflections — celebrating the vibrancy and resilience of Weston through the language of movement.
