Participatory Art • by Alexis Moline • 1

Hamilton Arts & Letters     Illustration: originally made by GAGL to promote artist Paul Chartrand's ‘The Mind is a River’ workshop.   Great Art for Great Lakes (GAGL), a Trillium supported project, is a participatory art initiative by Waterlution that seeks to directly engage local communities with their watersheds. Completing two successful years pre-COVID in 2017 and 2019, GAGL has worked with 15 artists to produce 13 publicly installed art pieces around the Great Lakes in Ontario. Working in primarily tight knit, rural communities, the importance of building relationships and trust has been paramount to the success of the final art pieces that depended on outreach to bring the projects to fruition. To achieve this, a high degree of in-person gatherings, meetings, and word of mouth connections was essential to understanding the affected communities and to engage them with critical, often difficult, ideas about water and environmental care. How could an initiative so dependent on participatory art making, relationship building, and partnership adapt in a post-COVID world? GAGL 2020, like every sector in the arts across the globe, faced extraordinary challenges as they attempted to answer this question.    [  >>>>>   FORWARD ]   + [Distillate © HA&L + Alexis Moline {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]