Still “Alive and Happening:” Highlighting What Makes UTM’s Art Club Pop
Learning more from their current executives about how UTM Art Club is able to endure
Nestled in Student Centre room 225, at the back of a second-floor hallway housing about a dozen other UTMSU-recognized clubs, is a small space containing, most notably, a worn-out orange couch, two shelves colourfully loaded with board games used by the Erindale Gaming Organization, and a wall decorated with drawings crafted by both executive and general members of UTM Art Club. At a thin black Ikea table beneath this wall, I sat down with Art Club’s president Belinda Zhao, a third-year Commerce Specialist, and treasurer Nini Ning, a fourth-year Anthropology major, to discuss their recent events and initiatives.
The earliest mention of an art club on campus can be found in the first ever issue of campus newspaper the Erindalian, released on November 14, 1968, which begins its brief about the club’s activities by announcing that “the art club is alive and happening.” The current iteration of the UTM Art Club, however, began its activities in spring of 2014.
“When I came to U of T, I thought to myself, ‘Hmmm…the campus is massive and has many clubs. There are clubs for dancing, music and even archery! but none for art.’” wrote then-president and founder on a website used alongside their Facebook page to inform members about club events and share their artwork. “I enjoy creating art and I’m sure many other people do too, so when I found out that UTM has no art club, I was heartbroken. I myself am a life science major, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t be an artist too. I figure maybe some people feel the same way, and that’s why I created the club.” Now-president Zhao has been able to witness this same sentiment in today’s members as well. “You know, surprisingly, in the art club a majority of the members actually aren’t in art. When we see introductions, it’s always, like, Life Science. I’m also in Commerce. It’s really cool… all these majors that aren’t related to art, but we still do art.”
Zhao shared their story about finding Art Club in first-year following an initial reluctance to study Commerce: “Since I was out of the womb, I’ve been drawing, actually. And so I was speaking with my parents, and you know how parents are always like, ‘art starve.’ So I was like, here’s my big brain strat: I’ll learn commerce. I’ll make a company. It’ll be an art company. And the motto, ‘art doesn’t starve.’ I’ll hire artists who have heard this phrase before, and they’ll be able to prove their parents wrong. That was the goal. And then in the middle of—don’t do this—but in the middle of a management class, I was Googling clubs and I found the art club.” Ning, meanwhile, was drawn to Art Club also as a first-year through it being “one of the only chill clubs that didn’t have either a registration fee or ‘you have to go to these meetings’ or anything like that.”
Explaining how they improved the club since their arrival, the executives stressed a substantial focus on events and, especially, collaborations. “We almost never turned down a collab,” Ning recounts.
In just the previous semester, Art Club ran events such as a “bookmark decorating event” in September alongside UTM Book Discovery; a Bob Ross themed painting workshop in October with the UTM Social Justice Club and Mending Minds UTM; and a 3D card making and painting event in November with the University of Toronto Card Game Club. Zhao particularly enjoyed the latter, mentioning how Card Game Club “came in with a whole bunch of Pokémon cards and, us execs, we just spent a few hours, like, every day cutting them out so then we could glue them together and make 3D cards. And if you came to the event, you could take the card home.” A standout event for Ning that also involved “a lot of background research” was the Creature Design Workshop held last March, which was one example of an Art Club event where “members of the exec team took aspects that they were very comfortable in in art and then held workshops of it for the general members.” Other regular initiatives include “a lot of tabling” and playing online games of Gartic Phone on the club’s Discord server.
Next, Art Club plans to repeat the “Artcade,” a collaborative event they ran last February with UTM Esports where “They had a whole bunch of games set up and you could win tickets from playing the games against an exec of the Esports club. And with these tickets, you could get art prints. It’s like an arcade, but art-cade.” The club also teases a “big collab” event that will have a whole day’s worth of activities scheduled.
Zhao’s goal for the future remains to “Expand the Art Club. We will art everywhere! And also gotta do more collabs; collab with everyone.”
The purpose of UTM Art Club, according to their founder back in 2014, “Is to gather artists of all levels to interact, collaborate and engage with each other in friendly conversations and brainstorms.” Ning credits the enduring presence of Art Club to the fact that “A lot of people draw, so there’s always new people. And a lot of people find community in the art club, right? So we have a pretty steady stream of members.” Zhao asserts that having places on campus for self-expression is important since “You need a break sometimes because you can’t just always study. You always need a moment for yourself to have fun. And for me, that’s art. I feel like a lot of people also share that sentiment and that’s why there’s an art club.”
