The Indigenous Creative Co-op (ATAWEKAMIK), located in the heart of Toronto ONT CANADA, is a member-based community of artisans, artists, and art patrons. The mission of ATAWEKAMIK is to provide a showcase for emerging and established artists to display and sell their artwork, while building community among artists, members, and patrons alike.

Approximately one hundred artists exhibit their various media, including ceramics, glass, jewelry, mixed media, painting,  photography, printmaking, textiles, and sculpture.  It is the mission of these artists to promote ATAWEKAMIK as a locally and nationally recognized model cooperative that presents a thriving retail outlet and exhibit venue for distinctive arts and crafts while providing a source of income support to its artists and an excellent working environment for its employees, all within a mutually supportive community.

Co-Operatives

A co-op is an organization that takes the idea of working together collectively and puts it into a business structure. A cooperative is a business voluntarily owned and controlled by the people who use it—its members. It is operated solely for the benefit of its members, to meet their mutual needs.

When groups of people have similar needs—such as the need for lower prices, more affordable housing, or access to telecommunications services—cooperatives offer great potential to meet those needs.

Co-operatives are an important instrument for social and economic development across Canada and abroad. They exist in many sectors of the Canadian economy important to Aboriginal people, including fishing, energy, forestry, housing, financial services, consumer goods, and arts and crafts. They are involved in training, the production of goods and services, and marketing and wholesale/retail. They fill an important role in economic capacity-building in terms of skills development, business development, mentoring, and employment. Similarly, co-operatives contribute to social capacity-building, providing a wide range of services in the health, social, and educational spheres. 

There are approximately 9,000 co-operatives and credit unions in Canada, providing products and services to 18 million members. 

Work Share: The concept of “shared artist space” is nothing new, taking its root from many sources like real-estate fluctuations in urban centres, the hippie culture of communal living and the cooperative movements of groups like ATAWEKAMIK, the Situationists and the Bauhaus among others. In recent years, there has a been a trend among artist-run spaces to play with ideas of “shared- space” creating work-only or live-work studios that financially support a shared “project space” or gallery. Work share models are also emerging as a recent trend. Work shares allow people to rent out work space where shared resources like printers, wifi and even the presence of people become a part of a monthly rental fee that is paid to reserve a spot at a large table or amalgam of cubicles.

Temporary Space, POP-UP Gallery: Many artist-run spaces are started with an intention of being temporary. They often take the form of pop-up galleries – an pop-up space that is converted into a gallery for special performance, events or even for years at a time. This is often a response to real- estate issues and the desire for intimacy, immediacy and the comfort of creating something in the space you also live in. 

Non-Profit Hybrid:  A number of artist-run spaces begin as a gallery, performance or gathering space but evolve overtime into a non-profit 501(c)3 entity. The reasons for this will vary on location and the intentions of the space, but mostly have to do with funding strategies, strategic partnership and mission of the space.

Residency Programs: Residency programs are often times the central component to an artist-run space inviting artists to come and live in the space while they create work or engage in the local community. Many times the intention is to provide some kind of exchange, the artist provides opportunities to show new work, present a new project or engage both the space and the community around the space through an art-making or problem-solving process.

Continuous media exposure is our marketing goal. Our publicity committee markets the gallery as a whole; individual artists pay for their own show fliers and mailings. Our direct mailing list goes out monthly to our most interested and supportive patrons. Community outreach programs help bring new people into our Gallery and expose the community to art; these include working with civic groups, schools and various organizations.

By collecting with ATAWEKAMIK’s Artists’ Co-op, you are helping to sustain creative culture around the Greater Toronto area (GTA), as well as supporting an important organization that is dedicated to making the world a better place for Indigenous people. What makes us unique, is that we bring the finest selection of art works that reflect the issues of land, our time and our generations.

So you see…the original plan was too help the people on the street…and the police cut crime…but when Wong Tam and the Big Businesses got involved they wanted an entire District…

really… we just wanted to use the space that is vacant…

and let creative people in there…

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