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rfmcdonaldWriter and activist Tim Groves's Missing Plaque Project is a decade-old project I've seen ongoing for a while. Andrew Francis Wallace's August article in the Toronto Star, "Missing Plaque Project unveils Toronto's untold history", goes into detail.
At present, Groves has more than a dozen different posters on a variety of different subjects, generally covering incidents in Toronto history that may have been neglected: GLBT oppression, police brutality and riots of various kinds, and so on.
(For more background to his project, see also this 2007 Spacing post, a brief 2008 post at the Justseeds Art Collective, a Torontowiki page, Reddit discussion thread.)
I like this sort of thing, though I share Emily Keyes' concern that some of the posters might be too stridently ideological to be readily digested. Then again, might they have to be strident to get through Torontonians' ignorance?
What say you all? Is Groves' strategy a good one, one that should be adapted on a larger scale? Is it flawed? What is to be done?
With a stack of homemade posters, a sponge and a tub of wheat paste, Tim Groves is revising the story of Toronto.
His aim: To ensure that the less celebrated, even shameful, incidents in our collective pasts are remembered. Affixed to telephone poles and other surfaces at the sites where these events occurred, his posters commemorate the notorious Cherry Beach Express, the 1992 Yonge Street Riot and other chapters in the city’s past that mainstream accounts are liable to gloss over.
“Those bits of history are being forgotten, and other bits are being played up,” said Groves, 31. “It’s easy that these (events) could slip from history if there aren’t people that are finding ways to commemorate them.”
The imperative to remember has been a powerful motivator for Groves. A freelance investigative researcher and journalist, he started the initiative, dubbed The Missing Plaque Project, more than 10 years ago.
After spending his teenage years exploring Toronto by bike, Groves was making a ’zine about a city he thought he knew so well. But while researching the 1933 Christie Pits Riot, he was shocked by the scale of the violence that boiled over at the height of anti-Semitic, anti-foreigner tensions.
“I was like, ‘How did I grow up right by there, and not hear about this?’” he recalls.
He abandoned the ’zine idea, and spent the next few months researching the event and consolidating his newfound knowledge into a poster to hang around Christie Pits Park. In the age of the Internet, he borrowed from a tried-and-true approach to connecting with a very specific audience.
“I really wanted to put it up on the street. Just the idea to use a poster to communicate locally, I was really excited about that,” he said.
At present, Groves has more than a dozen different posters on a variety of different subjects, generally covering incidents in Toronto history that may have been neglected: GLBT oppression, police brutality and riots of various kinds, and so on.
(For more background to his project, see also this 2007 Spacing post, a brief 2008 post at the Justseeds Art Collective, a Torontowiki page, Reddit discussion thread.)
I like this sort of thing, though I share Emily Keyes' concern that some of the posters might be too stridently ideological to be readily digested. Then again, might they have to be strident to get through Torontonians' ignorance?
What say you all? Is Groves' strategy a good one, one that should be adapted on a larger scale? Is it flawed? What is to be done?
