Art, Culture, Place: Kensington Market as Muse

How do writers, musicians, sculptors, and filmmakers imagine Kensington Market?

Kurt Swinghammer's Augusta as an ode to Kensington Market

A ChartAttack.com article on Toronto Musician cites Kensington Market as an important source of his creative energy:

The new album, Augusta, is a direct reference to Augusta St. in Kensington Market where Swinghammer lived for nearly 15 years. He says that the colourful, multi-cultural environment has influenced his work greatly and that he finds it impossible not to be taken in by Kensington Market.

"One of the things that motivates people to make art is to shape their environment, to make sense of things and to sort of reorder things," he says. "To have that extend out into the community or through television and movies and CDs and stuff, it just extends that. Its seems to validate the work for sure."
...
"Proximity to the source is directly correlated to how exciting and visceral the experience can be," he says. "The best parties happen in the kitchen, people want to be close to each other, as opposed to spread out in a big room."

The City of Toronto's Public Art Program: Community Markers for Kensington Market
Community markers

Kensington Market (Baldwin Street and St. Andrews Street)
Artist team of Shirley Yanover & David Hlynsky

The artist team of Shirley Yanover & David Hlynsky summarizes the market's variety of activities, from its grass roots international trade, represented by the marker at Baldwin Street, to the best of domestic harmony, represented in the icon at St. Andrews Street. The Baldwin Street globe (powder coated aluminum) represents the home we all share, with orbiting images of what we need to survive. The images (powder coated aluminum) circling the globe are inspired by photographs of the Market's windows and signage. The artwork evokes global commerce on an intimate scale, a pictorial language that transcends multilingual chaos by reducing trade to a few essential appetites. The St. Andrews marker, a cat on a kitchen chair, is a poignant representation of the spirit of Kensington. Cats rule supreme in the market. They are its security guards and they keep our laps warm in winter. The artwork is a monument to their simple but essential contribution to human well being.

The King of Kensington (A CBC television series representing Kensington Market (1975-1980))

Wikepedia entry
The Al Waxman Collection at the Toronto Reference Library
"Salute to the King" (from the Canadian Jewish News, July 4, 2002)
"He was a good King" (from the Toronto Sun, June 24, 2002)
"The King is Back in Kensington for Good" (from the Globe & Mail, June 24, 2002)


Twitch City (CBC television series, 1998-2000)

Cast and episode guide
Canoe.ca articles on Twitch City

Literature

From Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride (1993, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart)

Gradually her heart settles. It's soothing to be among strangers, who require from her no efforts, no explanations, no reassurances. She likes the mix on the streets here, the mixed skins. Chinatown has taken over mostly, though there are still some Jewish delicatessens, and, further up and off to the side, the Portuguese and West Indian shops of the Kensington Market. Rome in the second century, Constantinople in the tenth, Vienna in the nineteenth. A crossroads. Those from other countries look as it they're trying hard to forget something, those from here as if they're trying hard to remember. Or maybe it's the other way around.

See also:

Dionne Brand's At the Lisbon Plate and Neil Bissoondath's Christmas Lunch, published in Fagan, Cary and Robert MacDonald, 1990. Toronto Stories: Streets of Attitude. Toronto: Yonge & Bloor Publishing.

Brand, Dionne, 2005. What We All Long For. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf.

Wolfe, Morris and Douglas Daymond, eds., 1977. Toronto Short Stories. Toronto: Doubleday Canada.

Papadimos, Basil, 1989. The Hook of it is. Enismore, Ontario: Emergency Press.

Callaghan, Barry, ed., 1995. This Ain't no Healing Town. Toronto Stories. Toronto: Exile Editions.

Niedzviecki, Hal, 1998. Concrete Forest. The New Fiction of Urban Canada. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.