PARTNERSHIPS

Art Cart is a partnership between Workman Arts and Gifts of Light, which pairs established Workman Arts member artists with CAMH client services to provide peer-to-peer arts instruction with an emphasis on skill development and creative exploration.

These art workshops connect artists with lived experience of mental health and addictions issues with those currently in recovery through structured 10-week workshop series exploring a specific art medium in depth and building a body of work.

The “Ica Pas Artist Scholarship Award” has been created by Barbara Pascaluta in partnership with Toronto Community Housing Revitalization Team and Workman Arts.

The purpose of the scholarship is to celebrate artists who use art as a way to overcome challenges in their life. This scholarship provides artists facing systemic barriers with financial, training, and showcasing supports to further advance their artistic careers. This scholarship is inspired by the life and legacy of Ecaterina Pascaluta “Ica Pas” and prioritizes uplifting and honoring artists and the power of art to highlight and overcome injustice, challenges, and barriers.

The Artist in Residence program is part of Workman Arts’ Rendezvous with Madness Festival in collaboration with Tangled Art + Disability. By providing time, resources, and both an artist fee and a material fee, we believe this can support the development of a body of work to become exhibition ready for a solo show at the Tangled Art + Disability gallery vitrine space in Spring 2026. We offer this opportunity to a Workman Arts member who has not recently presented or has minimally exhibited their artwork.

This year will be dedicated to artists working with and/or integrating sound art in their practice. In addition to the vitrines space, the selected artist will have the opportunity to use the Library shared space at Tangled Art + Disability as well to either display works or hold public program events.

Workman Arts partnered with Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness to publish our second print anthology, Up:Rising – A Collection of Rebellious Imaginings, an unapologetic chorus of Mad voices that refuse to conform or cower in the shadows.

We invited writers with lived experience of mental health and/or addiction issues from across Canada to send us their stories, poems, daydreams, imaginings, and manifestos around all the things it can mean to rebel.

What we received exceeded our expectations. While some pieces whisper rebellion through quiet acts of survival, others rage loudly against psychiatric incarceration, systemic violence, and various forms of injustice. Many of the pieces stare you defiantly in the eye while rupturing sanist stereotypes. They subvert genre.

Thanks to a $1 million investment over four years from the Slaight Family Foundation, Workman Arts expanded its art training programs throughout the GTA by partnering with Scarborough Arts, UrbanArts, North York Arts, East End Arts, Arts Etobicoke and Lakeshore Arts.

The expanded program tackles the prevalence of social isolation in individuals with mental health issues and the lack of opportunities to build lasting social connections through meaningful engagement outside of the mainstream mental health system. Workman Arts’ art training programs are unique in the mental health sector because they do not treat the art class as secondary to the mental health benefits. High-quality art classes across all disciplines are facilitated by instructors with lived experience of mental health and/or addiction issues.

Artist collective Gendai in collaboration with Workman Arts invites BIPOC youth (ages 16-20) participated in a free March Break program about art, activism, and solidarity from March 14-18, 2026.

The program, facilitated by Petrina Ng and Marsya Maharani , was a space to hang out, eat, gossip, dream, read, and make art to think about how oppression (like racism, ableism, colonialism, and capitalism) impacts our daily lives, and to collectively envision alternative futures.