Welcome to Our Home
Welcome to the website of The Art Collective, a group of artists based in Montreal who are experimenting with collaborative art-making, with sometimes surprising results. The Art Collective works in collaboration with the Studio Arts department of Concordia University's Faculty of Fine Arts. The group also is co-sponsored by the university's Fine Arts Student Alliance.
What we do: Each piece of artwork we produce involves the work of several artists working in turn, adding layers of meaning and expression.
Collaboration, risk and reward: It can take a substantial amount of trust to turn over artwork you've just completed to somebody else who can, for example, take the piece in a completely different direction, if that seems warranted. But that's just part of the collaboration process, which involves setting aside some of the traditional ideas surrounding art and artists. One of these involves the idea of the individual artist as genius, an idea that was popular in some circles during the Renaissance. In collaborative art-making, each artist tries to build on what is already on the page, amplifying or clarifying what is there.
Who we are: The Art Collective operates in collaboration with the Studio Arts Department of Concordia University's Faculty of Fine Arts, which is known as one of the leading art schools in Canada. We do much of our work in one of Studio Arts' drawing studios and receive advice from faculty members who are professional artists with strong careers in the art world. Student members of the group bring their own artistic preoccupations and the latest techniques and thinking coming from their classroom experiences. Other members of the group are professional artists who wish to remain in contact with the art-school milieu.
Links with other collectives: We are interested in exchanging ideas with other art collectives in Canada and elsewhere, with the goal of exploring the potential for collaborative art-making, both within our group and with other collectives.