Queen Street Art Galleries

Queen Street West is one of Toronto's trendiest art communities, thriving with a youthful contemporary art scene. On any casual walk through this gallery district, you're bound to find some interesting things to look at. A forewarning in advanced however, everything here is not exactly G-Rated. Just saying. Haha.

C1 Art Space is both a local art gallery and school actually located on Ossington Avenue very close to Jonathan+Olivia. Ossington actually has a number of interesting art spaces and vintage shops to check out. Anyways, C1 is a nice place to find mixed media art type things and such.

*new* gallery is an artist run gallery that offers a wide variety of contemporary visual art. It actually originated from Toronto's Distillery District.

This is the Ontario Crafts Council. They help to promote many of Ontario's finest craftspeople.

And this is Paul Petro Contemporary Art. The gallery just finished up a group exhibition entitled "Making Scenes." It explored the ideas of domesticity, the material world, and female consciousness.

StyleGarage. Your contemporary furniture stop.

This is one of the most important places on Queen Street, MoCCA. The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art.

They have free admission for the rest of 2010, so definitely head on down there and check it out!

Below is Chippy's Fish & Chips, one of Toronto's best fish and chip stops, and right next to it is The Paper Place. Your best bet for finding unique Japanese papers. They have an exhibit going on right now entitled "six by eight" where a number of 6x8 artist designed cards can be seen on display. They have all sorts of things going on like origami displays along with various workshops on crafts such as screenprinting and letterpressing.

The Spice Trader & The Olive Pit, specializing in unique and organic spices.

And here we have the Candy Factory Lofts. This building is over a century old and used to be the factory of Ce De Candy Company which produces what in Canada we call Rockets and what they call Smarties in the U.S. It has now been converted into an interesting living space with "real hardwood strip flooring, some exposed brick, mezzanine bedrooms, exposed fir columns and beams, exposed wood ceilings, floating spiral ductwork and granite counters, just to name a few." All this not to mention an incredible location right in the thick of Toronto art galleries.

There are really many many more art spaces and interesting creative retail experiences to enjoy in this art and design district of Toronto.

If you're a contemporary art enthusiast, this is a lovely place to stop by and just take it all in.