Art Takes Action
- Recommended grades: 3 – 8
- Duration: 2 hours
- Dates in 2026: April 10, 17 + 24; May 8, 15, + 22; June 1 + 8
- Fees: $105 (Museum admission not included)
How can we engage in meaningful activism in an artful way? How do coastal First Nations steward the waters within their territories, and how should that inform the way we think about and advocate for water conservation?
In this feature workshop, students will be invited to think critically about the intersections of activism, art-making, and the conservation of coastal waterways. Workshop participants will visit with a selection of artworks in MOA’s galleries that model “art taking action” – pieces that use their positioning in the Museum to advocate for the protection and reclamation of Indigenous lands and waters. Students will learn how Indigenous ways of knowing can guide their own understandings of water and its relationship to culture and creative practice, and will be empowered to imagine themselves as agentive, artful activists in their own right.
After their guided gallery visit and a facilitated activity in MOA’s Multiversity Galleries, students will be asked to take their learning beyond the Museum by personally committing to an action that furthers water conservation efforts. With these commitments in mind, they will then engage in a “trash/formations” print-making activity, creating prints of Indigenous aquatic animal and plant life using collected pieces of marine trash. Students will also be invited to inscribe their personal commitments on top of each artwork.
After the session has concluded, MOA educators will photograph and upload students’ artworks to a webpage that will host their “Trash/formed Ecosystem”, and move their own artworks into action. This page will serve as an accessible, public-facing gallery of their creations, and as a catalogue of their commitments to foster a sense of collective responsibility and inspire other youths to make commitments of their own.