A Markham, Ont. arts hub reimagines the industrial park

A frill-free, five-acre site within the nondescript strip malls and sprawling warehouses of Markham, northeast of Toronto, isn’t where you expect to find an emerging arts hub. But Andrea Carson Barker, who established herself as one of Canada’s foremost art writers before digging into her current role as president of Arbutus Real Estate Ltd., is building just that with Industrial Arts.
“My dad purchased land up here in the late 1960s,” Carson Barker says of the site on the ruggedly monikered Steelcase Road. The Don Valley Parkway had just been built and everything toward the top of the DVP, around Steeles Avenue, was farmland beyond the boundary of the city. The undertaking was intended to afford Carson Barker’s father additional warehouse space for his businesses at the time, which included importing home decor from Italy. It grew to become an enterprise where he both operated that company and leased out other units.
Given the site’s history as an address for trades that require ample space – think die-cutters and printing houses – it’s unlikely that anyone would have predicted its contemporary evolution into a burgeoning cultural centre. But Carson Barker, who became more involved with her father’s business after his death in 2017, launched Industrial Arts here to combine her passion for the visual arts with her unique ability to foster an artistic community in an unlikely environment.
“The idea is to transform [the buildings] into something for a more creative use,” she says of the metamorphosis of the first three properties on the site. “As units come up for lease, we will be bringing in more creative industrial kinds of tenants – they could be furniture makers, design studios or garment makers.”
Carson Barker highlights one of her first tenants, Xiaojing Yan, and her studio as an example of a creative whose practice greatly benefits from an outsized utilitarian working space. While her unit may not have the romance of a post and beam loft downtown, Yan, who is known for her materially complex sculptures made using mycelium, wood and other natural objects, can conceptualize unfettered in its ample and indestructible square footage.
“When I met her, she was working out of her living room and making these giant sculptures from pearls and mushrooms, and incubating mushrooms in a contraption in her house,” Carson Barker says. “When I saw this, I told her, you need to have a studio. So, we created a space for her, and she’s been here for about seven years.” Carson Barker also notes that artist Esmaa Mohamoud worked on the Industrial Arts site for a project that required enough room to store the pink 1978 Cadillac that was used in her 2023 work, Nirvana (Oh, Sweet Elham).
Carson Barker beams as she shares these accomplishments and programming highlights from Industrial Arts’ not-for-profit arm, Steelcase Art Projects, such as the temporary installation of a work by Nicholas Fleming. That work’s grouping of seafoam chairs perched on tall plinths was the inaugural piece to be shown in the Industrial Arts Sculpture Garden. A 2023 exhibition called Site Unseen – curated by Yuluo Wei and featuring community programming by Steelcase Art Projects’ placemaking coordinator, Max Morgia, who are two of Carson Barker’s closest collaborators – invited visitors to experience cast metal replicas of industrial objects by Zeke Moores – including a gilt dumpster made entirely of bronze – which were shown alongside photographs by Steven Laurie.
The site’s current exhibition, Face/Waste, runs until Dec. 15. It involves the takeover of a semi-demolished unit by over 30 artists of various disciplines. Since mid-October, their work has occupied the space and when the show ends, the unit will be turned into subsidized artist studios. This quick evolution from industrial space to exhibition venue to creative incubator is a succinct example of Carson Barker’s aspiration to cultivate a more creative approach to a city’s inevitable change.
For more, visit artsindustrial.com.