A collaboration between Younger than Beyoncé and SHEEEP

October 17 – November 23, 2025
Gallery hours: Saturdays, 3-7pm and by appointment on Fridays

At Whippersnapper, 594B Dundas Street West Toronto
www.whippersnapper.ca

This exhibition is a proposition for a different 888 Dupont. The now-demolished live-work space holds a legendary status in our urban history. Within its crumbling walls, artists launched their careers, roamed the halls of their idols, took artistic risks, traded equipment and skills, and opened their spaces for community use. When all the residents were eventually evicted in 2021, many left without a fight, either due to a lack of resources, or accepting that this way of life was never meant to last.

This exhibition proposes answers to: How do we create and maintain enduring spaces for artists to make and develop work in a deeply communal and human way? What spatial, financial, and governance structures need to be in place?

The site of 888 Dupont now sits empty. TAS, the developer who demolished the building in 2021, recently sold the land to another developer, Carttera, after their project went into receivership due to the recent downturn in the condominium market. While markets are speculative, the needs for housing and culture are permanent. We can learn from the long trajectory of cooperatives, community land trusts, and other solidarity economy practices that we don’t have to rely upon the benevolence of those in power to build the spaces we need. When we draw our own plans and create our own budgets, we can provide greater autonomy and sustainability for our communities. This exhibition takes the stories that held 888 Dupont together and imagine its continuation as a vibrant live-work building, in a city that privileges its inhabitants’ safety and economic stability.

888 is an extension of our ongoing research, HATCH: Housing affordability tactics for creative humans, in collaboration with SHEEEP.school. HATCH is a series of discussions and workshops with the arts community to learn alternative strategies to co-create the conditions to meet our basic needs. We have presented co-learning sessions on artist housing co-ops, community land trusts, co-ownership models, and social housing architecture.

Collaborators

SHEEEP is a Toronto-based experimental art and architecture studio primarily working within community, education, activism, culture, public art and architecture.

Acknowledgements

This exhibition is part of a programming series supported by Collective Collective, a project between eight visual arts collectives with majority racialized membership. As a response to the systemic racism and exploitative labour conditions in the arts, as well as the interrelated lack of sustainability within the sector, we are testing out organizational and curatorial practices that centre values of collectivity, solidarity, and mutual aid through resource and labour sharing. Learn more here.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council of the Arts.