ARTiculate Our Rights: Outdoor Art Exhibition At The Forks In Winnipeg, Canada

September 21, 2020

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ first phase of the ARTiculate Our Rights exhibition features an outdoor art display at The Forks in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada that explores the meaning of human rights to youth

A series of artwork billboards along a pathway at The Forks in Winnipeg, Manitoba are part of an exhibition staged by Canadian Museum for Human Rights. ARTiculate Our Rights expresses human rights themes important to youth in Manitoba today.

To mark the 150^th anniversary of Manitoba becoming a province, the museum invited students aged 13 to 19 from across Manitoba to imagine the future for human rights and how these rights will impact people’s lives. Students submitted artwork. More than 100 diverse works were chosen for two phases of display.

A billboard containing a map to the the 13 art installations of the Canadian Museums for Human Rights' Articulate Our Rights exhibition along a pathway at The Forks

The first phase is an outdoor exhibition featuring art by 26 youth on 13 large installations.

brick walkway alongside treed green space where billboards displays a collection of art work

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights sits at the edge of The Forks, a community hub and National Historic Site that includes shops, restaurants, museums, recreational areas, park space, and a riverside walkway. It is a lovely area to walk through and makes a beautiful backdrop for the art.

The pieces of art are varied, engaging, powerful, and thought-provoking. That is probably best explained with a few photos of the works themselves.

Artwork featuring a black globe containing a black and white drawing of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights surrounded by colourful country flages with diverse faces on the right and soldiers against a wall of fire on the left

Painting in vivid colours of red, orange and yellow featuring a robotic hand across an abstract face and hands reaching out from the darkness on the side

Artwork featuring a stylized naked skeletal body with ribs showing, bald head, and sunked eyes

Painting featuring greyscale women with long hair curled hugging legs and crying against a red back of read tears with assorted words printed between the tear (e.g. slut, whore, easy, etc.)

A painting of a dark-skinned woman in a white hijab crying red tears. A coloured area of red around her head contains words like oppressed and abducted; a white banner across her mouth read Do No Silence Our Suffering

A painting showing mask-like drawings of the eyes and noses in purples and reds of two people against a white background with colours dripping down like tear

Painting with a brown coloured fist with palm covered in blood and a banner below it saying I Matte, and the words Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women printed against a background of yellow stripe emanating from a sun at the top right

An art work a black background shows the profiles of three womean with books open on their noses covering their eyes and many hands reaching up at the bottom of the painting

Painting on a white background shows a hand releasing a dove surrounded by colours of blue and mauve

Billboard with a quote by Leslie Meisels a Holocaust survivor: Silence helps the oppressors — *Quotes to make you think further are displayed at some of the installations*

Two large paintings on billboards on opposite sides of a path through a park

The ARTiculate Our Rights outdoor exhibition opened July 15, 2020 and runs until October 31, 2020. The indoor version, which will consist of dozens of projected and still images, is postponed to 2021 due to COVID-19. Specific dates have not yet been determined.

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