Collaborative Kitchen Collage
Collage, community art workshop
Country Hills & Southwood Calgary Public Library branches
Collaborative Kitchen Collage, a 2Peaz Artist Collective project (Melisa and Sharon Fortowsky), invited community members to create collective artworks from images, texts, and objects representing their kitchen memories and food traditions. Exhibited at two Calgary Public Library branches — Country Hills and Southwood — in January and February 2023. Using collage as an accessible medium (no art experience required), participants contributed fragments of their food stories to build a shared visual narrative.
The project makes visible the invisible labour and love embedded in everyday cooking. It honours the kitchen as a site of culture, identity, and intergenerational knowledge transfer — especially for immigrant and diaspora communities where food traditions carry the weight of home.
By placing the work in public library branches rather than art galleries, the project reached community members who might never enter a gallery. This exemplifies 2Peaz's facilitation approach: using a simple, accessible art-making process (collage) to open up complex conversations (food, identity, belonging) in spaces people already trust.
The Situation
As 2Peaz Artist Collective, Melisa and Sharon Fortowsky had been developing their collaborative practice around food, kitchen work, and domestic labour as art subjects. The Calgary Public Library offered an accessible, community-centred venue to bring this work directly to diverse neighbourhoods — taking food-themed collaborative art out of galleries and into the spaces where community members already gather.
The Approach
Collaborative Kitchen Collage invited community members to create collective artworks from images, texts, and objects representing their kitchen memories and food traditions. Using collage as a deliberately accessible medium (no art experience required), participants contributed fragments of their food stories to build a shared visual narrative. The exhibition ran at two Calgary Public Library branches — Country Hills and Southwood — in January and February 2023, reaching different communities across the city.
The Challenges
Facilitating genuine creative participation in a library setting — a space people associate with quiet individual activity rather than messy collaborative art-making — required rethinking how to invite engagement. The project needed to honour diverse food traditions without flattening their differences into a generic "multicultural" narrative, and to make the collage process simple enough for anyone to contribute while producing work with genuine artistic depth.
The Impact
By placing the exhibition in public library branches rather than art galleries, the project reached community members who might never enter a gallery — particularly newcomers and families from the diverse neighbourhoods around Country Hills and Southwood. The collage format honoured the invisible labour embedded in everyday cooking and the kitchen as a site of culture, identity, and intergenerational knowledge transfer.
Lessons Learned
Collaborative Kitchen Collage demonstrated that 2Peaz's food-centred collaborative practice could scale across multiple venues simultaneously while maintaining its participatory quality. The library setting proved ideal for community-engaged art — accessible, trusted, and already serving the diverse populations the project aimed to reach.