Come make art with our artist-in residence, Michelle Peraza!

As part of her artist residency at the AGO, Michelle Peraza is creating two large-scale drawings, one of which will be made by working on-site and collaboratively with museum visitors as part of our monthly Maker Fridays. Free with General Admission.

Drawing inspiration from scholars, artists, and scientists speaking from the margins, Peraza engages with the alt-anthro-scene and the asymmetry in the current geological age. She is inspired by the colonial-led movement of plant life throughout the globe, the dissemination of drawn botanical images, our lived and embodied experiences of plants, geological strata, entanglement, and mending.

Peraza invites you to collaborate in one of her works and be inspired by your own experience with botanical imagery found in the AGO’s collection, from memory, or from your imagination to draw representational, abstracted or fantastical images of botanical life with coloured pencil on amate/amatl (Mesoamerican tree bark paper). Placed in strips of 94.5’’ in length, collaborators are invited to draw repetitive images inspired by botanicals above, below or weaving through the cut-out guides. Long durational pattern work, quick additions, intertwining your work with others, and moments of rest in-between images are all highly encouraged. Peraza intends to entangle the images made collaboratively with visitors and to coproduce the work through drawing, cut-outs and mending.

Presented as part of the AGO x RBC Emerging Artist Program. Visit AGO X RBC ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE: MICHELLE PERAZA to learn more about the program and the artist.

Image: Michelle Peraza, Interstices (detail), 2022/24, coloured pencil, 23k gold leaf,

red radish and purple carrot paper on amate/amatl paper.