World Literacy Canada’s Kama Benefit Reading Series This instalment of World Literacy Canada’s swank charity series, now in its 20th year, features authors Ava Homa, a Kurdish exile, James Loney, a peace activist who was held hostage in Baghdad, and Marina Nemat, who spent over two years as a political prisoner in her native Iran. Find out more »

It’s not particularly polite to ask rich people what they earn. But tact is overrated, and we wanted to know, so we asked anyway. When they told us to get lost, we got sneaky. We dug up disclosure documents, annual reports and the tax filings of charitable organizations. When those trails went dry, we surveyed industry insiders who know what other people make—headhunters and consultants and analysts and colleagues—and asked for an educated guess. After hundreds of calls and emails and deep-throat meetings in dark alleys, we phoned the high earners back and told them what we found. Again, with feeling, they told us to piss off.

What follows is our shamelessly gawking, as-precise-as-possible examination of the highest-paid people in the city’s top industries. When the information was available, we included bonuses and perks and, in some cases, exercised stock options. Our findings verified that a high earner in finance is almost always on a different plane (a private jet, usually) than a high earner in, for example, the lowly arts. One major discovery: Heather Reisman took a pay cut. One truth reconfirmed: no matter how rich you are, there’s always someone who makes a helluva lot more.

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(Images: Steve Krug; Royal Ontario Museum)

The Royal Ontario Museum announced an interesting change of the guard today at C5, the continental fine dining restaurant perched atop of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Ted Corrado, who’s been the executive chef since the restaurant opened, has been promoted to regional executive chef at Compass Leisure, a subsidiary of the Compass Group, the national food-service company that runs C5 for the museum (we took a look inside Corrado’s fridge for our Crisper Confidential series in March). Replacing Corrado is Corbin Tomaszeski, of Restaurant Makeover and Dinner Party Wars fame, who also ran the kitchen at Holt Renfrew’s café. While Corrado’s menus have tended toward innovative dishes with the occasional molecular touch—one tasting menu started with butternut squash that had been cured, compressed and shaved, with a citrus tea syrup and crumbled caramelized cream—Tomaszeski is better known for less complicated fare. “My style is simple, but classic,” he said in a release. “I believe the best meals use everyday ingredients to create beautifully presented dishes that are uncomplicated, accessible and appealing to everyone.” Tomaszeski’s new menu at C5 includes truffled chips with fleur de sel, flatbreads with seasonal toppings and a lobster B.L.T. salad. He’ll also be responsible for the food at the Food Studio Café and C5’s catering service.

The problem with this season is there’s simply too much to do. Too many tortured opera divas. Too many ballerinas with toe cramps. Too many new sitcoms set in psychiatric offices. Too many touring exhibits of curiosities once touched by now-dead silver screen stars. Too many washed-up TV actors with a surprise talent for stage comedy. It’s all too, too much.

Our coping strategy: pick 10. Here, recommendations for an absolutely satisfying, perfectly proportioned fall

	#1 MEZZO IDOL Susan Graham, the renowned mezzo-soprano, performs as an anguished princess in Iphigenia in Tauris, another major coup for the COC READ MORE
	#2 THE CHAMELEON Herbie Hancock’s jazz experiments—fusion, folk, hip hop, disco—earned him as many detractors as fans. Backed by an orchestra and performing standards, he’s no less a provocateur READ MORE
	#3 A TALENT FOR SCANDAL The rising director Brendan Healy makes Toronto theatre exciting again with Jean Genet’s psychosexual thriller The Maids READ MORE
	#4 HER SERENE HIGHNESS Grace Kelly gets the royal treatment with a TIFF Lightbox exhibit of her dresses and artifacts and a program of her greatest movies READ MORE
	#5 DAINTY DANCING How the National Ballet’s Elena Lobsanova is preparing for her big debut in Romeo and Juliet READ MORE
	#6 MAGICAL THINKING Thirty-two of Marc Chagall’s spell­binding artworks are the main draw of a Russian avante-garde show at the AGO READ MORE
	#7 EMOTIONAL RESCUE Johanna Skibsrud’s first book catapulted her into the CanLit canon. Her second, a collection of short stories, is packed with gunshots, ill-timed vacations and terror at the circus READ MORE
	#8 AN EARFUL Jonathan Crow, the TSO’s new concertmaster, makes his debut with a multi-million-dollar violin READ MORE
	#9 BETTER THAN SEX Kim Cattrall, proving she’s much more than Carrie Bradshaw’s sidekick, dazzles as the brittle Amanda in Noël Coward’s Private Lives READ MORE
	#10 LAUGH ADDICTS Don McKellar and Bob Martin’s new TV series, Michael: Tuesdays and Thursdays, finds the funny in depression READ MORE

By Kamal Al-Solaylee | Illustration by Joel Kimmel

As the crowd settled in for an early June performance of Édouard Lock’s Untitled at the Bluma Appel Theatre, Matthew Jocelyn, the artistic and general director of Canadian Stage, stood under the spotlight, urging his audience to renew their subscriptions. Some serious name-dropping ensued. The company will be staging Red, about the life of the painter Mark Rothko, which won a Tony last year, as well as Clybourne Park, a Pulitzer Prize–winning play inspired by A Raisin in the Sun. And Atom Egoyan—who was in the audience that day—will be directing his wife, Arsinée Khanjian, in the war-themed British play Cruel and Tender.

Awards, celebrities, allusions to well-known works: there was an unmistakable whiff of desperation in Jocelyn’s populist appeal. Last year, he came to CanStage to make it a hub for, as he puts it, “the great theatre and choreographic artists who work in this country.” But his radical, rapid revamping of the ultra-safe company has alienated audiences. He opened his first season with Fernando Krapp Wrote Me This Letter, an obscure German play, and continued into movement-based and experimental works. By the end of the 2010–11 season, the company had experienced a six per cent drop in subscription rates, and the house capacity numbers were even bleaker. A few short-run plays came close to filling the Bluma for six to 12 performances, but some long-run shows ranged from 45 to 60 per cent capacity, and that factors in tickets sold through heavily discounted specials and other promotions. After two successful decades in Asia and Europe, Jocelyn’s return to his native Toronto has been met with more jeers than cheers.

The attempt to revive Canadian Stage is long overdue. Toronto’s big theatres have lagged in architectural and artistic excitement, left behind by film (Lightbox), opera and ballet (Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts) and art (renovation and rejuvenation of both the ROM and the AGO). Once upon a time, a regional Canadian playwright or director couldn’t be said to have “arrived” until he or she worked in Toronto, but Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton have usurped our natural place as the nerve centre of theatrical innovation. As a company, CanStage has been in artistic decline for years. Martin Bragg, Jocelyn’s predecessor, ended his 12-year tenure in 2010, stepping down at the end of his contract. His penultimate, and representative, season featured such crowd-pleasers as Shirley Valentine—the kind of heartwarming one-woman show that Jocelyn wouldn’t cross the street, let alone the Atlantic, to program.

During Jocelyn’s decade as the head of the Atelier du Rhin in Alsace, he transformed that company into the only organization in France to produce opera, theatre and contemporary dance under one roof. He also brought in corporate sponsorships and oversaw a glitzy renovation. When he was hired at CanStage, the hope was that he would couple his international connections with a nationalist agenda to create a vibrant, culturally relevant performing arts centre producing original work.

Unfortunately, the execution of last season’s productions rarely matched the intellectual ambition it took to program them. Director Peter Hinton’s take on Michel Tremblay’s already-dated story of Québécois identity, Saint Carmen of the Main, looked great but was soulless and poorly acted. At the smaller Berkeley Street Theatre, The Middle Place, based on the lives of Toronto’s homeless youth, came off like a clichéd after-school special. Even the stronger plays, like David Greig’s The Cosmonaut’s Last Message, received plodding productions: I saw a Friday night performance at which a big chunk of the scant audience bolted for the exit doors during intermission. Jocelyn dreams of attracting new, younger audiences, the same crowd that frequents Queen Street art galleries or lines up for TIFF. Last year, he hired an audience development manager specifically to focus on C-Stage, a program designed to seduce the under-30 set with free memberships and $12.50 tickets. For the opening night of Fernando Krapp, he planted mock protesters outside the Bluma with placards reading “Live Theatre Is Krapp,” meant to appeal to a youthful taste for irony. So far, these tactics haven’t translated into ticket sales. Meanwhile, to CanStage’s conservative subscriber base, the changes intended as a breath of fresh air felt more like an unexpected winter blast.

The effects of such a grim reception are showing on Jocelyn’s face. In the promo shots released when his appointment was announced in February 2009, the then-51-year-old exuded an air of European sophistication mixed with the nerdiness of a glee club teacher. That’s been replaced by the housebroken demeanour of someone forced to accept the realities of selling theatre in Toronto in 2011. Part of the problem may be that Jocelyn made his name in Europe, where public funding allows for artistic risk taking without much worry about commercial appeal. He shares a philosophy with the mid-century French theatre director Jean Vilar, who believed in bringing high art to mainstream audiences. “Who doesn’t deserve to eat caviar? Who doesn’t deserve to drink champagne?” Jocelyn says.

Without a doubt, Jocelyn must improve the quality of his productions; his programming choices have been undeniably arrogant. But artistic transitions have bumpy starts. CanStage needed a rude awakening. Risk-averse programming has turned off curious audiences and divorced the city from exciting theatrical experiments. Knee-jerking back to a Martin Bragg–like season would be a mistake—the thought of returning to a slate of middle-brow comedies and dated musicals is much too sad for me to contemplate.

Among his more popular selections for the 2011–12 season, Jocelyn has managed to squeeze in Dark Matters, an exploration of physics and human emotion from the Frankfurt-based Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite, and Beckett: Feck It, a words-and-music tribute to the Irish master. We’ll see how they go over. Two years after his return to Toronto, Jocelyn has yet to buy a home; he says his ideal living space is a loft. This time next year, he might be making a down payment. Or he might be buying a one-way ticket out of here.

David Hockney: two mediums (Image: Andrew)

David Hockney once said, “Inspiration, she never comes to the lazy,” so it’s a bit curious that the works from his most recent series are iPad and iPhone drawings, many of which he created lying in bed or lounging in his living room. Two hundred of these iPictures—which spread across 20 iPod Touches and 20 iPads—will be mounted on the ROM walls for David Hockney’s Fresh Flowers, an exhibition that will be in town from Oct. 8 to Jan. 1. 

Most of Hockney’s works are little fragments of his daily life frozen on the screen as if they could just as effortlessly have been snapped with the device’s built-in camera and forgotten in an album full of looking-down-at-your-shoes photos. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t beautiful or that they don’t require some semblance of an artistic eye—vibrant flowers in vases and picturesque scenes of books and berries are portrayed in bright, colourful still-lifes rendered with the various blurry brush strokes from the Brushes app available on any iPhone, iPad or other iThing.

Hockney says the quickness of drawing with your fingertips (or a stylus) on Brushes allows your thoughts and feelings to stream more quickly onto the canvas (read: backlit glass screen) than working with, say, a pen or paintbrush on a sketchbook page. The instant nature of digital art actually makes it easier to convey the artist’s ideas. Sometimes Hockney even gets so absorbed that he absent-mindedly wipes off his fingertips to remove the non-existent paint. What’s more, all the artist’s fingertips can be used to draw five lines at once, which would be pretty tough to do with a paintbrush (this technique isn’t usually fruitful). The iPads, though made for touching, will still be hung as art, so this ROM showing will not be easy for grabby technophiles to digest.

• Exhibition of David Hockney’s iPictures Coming to Canada

The Glass Menagerie The oppressively insular life of Amanda Wingfield and her delicate daughter Laura and the hopes they pin on an unsuspecting gentleman caller get the Soulpepper treatment. Find out more »

The Toronto Fringe Festival The city’s 12 days of theatre are back. This year, 150 good, bad and ugly productions take over dozens of venues spread across downtown. Find out more »

Bipasha Basu will be one of the Bollywood stars in town for the IIFA Awards. (Image: Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP/Getty)

The stars and starlets of Bollywood will face a screaming, thronging, packed house at the Rogers Centre this week for the 2011 International Indian Film Academy Awards. Tickets for the ceremony sold out six months in advance, with the first 5,000 bought within an astonishing three minutes at a rate of just over 10 tickets per second. (Those planning on buying scalpers’ tickets, be wary of fakes.) Toronto is expected to receive upwards of 40,000 visitors for the awards, which will be the first to take place on North American soil.

Organizers will be rolling out the traditional green carpet on June 25, but the hype has been building since that delightfully awkward photo op last January with noted Bollywood enthusiast Dalton McGuinty and actors Preity Zinta and Anil Kapoor (of Slumdog Millionaire fame, for those whose Bollywood knowledge stems mostly from the Danny Boyle flick). Never one to refrain from hyperbole, Kapoor told a throng of Canadian reporters that “IIFA Toronto will be the biggest landmark event [in Indian cinema] and will define the future of relationships between our two countries.” Ahem. Other celebs expected to be in attendance include Bollywood megastars Shah Rukh Khan, Bipasha Basu, Priyanka Chopra and the Deol family.

Expect the city to pull out all the stops in welcoming India’s film community to “Bollywood West” (the ROM has already opened this exhibit of classic Bollywood movie posters), and with good reason: the event is expected to garner an international television audience of at least 600 million. There will be various lead-up festivities held throughout the GTA in the coming days, so check back throughout the week for our ongoing coverage of IIFA 2011.

(Image: Remie Geoffroi)

There’s always a queue at the ROM’s bimonthly rock, mineral, gem, fossil and meteorite identification clinic. Last March, the lineup included Josette, clutching a mass of tangled-up jewels, Harvey, who carried some colourful stones, and Nancy and Joe, fossil enthusiasts in matching polar fleece vests. All were hoping for a windfall. Some people arrive with black rocks from their backyards, hoping they’ve discovered a primitive meteorite—the extremely rare, scientifically invaluable specimens that show us what our solar system looked like before the planets were formed and can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most suspected meteorites are what clinic coordinator Katherine Dunnell calls “meteorwrongs.” In one case, a construction worker with a dirt-caked pickup backed into the ROM’s loading dock, hauling a coffee table–sized find to the clinic. (It turned out to be just a common rock.) One woman, while walking along the Don River, found a limestone rock that cleaved open to reveal a perfect starfish fossil, an extremely rare discovery for this area. In keeping with museum policy, the ROM staff won’t do outright appraisals, but they will tell you when you should keep something in a bank vault. “Toronto sits atop a hidden city of unbelievably interesting things,” Dunnell says. “Our repeat customers are people who are constantly looking at the ground and searching.”

One Thousand and One Nights director Tim Supple; Scaramouche’s Keith Froggett at last year’s Toronto Taste; and Glee’s Lea Michele

1. LUMINATO
Luminato No. 5 kicks off this Friday with a free concert at Metro Square featuring Beast and the Joel Plaskett Emergency. Other offerings we’re dying to see? Malcolm Gladwell’s talk at the Bluma Appel theatre and One Thousand and One Nights, a multilingual, interdisciplinary retelling of Shahrazad’s tales, by British director Tim Supple and Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh. June 10 to 19. luminato.com.

2. TORONTO TASTE
Second Harvest’s annual fundraiser isn’t just about raising the cash to support the organization’s good work (over the last 21 years, it has provided on the order of eight million meals to the city’s hungry, and each ticket purchased for this event funds 250 meals). It’s also one of the most anticipated foodie events of the year. Toronto’s culinary boldface names—Marc Thuet, Mark McEwan, Roger Mooking, Teo Paul, Paul Boehmer and more—whip up some seriously gourmet eats at and around the ROM, while this year’s host, Food Network’s Bob Blumer, promises to be extra entertaining. Although tickets are usually available at the door, they’re going fast this year. June 12. $250. Royal Ontario Museum, 100 Queen’s Park, torontotaste.ca.

3. STEVE-O (FREE!)
Steve-O (a.k.a. Stephen Glover), TV personality, stuntman and star member of the Jackass family, is kind of shocking. (Does anyone else remember when Dean Blundell and the rest of his morning show was suspended after Steve-O visited the studio, peed on the floor and performed a stunt called “Unwrapping the Mummy”—duct tape and his, ahem, unmentionables were involved—back in 2004?) But all his crazy behaviour wasn’t just poor judgment; rather, it stemmed from a raging drug addiction and a seriously overblown fondness for fame. Now, after an arrest for coke possession and stints in rehab and a psychiatric ward, Steve-O is back—still a daredevil, but a sober one. He’s in town promoting his new memoir, Professional Idiot, about his journey to the edge and back, this weekend. June 10. Chapters John and Richmond, 142 John St., 416-595-7349, chapters.indigo.ca.

4. UNITED WE SOLE
We love a good pair of kicks, whether they’re towering and strappy or hipster-endorsed Chucks. But we’ve got nothing on Lee Joseph and Dion Walcott, two seriously shoe-happy Torontonians. Founders of Toronto Loves Kicks, they’re hosting the city’s first sneaker expo this weekend, with all sneaker heads invited to participate. Limited editions, rare pairs, sneaks of every brand, style and colour are all on offer, whether they’re for sale, for trade or just there to be admired. June 11. $10. 99Sudbury, 99 Sudbury St., torontoloveskicks.com.

5. WOOFSTOCK (FREE!)
St. Lawrence Market plays host to an onslaught of dogs and dog people this weekend. This super-sized fest is billed as the largest of its kind in North America, and attractions include a doggie fashion show, sporting events and even a pool for the pups to take a dip. June 11 and 12. St. Lawrence Market, 92 Front St. E., 416-234-9663, woofstock.ca.

6. INSPIRATO FESTIVAL
Like that other event that ends in -ato, this festival seeks to promote and support Toronto’s culture scene. Here, though, the emphasis is all on theatre. The lineup of 16 original plays, each 10 minutes long, is themed around sound. Performed in two groups of eight on alternating nights, half are meditative and calming, while the rest focus on sounds that “disturb or awaken.” To June 12. $12–$17. Alumnae Theatre, 70 Berkeley St., inspiratofestival.ca.

7. GLEE LIVE! IN CONCERT
We have a confession: we know exactly who each of the following people are: Rachel, Finn, Mercedes, Kurt, Artie, Tina, Puck, Quinn, Santana, Brittany, Mike, Sam and Blaine. Not only that, we regularly watch them mangle (or, sometimes, bring down the house with) classic songs like “Don’t Stop Believing,” “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “River Deep, Mountain High.” We even watched them religiously, once a week for an entire TV season, which is rare in these downloading days. We draw the line at caring about their romantic entanglements and, frankly, most of the plot developments not related to singing. But that’s why this concert is kind of perfect: it’s Glee, the good-parts version. June 11 and 12. $49.50–$89.50. Air Canada Centre, 40 Bay St., 416-870-8000, ticketmaster.ca.

8. TIFF FAMILY CLASSIC SATURDAYS
While this TIFF-organized family-friendly movie night doesn’t take place under the stars—like so many others—we like the focus on quality. This summer’s lineup includes award-winning and critically acclaimed movies like Newsies, Whale Rider and The Iron Giant. Kick things off this weekend with The Shaggy Dog (the original 1959 edition, not Tim Allen’s bizarre 2006 foray into therianthropy). June 11 to August 13. $12. TIFF Bell Lightbox, 350 King St. W., 416-599-8433, tiff.net.

(Images: Supple, Luminato; Froggett, Renée Suen; Michele, David Shankbone)

Gregory Burke with Sarah Bywater, the former Power Plant head fundraiser, at the 2009 Power Ball (Image: George Pimentel)

The Power Plant’s first board meeting of the year was held at noon on Monday, February 7. The gallery, situated on prime waterfront property, is a magnet for the city’s wealthy society figures. The clubby board of governors reflects that. Trinity Jackman, an archaeologist and the daughter of Hal Jackman, is the vice-president. The Drake Hotel owner Jeff Stober is a member, as are Rosedale hostess and arts patron Elisa Nuyten and the entertainment lawyer Paul Bain. The board’s president is Shanitha Kachan, an art collector and the wife of investment guru Gerald Sheff. Kachan called to order what should have been a routine, low-key meeting. Then came the big revelation.

Gregory Burke, the gallery’s director for the past five years, rose from his chair to make an announcement. The 53-year-old Burke is painfully shy and uncomfortable in public, and avoids eye contact. In a quiet voice, he informed the board that he was resigning. The announcement wasn’t totally unexpected. Since the day Burke was hired, there had been tension between him and members of the board, especially Bill Boyle, the gallery’s former director and a steadfast advocate of a more populist approach to arts programming. The socially graceful and savvy Kachan had become board president last June and never really connected with Burke, either.

His resignation came at a particularly awkward moment. The Power Plant was nearing the end of a $750,000 renovation that was meant to reintroduce it to the city when completed this spring. The gallery was also preparing to unveil an ambitious installation by the celebrated Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. The news of Burke’s resignation signalled that he was so unhappy he’d eclipse the grand reopening with his departure.

The directors of medium-sized art galleries aren’t usually celebrities, but the person in charge of the Power Plant spends a great deal of time in the spotlight. Unlike collecting institutions such as the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum, the Power Plant doesn’t acquire art; instead, it spends its budget on curating themed shows of borrowed artworks and organizing exhibitions that survey trendy art themes. The gallery is known as a conduit for the fickle fashions of the international art world, and as an arbiter of the biggest names in contemporary Canadian art (last year it hosted a survey of the video art of Michael Snow). The Power Plant doesn’t sell the art it exhibits, either—it leaves that to artists’ agents and dealers. An artist exhibited at the gallery acquires instead the coveted seal of disinterested approbation. With that endorsement comes status and a spike in asking price. The director of the Power Plant is one of the most power­ful tastemakers in the country’s art circles.

The gallery’s prestigious reputation was carefully nurtured by its parent, the Harbourfront Centre—a non-profit consortium that also runs the International Festival of Authors, the Fleck Dance Theatre and two marinas. Founded in 1976 as the Art Gallery at Harbourfront, the gallery has always been devoted to exhibiting the work of contemporary artists. In 1987, it changed its name and moved into its current building, a renovated 1920s facility that once housed the heating and refrigeration equipment for Queen’s Quay Terminal. The relationship between the Power Plant and Harbourfront is and has always been cozy. Boyle, in addition to serving as a Power Plant board member, is the chief executive officer of Harbourfront and was one of the gallery’s original founders. From the outset, he wanted the gallery to address what he considered a shameful dearth of contemporary art exhibited at institutions such as the AGO. The Power Plant was meant to bring together the bohemian artists on Queen Street West and the international scene in New York, Los Angeles, London and Berlin. The Power Plant’s budget is approved by the Harbourfront board, and it is ultimately Harbourfront that hires and fires the Power Plant’s director.

Burke, a native New Zealander, began his career in the 1970s as a video artist. By the mid-’80s, he had shifted to arts curation and administration. He ran the Govett-Brew­ster, a public gallery for contemporary art in New Plymouth, New Zealand. “At the time I was at the Govett-Brewster, there was a plague in public funding,” Burke says. The city administrators eventually came around to his impassioned pleas to continue funding the gallery, agreeing that art was too important to sacrifice to economic pressures. Burke was at the Govett-Brewster for seven years, exhibiting international work, especially from the Pacific Rim, and establishing an artists’ residency program. By 2005, the year he received a call from the Power Plant, he had acquired an international reputation. “I knew about the Power Plant from day one,” he told me. “I knew people in the international art world respected it.”

Members of the ROM Young Patrons' Circle mingle among the dinosaurs (Image: Jaclyn Klein)

Last week at the ROM, Dr. Sarah Fee, a cultural anthropologist on staff, took to the stage in the museum’s theatre and accepted the inaugural Young Patrons’ Circle Research Fund gift—a $7,000 sum that will eventually result in new exhibits. Before the announcement, curators from various parts of the museum made their case for the funding, turning the event into a kind of Academy Awards for museum nerds. After the jump, our rundown of the night.

The Young Patrons’ Circle is the baby version of the ROM’s Royal Patrons’ Circle. Members of both groups pay a yearly fee (for the YPC, between $600 and $5,000) and receive benefits like behind-the-scenes tours and research lectures from some of the ROM’s curators. Last year, the YPC voted to donate some of its dues to a research fund. Since September, a portion of that money has been saved up, just waiting to be handed out.

Dr. Sarah Fee, YPC Research Fund recipient (Image: Jaclyn Klein)

A peer-review committee, which also chooses the recipient of the Royal Patrons’ Circle fund, decided Fee should receive the donation for her research into the links between the textiles of Oman and East Africa. Fee will use the money to travel to the regions, where she will study the trade circuit of Omani silk fabric and the contributions of that fabric to East African style. “I need to travel to live with people to study and understand their art,” she said, thanking the audience for the donation.

The research that Fee and subsequent recipients undertake through the YPC fund will result in displays and presentations for the general public. “This is something that several people in the ROM are working on, the idea that globalization is actually something that has been happening for many millennia around the world,” she told us after the ceremony. “We’re building up towards an exhibit to see all these Indian Ocean interconnections. We’re also going to be doing some reporting and filming for the website.” We’re looking forward to seeing what happens.