Artist Spotlight: The World in a Block Party

🌎✨ Artist Spotlight: The World in a Block Party ✨🌎

📍 Former Hudson's Bay parking lot (outside STC Gate 3)

📅 June 27–28, 2026

⏰ 11 AM–4 PM

🎟️ FREE admission

We’re excited to highlight some of the incredible artists leading art activations at Weekend Two of The World in a Block Party. Swipe through to meet the artists helping bring this celebration of Scarborough’s creativity, culture, and community to life:

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👨‍🎨 Jared Olsever

Jared Olsever is a multidisciplinary artist who was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. After receiving foundation courses in Studio Arts from George Brown College in Toronto, he later received a Digital Media Arts diploma from Seneca College at York University in 2011. He continued exploring different mediums such as painting, sculpture, digital media, portraiture, and figurative painting. Olsever has exhibited work in Toronto and in the Caymans Islands. Currently, Olsever explores his creativity using video, graphic design, digital illustration and acrylics to develop compositions of a narrative around his identity.

🎭 Theatre of the Beat

Theatre of the Beat (TOTB) is a Canadian touring theatre company working to catalyze conversations on social justice and its intersection with the beliefs of the communities in which we find ourselves. Since 2011, Theatre of the Beat has been staging change across North America (and The Netherlands) by creating original social justice theatre and workshops for underrepresented populations. Through an immersive cultural exchange of grassroots theatre, hospitality, and philosophy, the company empowers its audience to work towards a just future.

✍️ Sharon Joy

Sharon Joy Tung is a queer, neurodivergent multidisciplinary community visual artist with ancestral roots in the Philippines and Singapore. Raised in Scarborough, she grew up surrounded by the resilience of diasporic communities—witnessing how creativity and collective care became acts of survival, resistance, and joy. This spirit fuels her artistic practice, where painting, illustration, collage, writing, and poetry come together as living, breathing spaces for healing and liberation. 

🎶 shn shn

Shanika is an experimental pop producer, singer-songwriter, and interdisciplinary artist who makes music under the name shn shn. Her work blends electronic production, acoustic instrumentation, and voice, guided by an intuitive, process-driven approach.

🖼️ Ashley Beerdat

Ashley Beerdat is a painter and muralist based in Toronto. She has a BA in Studio Art and Art History from Western University and her MFA from the University of Waterloo. Her work is held in Mississauga’s permanent corporate art collection and has been exhibited at KWAG gallery, Tom Thomson Gallery, The Body Shop Studios, Small Arms Inspection Building, Latitude 53, The Artist Project and Withrow common gallery. Passionate about public art, Ashley has painted murals for the city of Brampton, Mississauga, and Toronto.  

🧶 Roxanne Ignatius

Roxanne Ignatius is a Toronto based textile installation artist, sculptor, and costume designer who draws inspiration from folk arts, traditional textiles and weaving, and the natural world and our place within it. As a frequent collaborator with actors, puppeteers, musicians, dancers, and performers of all kinds, Roxanne builds unorthodox connections across art forms and looks for audiences outside of the gallery setting.

🏺 The Potter’s Studio

The Potter’s Studio was first conceived in 1971 by a group of twelve people. With support from the local potters’ community and the Clay and Glass Association (now called Fusion), the studio was born. Space was rented at 328 Dupont Street and the studio was up and running by April,1972. Since then, the Potter’s Studio community has only gotten bigger and stronger.

🍿 Guild Festival

Guild Festival Theatre is Scarborough’s only professional theatre company. Since 2011, we have been performing classics outdoors at the Greek Theatre in Guild Park & Gardens, where Art truly meets Nature. Presenting plays whose universality and timelessness speak to modern audiences, GFT is committed to expanding the conventional definition of theatre classics by highlighting stories and artists that reflect the diverse, multicultural community that we call home.

🎨 Fresh Paint Studio

Fresh Paint Studio is a welcoming creative space where people of all skill levels can relax, explore their creativity, and enjoy the simple joy of making art. From paint nights and freestyle painting experiences to workshops, private events, and lessons, Fresh Paint Studio offers approachable and engaging art experiences for kids and adults alike. With an on-site café serving drinks and treats, it's a destination designed to bring creativity, connection, and community together.

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See you there!