Last week, the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Quebec (CALQ), the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing (MAMH) and Culture Outaouais collectively granted at total of $228,388 to six professional artists and eight professional organizations.

Part of a territorial partnership agreement between artists and organizations in the Outaouais, the funding aims to financially support 14 different artistic and literary projects that will be carried out over the course of 2020.

According to a press release issued by the CALQ on Sept. 4, the selection process involved a committee of peers working in different artistic sectors in the region. The selected projects were chosen based on merit depending on the quality of each application and their alignment with the program’s objectives.

Totaling $744,000 over the next three years (2019-2022), the project’s main goals are to ensure the implementation of Outaouais territorial partnership in order to sustain the creation, production and or diffusion of artistic projects and to promote connections between artists and their communities at large.

The only selection from the MRC Pontiac was ArtPontiac in Portage du Fort, who landed $21,900 to subsidize together one of their biggest projects to date.

According to ArtPontiac’s President Louise Guay who found out about the grant last week, their project will begin in November.

Their project will be titled Interconnexion, going with the theme that everything around us, from nature to the rest of the community is interlinked.

Involving seven local printmakers, the project will consist of printing portraits on large wooden plates, which will eventually be pressed with a five-ton steamroller in the streets of downtown Shawville.

Plus, with a documentarian on hand to film the process from A to Z, folks can anticipate to see a short film about the project, which Guay hopes will be displayed when the project is shown in art galleries.

“We’ll put it on YouTube also,” she said.

To get things started, the seven artists involved will meet with a photographer and the documentarian to brainstorm ideas and plan out the process of their work.

Although everyone will follow a theme, each plate will represent an original interpretation from the respective artists, Guay said.

“We’ll start discussing what we’ll do, what are our ideas and so on,” she said.

Projected to be presented to the community in August of 2020, the project is expected to extend from January to July.

Typically, ArtPontiac is known for putting on exhibits at the Stone School Gallery in Portage du Fort but the idea behind bringing the exposition to Shawville was to draw more people while following the program’s mandate of fostering connections between artists and the community.

“Doing it in the streets will involve much more people than doing it in the gallery,” she said.

Guay applied for the grant in the beginning of May, after hearing about the project at an information session put on by Culture Outaouais.

While she’s extremely grateful to have received the funding and excited to get the project started, being selected among the long list of applicants wasn’t exactly shocking to her.

“I knew that our project was very good and I did show to two people the project itself once I completed the forms and everything and everybody was telling me that it was a good project,” she said. “So, I was pretty sure that we would have it.”

For Guay, one of most rewarding aspects about the grant is that it will enable ArtPontiac’s artists to be financially compensated for their work while being encouraged by the government to carry it out, an opportunity that doesn’t come around too often for them.

“We’re very proud that we can pay the artists to create and we are very thankful to the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Quebec for the program to help the regions to be able to create and to be sustained to create,” she said. “This is very rare for us. This is a first really.”

With a ton of work to get done in order for things to go smoothly, Guay noted that she is on the lookout for several volunteers interested in helping out with the project.

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