King St. Fountain

Type: Competition Finalist, Urban Design, Public Art

Location: Toronto, Ontario.

Status: Completed

Client: City of Toronto

Collaborator: Curtis (Talwst) Santiago

As part of the new development on King Street East, a new 470 square-metre parkette will be conveyed to the City of Toronto. Given the area’s higher than average Black population, community visioning requested the Janet Rosenberg & Studio designed parkette to reflect the diverse history and future of Black communities in the neighbourhood.

In collaboration with artist Curtis Santiago, SOCA was shortlisted to design a standalone artwork that would further inform the landscape design. The proposal begins with the questions: how are Black bodies commemorated in public space? And how can an art installation speak to the diversity of Toronto’s Black communities? 

Being located in the most historic part of the city the project sought to deconstruct and reconstitute colonial designs and symbols found in early Toronto architecture and proposes a fountain as an epitome of classical European public design.

Inspired by an 1846 City of Toronto directory that singled out residents as “coloured” in addition to their age and occupation, the fountain commemorates the common man and woman by 3D scanning the faces of current Black community members and cast in bronze to create facial expressions of the neighbourhood. Through abstracting Black faces, the proposal reclaims Black identity in public space. As a playful twist the fountain is altered ever so slightly to be asymmetrical and incorporates elements of the Black diaspora into its design. A sweetgrass seedpod sits atop a royal palm tree. Each tier of the fountain is adorned by symbols and patterns derived from Queen Mother Idia’s headdress, steel pans, bronze cast faces, with a figurative nod to Dame Lorraine.