Works by Maureen Gruben, Rachel Crummey, Miguel Caba, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, and Meech Boakye and Bhavika Sharma

Curated by Chloe Gordon-Chow

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Little and Often traces how our relationships to land, material, and one another are sustained within disturbed landscapes and conditions of precarity. In works by Maureen Gruben, Rachel Crummey, Miguel Caba, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, and Meech Boakye and Bhavika Sharma, resilience is enacted as a collective, relational practice, continually shifting under constraint. From Palestine to the Philippines, Tuktoyaktuk to Toronto, life continues to be negotiated amidst ecological, political, and social disturbance. Relations to people and place are sustained in spite of land occupation, eroding shorelines, geographic displacement, fungal decay, and colonial logics of purity and exclusion. Working with seeds, soils, mushrooms, and plants, the artists hold onto something at risk of being severed.

This exhibition does not imagine utopic futures nor does it propose concrete resolutions. These are not practices of preservation (which assumes a stable original to protect) or restoration (which assumes a prior state to return to). The artworks are shifting assemblages, collaborative efforts between communities of people, more-than-human beings, and place. Little and Often explores the sticky work of holding on and holding together. It looks around rather than forward to explore human-ecological entanglements and resiliencies on unstable terrain.

This exhibition is produced as part of the requirements for the MVS degree in Curatorial Studies at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto.

Opening Reception: 2026 MVS Curatorial Studies Graduating Exhibitions

Wednesday, May 6, 6pm–8pm
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery

Our Supporters

We gratefully acknowledge the continued support of the Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Award and International Travel Fund.