Workshop | Drawing and Writing

Saturday, July 4, 1pm

Living is Easy Members' Projects

For more information or to register, please contact: Angie at admin@strutsgallery.ca

Workshop hosted by Jerry Ropson for children, youth, and any kids at heart. Parents and guardians are warmly invited to stay and participate alongside their children throughout the workshop, making it an opportunity for shared creativity and conversation.

Join artist Jerry Ropson for a one-day drawing and writing workshop. We are inviting a limited number of children and youth to participate in a collaborative process of imagining and constructing a shared world. Guided by the ongoing studio project “a place of safety” (forthcoming exhibition at the Owens Art Gallery, Fall 2026), participants will collectively create drawings, tiny sculptures, and short written/spoken pieces that explore invented environments, beliefs, characters, and mythologies rooted in their own ideas of safety, belonging, and material transformation. 

"Through a series of prompts and open-ended exercises, the workshop will emphasize play, intuition, and collective storytelling. The resulting works will contribute to a larger body of material informing my exhibition, including a potential audio component and a series of small sculptural works developed from these collaborations. Participating youth will be fully acknowledged in the final project (with parental consent)".

Jerry Ropson is an artist, writer, and community organizer, raised in Pollards Point, a resettled Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland) outport community. In acknowledging the settler and indigenous history of his community, he combines image, object, text, and narrative, to focus an artistic practice around site-specific installation and performative storytelling. Ropson is deeply interested in the politics of rural demise, ritualistic practices, and the language of fanaticism. He makes class-conscious work seeking non-traditional sites and outcomes. Ropson holds a BFA (2001) from Memorial University: Grenfell Campus, and an MFA (2009) in Studio Arts: Fibres and Material Practices, from Concordia University. Ropson was listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2016 and 2018. He has been awarded grants from The Canada Council for the Arts, The New Brunswick Art Board, The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and The Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council. He has participated in artist residencies at The Banff Centre, The Vermont Studio Center, The Atlantic Centre for the Arts,

St. Michael’s Printshop, Fogo Island Arts, NSCAD University, and Union House Arts. Jerry divides his time between communities in rural Ktaqmkuk, and Siknikt-Mi'kma'ki (Tantramar, New Brunswick), where he leads studio and seminar courses at Mount Allison University.

Struts Gallery is happy to welcome artist Jerry Ropson in our 2026 Living is Easy Members’ Projects. Living is Easy is an ongoing professional development program for Struts Gallery members to use the gallery for self-directed exploration. This could entail creating work, documenting work, installing an exhibition, hosting workshops, and/or experimenting with process in the studio space.