Back Lane Studios

She was a slip of a girl who took on the prejudices of a nation through her art. When she was just 14, singer song-writer Janis Ian wrote “Society’s Child” about the taboo subject of interracial romance. When the song was finally released in 1967, it was banned from some radio stations; Ian received hate mail and death threats; her performances were marred by disruptive boos. And yet Ian, just a teenager, had the strength to stand up to the backlash.

Join us for our next Extraordinary Women session, Sunday, June 29, at 12:30 pm at the Revue Cinema. We will be exploring Ian’s life and accomplishments with the 2024 documentary Janis Ian: Breaking Silence and guest expert Rob Bowman, music historian, producer and Roncesvalles neighbour.

Says Bowman: “Janis Ian is important for having the courage to write about such significant issues as interracial romance, women’s rights, the Holocaust and breaking the silence around being gay. At the same time, she has managed to have her songs recorded by such divergent artists as Bette Midler, Mel Torme, Roberta Flack, Cher and Nina Simone. Her impact has been singular and immense.”

He adds: “Janis Ian: Breaking Silence is a film not to be missed.”

Watch the trailer. Advance tickets, $16.50 on Eventbrite: click here. At the door, $18.00.

Ian has a Toronto connection. In 1993, she came out as a lesbian, and in 2003 was married in this city to Patricia Snyder, her partner of more than a decade.

Find a recorded YouTube link here for Wayne’s first presentation on finding archival photos.  

Our exhibit of photographs and quotes from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s journals  and books is now closed. We’re thrilled, however, that Lambton House is planning to put the exhibit up in September.  The historic Lambton House is located just south of Dundas St. W. and east of the Humber River.

We were inspired to create the exhibit last year to mark the 150th anniversary of Maud’s birth but had to close the exhibit for scheduled art shows. 

Lucy Maud Montgomery spent a lot of time in Toronto, especially during the last seven years of her life when she lived at 210 Riverside Dr. in Swansea. Her ghost is everywhere in this city, with the evidence recorded in her copious diaries. It’s surprising how much she accomplished in the last seven years of her life, despite depression, worries about her sons, money concerns and her husband Ewan’s mental illness. We’ve collected some archival photos, including many taken by Maud herself, and combined them with quotes from her journals.

We’ve also explored some themes that run through her novels and her diaries. One great irony stands out; Her fictional creations represent wish fulfilment, a fantasy of what she would have wanted things to be; her life, on the other hand, was in stark contrast to the world she dreamed of. You’ll learn about some of the challenges she faced and some of the challenges she created for herself at this exhibit.

Summer is almost here! Sort of. Why not try something new, and at the same time help us collect stories for our Mapping our Memories project? We are welcoming people 55+ to our studio for free workshops on a continual basis to learn how to make short videos using smartphones and  laptop computers. Would you be interested?

We have scheduled Monday morning drop-ins from 10:00 am to noon and Wednesday afternoon sessions from 1:00 to 3:00 pm, and welcome new beginners at any time. You will create a short videos 2-3 minutes in length about family, friends or personal experiences, with plenty of one-on-one help. We would love to include the videos in our Mapping our Memories project if you agree.

Thanks to videographer Cheryl Rondeau, who is our main instructor.

Above is a family photo of Johnming Mark’s grandmother with grandkids. Unable to speak English or read Chinese, she still was able to run a laundry at 8 Brock Ave. in Parkdale. John, a retired engineer, made this short video about her, making sketches of the inside of the laundry that he remembers from childhood. Watch the video here. 

Would you be interested in joining us? Email us at ellen@backlanestudios.ca or call 647-313-1654. These workshops are supported by funding from the Government of Canada’s New Horizons for Seniors’ Program (NHSP).

Five artists are showing their work at our studio, Saturday, May 31 and Sunday, June 1, from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm. The exhibit is part of the West Toronto Artists art tour. Admission is free.

Nadine Dennis, Bernie Hunt, Christine Jermyn, Lilian O’Meara and Marilyn Scott are showing their work, which includes watercolours, oils and acrylics and collage. Lilian O’Meara also incorporates beading in her images.

We welcome them to Back Lane Studios.  Please drop by this weekend to enjoy the show! Below are two early visitors, armchair Fred and Cece.

Thanks to everyone who came to the Revue, Sunday, April 27 for our Extraordinary Women event that featured the stories of our neighbours. The short documentaries came from our video-making programs for seniors, which have been supported in part by the Government of Canada’s New Horizons for Seniors program (NHSP). We are grateful to our panel: Dorie Dunne, who just turned 99, her daughter Maureen Chicorli, Elizabeth Ross, Mavis Wilson, Sherry Murphy and Verna Van Sickle, all of whom have made videos with us. We showed a total of 17 documentaries, a few longer ones from earlier programs and a selection of short videos we’ve been making for our Mapping our Memories series. We have posted the selection of videos on YouTube. Click here if you’d like to see them. To read more about the videos we showed,  click here. 

To read about some of our past Extraordinary Women events, click here. 

Welcome to OldTO. It’s an interactive map featuring a wealth of digitized historic photos from the City of Toronto Archives.

Are you interested in what your neighbourhood might have looked like? Do you want to revisit downtown before all of the condos went up? Have a look at the map and see. There are thousands of images, some dating back to 1856.

The map was originally created by Sidewalk Labs, the Google affiliate that was planning a downtown development in Toronto’s Portlands. Sidewalk abandoned its project in 2020 and eventually stopped hosting OldTO.org. However, they kindly left the source code freely available.

At Back Lane Studios, we were sad to see OldTO.org vanish. One of our main projects is our Mapping our Memories endeavour. This photo map parallels this interest, and we are thrilled to be able to restore it.

We will be forever grateful to software developer Michael Lenaghan for his terrific work bringing this mapping tool back to life! (Check the browser you use to access oldto.org. Try Chrome if you’re having problems.)

Read the article about OldTO in BlogTO!