EMBASSY CULTURAL HOUSE
  • Home
    • ECH News
  • Community
  • Exhibitions
  • Projects
  • Background
    • Past Programming >
      • Exhibitions 1983-1990 >
        • Index of Curators
        • Index of Photographers
        • Index of Visual Artists
      • Film 1983-1990
      • Music 1983-1990 >
        • Index of Musicians
      • Performances 1983-1990 >
        • Index of Performers
    • Embassy Hotel History
  • About

The ECH and London's Old East Village BIA to promote local arts

5/11/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Art by Simon Shegelman commissioned by the Old East Village BIA to promote the area.
​The Embassy Cultural House (ECH) and the Old East Village Business Improvement Area (OEV BIA) are pleased to announce a collaboration to support and promote local arts and culture in the historic Old East neighbourhood in London, Ontario.
 
The ECH, an online community arts and cultural space, has physical roots and history in east London going back to its original founding as the Embassy Cultural House in 1983, formerly located in the old Embassy Hotel on Dundas St. The site of the hotel is currently being developed by Indwell as the future Embassy Commons, an affordable housing project, to open in the spring of 2022.
 
The Old East Village BIA works to support businesses and cultural programming, alongside citizens of the area. Through the Old East Village Community Improvement Plan, they are a part of the continued development of a vibrant and much-loved part of London.
 
These two organizations have ambitious plans for a community arts program  that will both engage local artists as well as future residents of the Embassy Commons, adding to the cultural life of Old East Village. A number of exciting projects  are in the planning stages: from storefront displays of art linked to QR codes (#cloudtostreet), to an online exhibition of the art murals of OEV on the ECH website. There are also discussions for a potential  arts festival, linked to the reopening of Dundas St., in spring 2022. Stay tuned for updates. Please contact us for more information. 
Read the essay 'at the Ech' by Marwan Hassan on his memories of art and culture

The old Embassy Hotel was located at 732 Dundas Street East at the heart of the Old East Village. The Embassy Cultural House was established in 1983, as a community-driven gallery and hosted interdisciplinary programs. It closed its physical doors in 1990.  In 2020 the Embassy Cultural House was re-envisioned as a virtual artist-run space and community website. 
Picture
Picture
Read the catalogue on the Embassy Cultural House publish in 2012 for an exhibition at Museum London curated by Bob McKaskell.
Picture
Rendition of the affordable housing project "Embassy Commons" to be built on the old site of the Embassy Hotel, 2020. The façade of the building will include a three floor high replica of Jamelie Hassan 1978 watercolour "embassy at nite".
Picture
Jamelie Hassan, Embassy at Nite. The watercolour was donated to the Museum London's permanent collection by the former Embassy Hotel owner and Jamelie's sister Helen Haller in 2019.

0 Comments

​ GardenShip.ca is a Timely Project for a Just Recovery

1/30/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Please visit GardenShip and State, 2019-2021, an exciting project that includes  as participants ECH co-founders, Ron Benner and Jamelie Hassan. This interdisciplinary research project is co-curated by award-winning artists/educators/activists, Patrick Mahon and Jeff Thomas.

An exhibition related to GardenShip research and workshops will be presented at Museum London and other locations throughout the city of London in September 2021. The contributors to this project address, in various contexts and formats, urgent issues related to the climate crisis and decolonization as intertwined. 
 
Please visit the GardenShip website for more details and information on other participating artists and contributors. 

0 Comments

Reprint: Christopher Regimbal, "A Fire at the Embassy Hotel," Fuse Magazine vol. 33, no. 3, summer 2010

10/25/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
A big thank you to Christopher ​Régimbal, who provided us a scan of his article "A Fire at the Embassy Hotel," Fuse Magazine vol. 33, no. 3, summer 2010, 12-15. The article provides a great read of the Embassy Cultural House's history.  A transcript of the article is below. 

A FIRE AT THE EMBASSY HOTEL
By Christopher Régimbal

For nearly 75 years, the Embassy Hotel stood in the heart of East London – a large, working-class neighbourhood 20 minutes east of downtown in London, Ontario.  In May 2009, the legendary hotel burned to the ground, the latest victim in a string of arsons targeting abandoned buildings in the southwestern Ontario city. The hotel was a popular alternative music venue and watering hole, and throughout most of the 1980s, it played host to one of Canada’s most innovative and resolutely alternative artist-run spaces, the Embassy Cultural House (ECH).  When the Embassy Hotel burned to the ground, the building still contained a very real connection to the ECH collective’s activities: permanent installations by artists Spring Hurlbut, Susan Day, and José Bedia.  These three projects were all that was left of a series of 12 in situ commissions by the ECH group, and all three were destroyed in the fire and subsequent demolition of the building.  

The story of the Embassy Cultural House collective and the destruction of these three significant artworks plays out alongside a parallel history of economic depression and renewal in the East End neighbourhood.  Significantly, the site is now being redeveloped as a 150-unit condominium as part of a plan to revitalize the neighbourhood as a “creative” community. In light of the neighbourhood’s transition, the history of Embassy Cultural House speaks to both the past and a potential future for community-based and inclusive city planning.   
​
ECH was founded in 1983 by Ron Benner, Jamelie Hassan and Eric Stach and quickly became a meeting place for London’s politically engaged post-Heart of London generation of artists, spurring the relocation of London’s art community from downtown to the East End.  It was run by a group of artists that included Hassan and Benner, as well as Wyn Geleynse, Debrann Eastabrook, Sharron Forrest, Janice Gurney, Jean Hay, Doug Mitchell, Kim Moodie, Gerard Päs, Peter Rist, Jean Spence and Jennie White.  The work of many artists of this generation was rooted in the regionalist language established by artists such as Greg Curnoe, Jack Chambers and John Boyle who participated in the generation defining 1968 National Gallery of Canada exhibition The Heart of London. ECH artists, however, re-imagined the city’s parochial regionalism by opening it up to international influence through extensive travel and international exchanges, situating London within the broader social and political world.

Unlike artist-designed hotels that have become popular in recent years, the Embassy was not home to an international jet-set, seeking “one-of-a-kind experiences” but to a group of down and out men and women, pensioners and transients. About 60 percent of the residents were on welfare, fixed incomes or in other marginal circumstances and were living in the hotel on a full-time basis.  The 40-room, 65-dollar-a-week hotel was a constantly changing space where bar regulars, off-duty taxi drivers, and hotel residents mixed with artists and concertgoers, creating a living and evolving community within its walls.  The name Embassy Cultural House was chosen in reference to culture houses that Hassan and Benner had encountered in Europe and reflected a desire to create a forum to foster art, culture, communication, and community.

Between 1983 and 1990, the ECH’s prolific exhibition schedule engaged with a distinct local culture in East London that was connected with the global political concerns of the 1980s, including indigenous rights, disarmament, and the Israel/Palestinian conflict. In two significant exhibitions The Body & Society in 1988 and Siting Resistance in 1990 addressed issues of HIV/AIDS and racism respectively, each within a context of the East London neighbourhood.  The Body and Society was organized by Hassan, Spence, and Geleynse and included three exhibitions, a conference, and a major publication, all exploring the politics of the emerging HIV/AIDS crisis. Twelve Canadian and American artists, including Stephen Andrews, Sheila Butler, Greg Curnoe, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, contributed artwork that explored the body as a political site, placing the HIV/AIDS epidemic within a context of gender, race, sexual orientation, age and income.  The exhibition and conference pushed the HIV/AIDS discourse outside of the medical and scientific spheres and into the social and economic realms of everyday life in East London.

The exhibition Siting Resistance was organized in response to the racist teachings of University of Western Ontario psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton.  At the time, Rushton’s neo-eugenic writings were attracting unwanted international attention in the press, placing the community at the centre of a devisive debate that it did not ask for.  Benner organized the exhibition program to increase public exposure to the work of artists of colour and to discredit Rushton’s discriminatory rhetoric.  The four exhibitions of the program included work by the self-styled Black Artists from Britain including Sonia Boyce, Allan de Souza, Shaheen Merali, Pitika Ntuli, and Keith Piper, Canadian artist Grace Channer, and Cubans Mariá Magdalena Campos and José Bedia.  Both The Body & Society and Siting Resistance, like many of the exhibitions that the group organized, reacted to issues that were prescient to the community and created a social space in the East End where these topics could be discussed.

Beginning with Room 31 by Shelagh Keeley in 1986, the ECH commissioned 12 site-specific projects, which included the pieces that were destroyed in the recent fire. Like the ECH exhibitions, the commissions were frequently intended to be relevant to the men and women who lived in the hotel.  Discussing the installations in 1988, Hassan wrote: “In [their] work, [the artists] responded to the reality of the hotel, inspiring both visitors and regulars who have come to feel that by sharing in the process and production of artists that the work of art itself is a part of them.”   Spring Hurlbut’s sculpture was commissioned in 1987 in the Beaver Lounge, one of the Embassy Hotel’s bars, as part of a series of projects that also included David Merritt, Robert McNealy, and Michael Fernandes.  Hurlbut replaced the shaft of a Doric column with a tree trunk and installed it in the Canadiana wood panelled bar.  Her project blended into the space seamlessly, changing it great deal but altering the atmosphere very little.  

Susan Day’s tiled mural Handicap Access Bathroom was installed in the women’s bathroom on the first-floor as part of the exhibition The Body & Society.  The mural depicted a wheelchair-bound elderly woman struggling to pull herself into a bathtub, highlighting the underlying politics of age, poverty, and sickness that play out on the body.  The most visible of the permanent projects, a 15-foot mural by Cuban artists José Bedia, came about as part of the exhibition Siting Resistance.  In the 1990s, London became the home of a large number of new immigrants from Latin America, many of who settled in East London.  Bedia’s painting of a horse jumping over a rising sun spoke to the changing cultural landscape of the East End neighbourhood and became a very visible landmark in the community. 

The fire was only the spectacular end in a process of neglect that began after the artists broke ties with the Embassy Hotel in 1990, at which time nothing was left of the collective as an entity able to offer stewardship over the site-specific artworks remaining in the hotel.  Over the years, the rest of the 12 permanent installations went missing or were destroyed, including projects by Lani Maestro, Elizabeth MacKenzie, Robert McKaskell and Liz Magor.  After the hotel was sold but before the sudden fire, Museum London Director, Brian Meehan, was working with the real estate developer to assess the possibility of salvaging some of the remaining artwork into a public collection.  After the fire but before the building was demolished, the artistic community implored the city to save the José Bedia mural, which was not damaged in the fire, but extensive structural damage to the remainder of the hotel led to the demolition of the building within a matter of days.

Ironically, since London was an important centre for contemporary art, poetry, literature, and experimental music for many years, the City of London has begun a top-down effort to re-brand itself as a Richard Florida-inspired “creative city.”   The East End, which had largely been ignored by developers until recently, has become a very attractive site for gentrification. What sets the Embassy Hotel apart from other, more recent artistic hotel projects is that instead of facilitating gentrification, the ECH helped the neighbourhood resist it.  In the 1980s, rapid development in London’s downtown drove up property prices in the core while neglect and absentee landlords helped to keep prices in East London low.  Speaking at the Dia Art Foundation in 1989, Hassan prophetically raised the spectre of development in the East End saying: “I don’t know if in 15 years …[we] will also fall pray to developers.  That may very well be the case.  But we are strongly encouraging anyone who has any resources to work together with us cooperatively and collectively.”   ECH artists often worked as advocates for the disenfranchised communities in the area, participating in a coalition of residents to protect heritage sites and prevent crippling development.  

Between the time the Embassy Cultural House closed and the present day there has been very little investment in East London, and many of the buildings are now in disrepair, boarded up, or, like the Embassy Hotel, burned out.  The condominium development on the site of the former Embassy Hotel is the first major residential development in the neighbourhood, signaling a new and irreversible shift in the community dynamic.  Twenty years after Hassan made her prediction of development, this new condo project will undoubtedly change the makeup of the East End, and, after years without investment into the community, change is sorely needed.  The artists of the Embassy Cultural House showed us that by working with the community, even if only with modest means, you could create inclusive and productive change.  My hope is that those who call for the revitalization of London’s East End keep this lesson in mind. 

Christopher Régimbal is an art historian and curator originally from Timmins, Ontario.  He has written for Art Papers and Magenta Magazine and is currently the Curatorial Assistant at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto.

Prepared with files from the archives of Ron Benner and Jamelie Hassan, the Embassy Cultural House archives at the London Public Library, and with the help of Joe Belanger at the London Free Press.


Update: October, 27, 2020 - The condominum project for the site of the former Embassy Hotel was not realized and the location remained a vacant lot for a number of years. Indwell, a not for profit organization was able to acquire the land and an affordable housing project is now under construction. The affordable housing project will carry the name Embassy Commons in recognition of the cultural work that previously was hosted at the Embassy Hotel and Embassy Cultural House. 

The author of this essay, Christopher Régimbal is now senior exhibitions manager at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.                          

0 Comments

From the archives: 2012 article by James Reaney on the Embassy Cultural House exhibit

10/10/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
From the archives: July 2012 London Free Press article written by James Reaney about the Museum London survey exhibit on the Embassy Cultural House (ECH).  Independent curator Bob McKaskell (1943-2020) based the exhibit on his research of the ECH archives and conversations with the artists associated with the collective.

0 Comments

From the archives: Invitation card from the 2012 exhibit at Museum London

9/21/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture
From the archives: This image of the Embassy Hotel was  the invitation card for the 2012 exhibit at Museum London curated by Robert McKaskell. The image shows the front exterior of the hotel on Dundas St. The  black & white mural was painted by Cuban artist José Bedia Valdés during the Siting Resistance exhibition series Sept. 1990. The entrance to the Embassy Cultural House has the colourful mural around its front window and door. This mural was painted in 1989 by Fabienne Rohner Haller, Matt Evans and Tom Nesbitt. All 3 were art students at H.B. Beal Secondary School at the time and Tom & Matt were in the band "The Others".
Photo courtesy of Jamelie Hassan & Ron Benner's archive.  

0 Comments

Collection of Jamelie Hassan's watercolours of the Embassy Hotel painted in 1978

9/3/2020

0 Comments

 
In 1978, the owner of the Embassy Hotel, Helen Haller, commissioned her sister, artist Jamelie Hassan, to paint a series of watercolours related to the Embassy, its workers, and residents. The watercolours, a tribute to life in London east neighbourhood, were on display in the hotel lounge for many years. Helen donated these historic watercolours to Museum London's permanent collection in the summer of 2019.

One of these watercolours, Embassy at Nite, will be featured on one of the facade wall of Indwell's new affordable housing project on the site of the old Embassy Hotel (744 Dundas Street) named the "Embassy Commons" in tribute to the location’s past cultural history. The new name was officially announced at the Hope@Home Virtual Gala on June 12, 2020. Hassan Law was a sponsor of the event. For more information, please go to Indwell's page on the the project. 

0 Comments

Past, present, and future visions: the original foundations of the Embassy Hotel & Cultural House

8/28/2020

0 Comments

 
Uncovering of the foundation of the former Embassy Hotel, August 26, 2020 - the site of Indwell’s affordable housing project the Embassy Commons.
Picture
Picture
Photo Credits: Graceview Enterprises Limited

0 Comments

Now online: Collection of posters and news clippings of Eric Stach's Free Music Unit

8/22/2020

0 Comments

 

Many thanks to London musician Paul Aitken, who has made available his personal archive of posters, promotional pamphlets, and press clippings that he received from Eric Stach almost 30 years ago. Eric was a huge influence on Paul as a developing musician, and Paul went on to run similar music projects of his own over the intervening years. Paul's current project is influenced by Eric's free improvisation is the trio Aitken | Clark | Peacock, which you can learn about and listen/watch here.  To see the full collection of posters visit Eric Stach's page.

0 Comments

Rare collection of Don Vincent's drawings from Jazz nights circa 1990

8/2/2020

0 Comments

 
A big thank you to Esther Vincent for sharing with us drawings by her father, Don Vincent, from his sketch book done circa 1990 at the Embassy Cultural House. The drawings were done during Eric Stach's regular Free Music Unit performances which were held weekly on Thursday nights. 

Don Vincent, (1932-1993), a graduate of H.B. Beal Art and husband of London artist Bernice Vincent (1934-2016), worked as a graphic designer at London Life, but he was well-known for his documentary photographs of the art scene in London, Ontario. Don’s photographic archive is in the collection of the McIntosh Gallery, Western University, London, Ontario. ​

Bernice and Don were avid supporters of the Embassy Cultural House and regulars at Eric Stach's Free Music Unit events. These drawings capture the energy and dynamism of these musical events and the Embassy Cultural House era. 


0 Comments

2012  Embassy Cultural House exhibit catalogue now online

8/2/2020

1 Comment

 
Picture
Cover of the Embassy Cultural House, 1983 to 1990. Photo credit: John Tamblyn, 1990
It is with great pleasure that we are sharing an online version of the now out-of-print The Embassy Cultural House, 1983 to 1990 catalogue.

This catalogue was published in 2012 to accompany the survey exhibit "The Embassy Cultural House, 1983 to 1990" presented at Museum London.

The late Robert (Bob) McKaskell curated the survey exhibit and the catalogue was edited by the late Melanie Townsend. The catalogue also includes essays by historical curator Michael Baker and Toronto-based artist, educator and activist Rebecca Deiderichs. The Museum London public program included a sold-out concert of an improvisational jazz performance by Eric Stach and local musicians.

With special thanks to Museum London, the estates of both Bob McKaskell and Melanie Townsend, to all the contributors and supporters of the catalogue and Colour by Schubert  for making this publication available online to a broader public. Click here to read the catalogue online. 

1 Comment

Rare footage of art installations at the Embassy Cultural House

7/18/2020

0 Comments

 

​See rare footage of the art installations at the Embassy Cultural House in this video produced by award winning Canadian artist Wyn Geleynse .  Installations by Shelagh Keeley, David Merritt, Robert McNealy, Michael Fernandes, Lani Maestro, Magdalena Campos, Spring Hurlbut and Susan Day graced the walls and rooms of the Embassy Hotel, which also hosted the ECH from 1983 to 1990 in the restaurant portion of the hotel located at 732 Dundas Street in London East.

0 Comments

    ECH NEWS

    Updates on the London Arts Community

    Archives

    November 2022
    September 2022
    July 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020

    Categories

    All
    BIPOC
    Environment
    Events
    Exhibits
    IBPOC
    In Memoriam
    London Art Scene
    Media
    Music
    Old East Village
    Partners
    People
    Politics
    Publications
    Women
    Words

    RSS Feed


EDITORIAL TEAM

ONLINE FOUNDER
Tariq Hassan Gordon

COFOUNDERS & CURATORIAL ADVISORS 
 
Jamelie Hassan 
& Ron Benner

ADVISORY CIRCLE
Samer Abdelnour, Marnie Fleming, Wyn Geleynse, Fern Helfand, S F Ho, Lorraine Klaasen, Judith Rodger, Ruth Skinner, Mary Lou and Dan Smoke,  and Lucas Stenning 

COORDINATING EDITORS
Tariq Hassan Gordon & 
Olivia Mossuto

WEB DESIGN & SOCIAL MEDIA 
Tariq Hassan Gordon, Ira Kazi, Olivia Mossuto, Niloufar Salimi,  JoAnna Weil 

VIRTUAL TOUR
Andreas Buchwaldt

PRINT PUBLICATIONS
Blessy Augustine, Shelley Kopp, 
Olivia Mossuto

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Andreas Buchwaldt, Blessy Augustine, Anahí González, Ira Kazi, ​Shelley Kopp, Ashar Mobeen, Niloufar Salimi,  Jenna Rose Sands, JoAnna Weil & Michelle Wilson. 

Picture
OUR STORY
Artists Jamelie Hassan and Ron Benner and jazz musician Eric Stach founded the Embassy Cultural House (1983-1990) located in the restaurant portion of the Embassy Hotel at 732 Dundas Street in East London. Other former members of the board were: Debrann Eastabrook, Henry Eastabrook, Sharron Forrest, Wyn Geleynse, Janice Gurney, Jean Hay (1929 - 2008), Doug Mitchell, Kim Moodie, Gerard Pas, Peter Rist, Wanda Sawicki, Jean Spence and Jennie White. In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Embassy Cultural House was re-envisioned as a virtual artist-run space and website. 

This project is supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the London Arts Council through the City of London's Community Arts Investment Program.
Picture
Picture
Picture

Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture

Thank you to our partners

Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture

E M B A S S Y  C U L T U R A L  H O U S E . C A

​London, Ontario is on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Lenape, Attawandaron and Huron-Wendat peoples, at the forks of Deshkan Ziibi (Antler River), an area subject to the Dish with One Spoon Wampum and other treaties.

Copyright © 2022  Embassy Cultural House.
All rights reserved.
Proudly powered by Weebly

  • Home
    • ECH News
  • Community
  • Exhibitions
  • Projects
  • Background
    • Past Programming >
      • Exhibitions 1983-1990 >
        • Index of Curators
        • Index of Photographers
        • Index of Visual Artists
      • Film 1983-1990
      • Music 1983-1990 >
        • Index of Musicians
      • Performances 1983-1990 >
        • Index of Performers
    • Embassy Hotel History
  • About