Exhibit reveals Scarborough’s rich design history
Many dozens of Scarborough yearbooks are currently at the Bluffs Gallery on Kingston Rd. as part of an exhibition called, appropriately, YEARBOOK. It’s a compelling window into a part of Toronto that often fiercely holds onto its distinct identity.
The wonderful thing about yearbooks is they are exquisite pieces of history, but made by teenagers who are too young and future-focussed to ever intentionally dabble in nostalgia. The books are a most innocent and honest reporting of a year in the life of a high school and the community it inhabits.
“Yearbooks not only provide photographs and personal records of our past, but invite us to evaluate our current relationships, achievements and goals post-high school,” says Reese de Guzman, curator of the exhibition. She’s an OCAD University MFA grad and currently in Centennial College’s Culture and Heritage Site Management program. “The program has inspired me to learn more about the history of my hometown; I was born in the Philippines but raised in Scarborough.”
The yearbooks are goldmines of information with incidental pictures that capture the styles of the era, some of the landscape, the vintage cars and the sensibility of the day. Often the corporate advertisements reflect that last part well. A Bell Telephone Company of Canada’s full page ad in one 1960sera yearbook asks “What’s ahead for you, young lady?” encouraging female grads interested in business to apply for a job now, or after they continue their education in college.
High schools each have their own ecosystem, worlds unto themselves, and we often map our hometowns by the high school we went to. Paging through our own yearbooks, each picture is a story: the high school jerks who sometimes became great people later; the heartbreak of long-lost friends with such potential who sputtered out after graduation; and the nerds who often ended up rich.
Included along one wall of the exhibition is a linear montage of faces de Guzman created from headshots in the collection that date from the 1920s to 1998, when the Scarborough school board was amalgamated into the TDSB, a visually rich representation of the radical demographic change Scarborough has gone through.
Beehive hairdos, chunky-framed horn-rimmed glasses and a near-exclusively white student body give way to shaggier hairdos, flared pants and, ultimately, the ethnic mix that is modern-day Scarborough. A few kids wore the chunky glasses throughout the decades though; those ones knew eternal style when they saw it.
“I was curious about the inter-- artistry of yearbook design and the many examples of visual and literary work by students featured in the yearbooks,” says de Guzman.
Inspired by Barbara Myrvold’s 1997 book The People of Scarborough: a History, de Guzman started to put the pictures together, a kind of old-school Facebook collage. “You can see the growth of diversity in not just visible ethnicities but in artistic expression as well with the many differences in writing, fashion and visual art,” she says. “The rapid evolution of our cultural and artistic makeup.”
The yearbook covers are such a great view into that evolution of design and culture over the decades. Particularly in the 1950s and 1960s there’s an overt celebration of the Scarborough modern vernacular on many of the covers. School architecture, like other institutional buildings, were expressions of that hopeful, future-focussed civic time. This would be Scarborough’s century,
“Yearbooks not only provide photographs and personal records of our past, but invite us to evaluate our current relationships, achievements and goals post-high school.” REESE DE GUZMAN CURATOR, YEARBOOK EXHIBIT
they seemed to say, and in many ways it was, considering its radical growth from a mostly rural township represented in the early yearbooks to the sprawling 600,000person-strong metropolis of today, and the yearbooks were relentlessly proud of the place.
The YEARBOOK exhibit is coproduced by the Scarborough Archives, who offered some of their collection for the exhibition, and Myseum, the pop-up museum that is producing events across the GTA. Scarborough Arts’ Bluffs Gallery recently expanded inside the old house they occupy in park setting atop the bluffs, a gateway to the rest of Scarborough that’s well worth a visit. YEARBOOK runs until March 31 at 1859 Kingston Rd., just east of Birchmount. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef.