“I do it because I can, and because I have hope,” says Cathy Farwell, visual artist and the driving force behind Art$Pay, a non-profit that educates artists and citizens alike on the value of creative work. We chatted with Farwell to get a sense of how Art$Pay came to be, and the kind of impact it’s having in Kitchener.

For this installation of the Make it Kitchener blog, we posed some questions to Nik Harron, an Irish born, Kitchener-committed painter and interactive artist. While many have encountered Harron’s art through the festival scene, the community-minded motivations behind his work aren’t always on display.

Five individuals and one community organization have been recognized as the City of Kitchener’s 2016 recipients of the Mayor’s City Builder Awards for their volunteerism and service to the community. 

Few spaces are more ordinary or passive than an office-building hallway.  These long, narrow expanses, dotted with the occasional acrylic landscape exist solely to bring you somewhere else.  Night\Shift, Kitchener’s placehacking festival has another idea.

“We have access to incredible technology, like the smartphone recording this interview, for example,” says Brent Wettlaufer, the Underground Studio coordinator at THEMUSEUM, taking note of the phone-turned-recorder on the table. “As a user, we don’t need to know how it works, but that means we’re missing out on so much about how it’s made.”

Making it in Kitchener is a wonderful idea – but just like all good ideas, it can benefit so much from a physical space.

“You don’t have to rely on a rich uncle to make a film.” Filmmakers Helmann Wilhelm and Ava Torres shared this mantra when explaining why their micro-budget filmmaking workshop, coming up this Thursday at the Kitchener Public Library has such value in an industry often focused solely on value.

Thick-rimmed glasses spray-painted on the sidewalk – the first encounter with Geek Week for many. But according to Sam Trieu, Geek Week coordinator and Community Marketer at Sortable, this guerilla-marketing tactic is a way to get you in the door, not a reflection of the audience.

“Toronto has more than a dozen maker spaces, but there’s something that makes Kitchener special,” says Cam Turner, Maker Expo co-organizer, Tinker Trunk owner and Maker Club leader. “We have the elbow room to try weird stuff and a...

Kitchener’s 2016 artist in residence, Sarah Granskou, embarks on a year-long project that will bring community members together to explore the city’s natural areas while contributing their observations to a life-sized “tree troll” doll.