Jim Bravo: It Took an Age or Two to Get Home

An Exhibition Hosted by the Collective City Gallery Project

Jim Bravo, Las Costureras AKA The Seamstress, 2023, Oil on Canvas, 48″ x 60″

Jim Bravo: It Took an Age or Two to Get Home

August 19 – 30, 2026
Reception: Saturday, August 22, 6 – 9pm
Dupont Rail Gallery, Toronto

Collective City Arts is proud to present It Took an Age or Two to Get Home, an exhibition by artist Jim Bravo, on view August 19 – 30, 2026 at the Dupont Rail Gallery. This exhibition is the sixth in a series of eight shows being hosted in the 2026 season by the Collective City Arts Gallery Project.

About the Exhibition

From the artist’s native birthplace of Guayaquil, Ecuador, to Toronto, Canada, and onto Europe, this exhibition presents works which collectively represent a study in immigration and resettlement. It explores themes such as ancestry, immediate family, inherited and adopted culture, and inter-cultural urban and rural dynamics.

Each canvas is an expression of a memory and should be considered a painted record of an instance for which no camera was present to capture. As the artist’s adopted home, depictions of life in Toronto form the core of the exhibit.

Other depicted locations are not random inclusions, but rather ones which were under consideration by the family as a potential home.

Jim Bravo, Oil Painter and Muralist

About the Artist

Oil Painter and Muralist Jim Bravo is a graduate of The Ontario College of Art and Design University. Career milestones include multiple T.A.B.I.A. mural awards, first honors for the Kingston Prize for Contemporary Canadian Portraiture, and numerous landscape painting accolades.

He is the recipient of the Toronto Arts Council’s Black Arts Projects grant for the years 2022 and 2023, and the Ontario Arts Council Creation Project grant for 2022, under which many of the works in this exhibition were created.

In 2023, Bravo was selected to spearhead the District of Muskoka’s extensive and ongoing I.D.E.A. (Inclusivity Diversity Equality Anti-bullying & Racism) mural campaign, decorating public edifices for various townships in the region.

www.artistjimbravo@weebly.com
Instagram @jimpaintermanbravo

Jim Bravo, The Lookout AKA Fruit Bandits, 2024, Oil On Canvas, 48″ x 70″

Collective City Gallery Project | Upcoming Exhibitions

Hannah Somers: The Music Sang ‘Lean on Me’
September 23 – October 4, 2026

Hannah Somers’ photography has tackled subjects around mixed ethnicity, culture, family, identity, and heritage. The artist has worked through these subjects using both new and archival imagery, video, and collage to express the complicated and often confusing dynamics that come with biracial families.

Jason van Horne & Brian Donnelly
November 18 – 29, 2026

Brian Donnelly: Goin’ Down the Road is an exhibition of video works that explore the City of Toronto through the lens of fiction. Positioned somewhere between piracy and cartography, the work recontextualizes fragments of film footage to shift focus from foreground narrative to background geography. What emerges are surreal documentations of a city evolving over decades, posing questions about the distortion of social identity and contesting the ownership of recorded municipal history.

Jason van Horne: The City. “During the pandemic I had the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it on my mind a lot. While apocalyptic themes have often been a part of my miniature work, the doomsday clock seemed to be getting especially close to midnight. So I started collecting the numerous boxes from online shopping that were coming to our house at the time and turning them into abandoned office towers, crumbling apartment buildings and burnt-out storefronts.”

About The Collective City Gallery Project

The Gallery Project will stage eight shows during the 2026 season, featuring the work of independent artists, arts collectives, and curators not represented by a commercial gallery or institution in the Greater Toronto Region, showcasing their work at no cost.

The Project aims to make the shows accessible to as broad a public as possible, allowing Collective City Arts to provide a public service to the community—a model that does not currently exist in Toronto. For more information about the Collective City Arts Gallery Project, visit The Gallery Project.

To learn more about Collective City Arts, visit the website.

Collective City Arts
www.collectivecity.ca
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Dupont Rail Gallery
1444 Dupont Street, Unit 10
Toronto, ON M6P 4H3

Gallery Hours:
Wednesday – Sunday, 12 – 5pm

Accessibility: Dupont Rail Gallery is fully accessible. For more information, visit Dupont Rail Gallery.