Isabel Bader / Tett Centre
On Kingston’s waterfront, side by side like the sophisticated sibling and the beautifully eccentric one who still paints in the basement, sit the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts and the Tett Centre for Creativity & Learning. Together, they form the sort of arts complex that makes you feel underdressed even when you’re wearing your good black sweater.
The Isabel, at 390 King Street West, is one of the most beautiful venues in town. A 567-seat, wood-panelled jewel box with acoustics so finely tuned it feels like being gently held inside a cello. Designed to be fully soundproof, complete with motorized acoustic drapes (which sounds faintly less like theatre equipment and more like something a Bond villain would own), it is the kind of place where a whisper could earn a standing ovation. Classical music may be it’s natural habitat, but the room has also welcomed everything from alt-country heartbreak to Polaris Prize royalty. It is beautiful, accessible, and frankly worth the trip to Kingston for the architecture alone.
Next door, the Tett Centre for Creativity & Learning hums with a different kind of energy. Housed in the old J.K Tett heritage building at 370 King Street West, it feels like the sort of place where, at any given moment, someone is rehearsing a play, someone else is throwing clay, and another person is standing in a gallery nodding thoughtfully at something made of wire and grief. Once part of the old Morton brewery complex, it now houses studios, galleries, rehearsal spaces, workshops, and enough creative energy to make the walls hum at night. It is home to nine arts organizations, artist studios, rental spaces, and, crucially, Juniper Cafe, where one may sit on the patio and contemplate both the lake and one’s own unrealized creative potential.
If the Isabel is the polished performer under the spotlight, the Tett is the backstage chaos: paint on the floor, ideas in the air, someone carrying a cello case past someone else carrying a kiln-fired bowl.
Together they make up one of Kingston’s great cultural ecosystems… a place where concerts, workshops, exhibitions, readings, and the occasional beautifully designed poster all drift together on the waterfront breeze.
This collection gathers together the visual breadcrumbs left behind from this stretch of waterfront, where beer history, brickwork, and the arts collide in the most Canadian way possible: thoughtfully, beautifully, and with excellent views of the lake.
Artists appearing in this poster collection: Greg Keelor (of Blue Rodeo), Orange Alabaster Mushroom, and The Sadies.
If you’d like to wander deeper into this waterfront arts labyrinth, click the tags at the bottom of the page for more on some of the artists appearing throughout this collection.
