Exhibit on history of Centennial College’s Story Arts Centre campus in East York opens this Thursday
By KAT BERGERON
Centennial College Museum students at the Story Arts Centre campus in East York will hold the opening reception this week for an exhibit honouring the history of the campus.
Eras End, Stories Live On: The Life and Times of the Story Arts Centre exhibition’s opening reception will take place on Thursday, Feb. 19, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. in the campus library. The Story Arts Centre is located at 951 Carlaw Ave., near Mortimer Avenue.
This exhibition comes nearly one year after plans to relocate programs to the college’s campus in Scarborough on Progress Avenue were announced by Centennial College President and CEO Craig Stephenson on March 5, 2025. The official move out of the East York campus will not take place until this summer, when the doors will be officially shut. Continuing course programs that began at the Story Arts Centre will be starting the following semester as scheduled, at the Progress Avenue campus in Scarborough.
The exhibit will tell the story of the Story Arts Centre campus’ history in three parts.
The exhibit will begin when the building first opened in 1915 as the Toronto Teachers College and continued as such until 1955. The second part will focus on when the building was used for the filming of the television show Degrassi High from 1989 to 1991. The third and final installation in the exhibit will focus on more recent history into the present day; from 1994 when the school opened as Centennial College’s School of Communications, Media, Arts & Design.
“We’ve been working on it all since our program started back in September. It’s part of a program requirement, but it’s giving all of the students in our program actual museum or gallery roles in putting on an exhibition,” said Centennial Museum Studies student Julanna Vine.
The Museum and Cultural Management students will use archival videos, publications and photos as well as scripts and costumes to tell the story.
Centennial’s Museum and Cultural Management graduate certificate program teaches students about management of programs and resources to preserve heritage in our cultural and natural environments.
At the opening reception, students will lead a discussion panel focussed on the project’s significance to their studies, their process putting together the event and the impact the campus’s history has had on the community.
“(The event) actually makes the campus that much more meaningful, because we are exploring the history right from when the land was acquired or occupied by the Helliwell family through the Degrassi years, when it was being filmed here, and into when it became a creative media campus,” said student and organizer Helen Habtu.
The exhibit is open to the public, with tickets available for free online. It will continue in the library at the Story Arts Centre until the end of March.
To reserve tickets for the opening reception, please get in touch with organizer Helen Habtu, hhabtu2@my.centennialcollege.ca by email or visit https://mcmcmuseum.wixsite.com/erasend-storieslive
