The name “Mesopotamia” derives from a Greek term meaning “land between the rivers.” The Royal Ontario Museum’s latest major exhibit, which opens on June 22, takes this literally, as visitors flow between painted representations of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers on the floor.

Presented by the British Museum and rounded out with pieces from institutions in Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, Mesopotamia: Inventing Our World covers 3,000 years of human development in the cradle of urban civilization. Most of the 170 artifacts on display have never been shown in Canada.

There are a lot of chefs in the kitchen for the Canadian premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, a triptych set in three time periods that tells the stories of amateur actors (played by real actors) involved in staging performances of the story of Christ. Three different Toronto independent theatre companies, all with reputations for innovative staging and creation in their past work, each tackle one of the three acts. Ordinarily, such a complicated arrangement would be to a show’s detriment, but not in this case. While you need to be prepared for a marathon of theatre (the show runs four hours, incluing two intermissions), you’re certainly going to get your money’s worth.

“A cross between Woodstock and the Algonquin Round Table,” is what Michael Redhill called it. Dorothy Parker grinding out an electric cover of “The Star Spangled Banner”? Well, not quite. Rather, Redhill, the literary curator for Luminato 2013, was describing A Literary Picnic, the annual festival’s celebration of storytelling, creativity, and the written word.

The 2013 Toronto Jazz Festival descends on the city this Friday with a huge “free for all” event. That means all of Friday’s programming at every Jazz Festival venue is, yes, completely free of charge. There will be concerts from local favourites Molly Johnson and Mary Margaret O’Hara, plus a show by Smokey Robinson and Martha Reeves, who will be launching the fest from its epicentre, Nathan Phillips Square.

Here’s a rundown of some of the shows worth checking out on Friday—and during the rest of the festival, when you’ll actually have to pay.

Folks who are planning on having a swim in the pool at Scadding Court Community Centre over the next few days may find themselves a little disappointed. Those who want to go fishing, however, will probably be ecstatic.

For the rest of the week, the Community Centre will be holding its annual Gone Fishin’ event, meaning its indoor pool will be an indoor fish pond. The pool has been drained, dechlorinated, and refilled with 2,000 rainbow trout, to be caught by local children and families.

WHERE: Outside Kensington Community School, near College and Bathurst Streets

WHEN: Wednesday, June 12

WHAT: A giant fence facing a busy stretch of College Street is nothing if not an invitation to graffiti writers looking for high-profile places to scrawl their names. Street artists Sean Martindale and Pascal Paquette had other ideas. At the request of the fence’s owner, Kensington Community School, and with the help of a City grant, the pair began work on this colourful mural before winter; they hope to finish it this week. It says, in giant letters: “Time is On Our Side / Yes It Is,” a nod to the song “Time is on My Side,” written by Jerry Ragovoy and later notably performed by the Rolling Stones.

Does graffiti belong in the galleries? Is it still graffiti if it’s in a gallery?

To some people graffiti is a style, an aesthetic—defined by how it looks. To others it is identified not primarily by its visual properties but where it is: specifically, graffiti is art that is drawn or painted or stenciled, in public spaces or on other people’s property, illegally. For some that makes it a form of protest and for others a form of vandalism; in either case, graffiti for many is defined by the fact that it’s illicit.

For any number of reasons, an increasing number of graffiti artists are challenging that notion. Among them is Pascal Paquette, whose first experiment with street art was a life-size self-portrait sculpture installed on the outside of an art gallery, and who most recently was part of a two-person installation project for the Art Gallery of Ontario in conjunction with Sean Martindale. Between the Lines spoke with him about the evolving nature of graffiti in Toronto; some of his thoughts are in the short video above.

CORRECTION: May 15, 12:53 AM We originally wrote that Paquette was the co-curator of the AGO show; it was actually curated by Katherine Dennis.

Bike off into the sun...

Bicycles are ubiquitous in any great city—and so is contemporary art. Artists Sean Martindale and Pascal Paquette get that. The two are currently collaborating on NOW, an installation project at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Young Gallery. It includes an artist workspace, a visitor’s lounge with a comment board, and two time-lapse videos of the graffiti writing taking place a bit further afield. What those videos show: a changing series of murals, painted outside the gallery in an alley off Nassau Street in Kensington market, and then each painted over to make way for the next design.

Martindale and Paquette recently asked guerilla street artists Urban Repair Squad to paint one of those murals for the video, called Whitewash.

“We invited current and active street and graffiti artists to paint that wall, then Sean and I paint it over with white paint. The video in our exhibition shows us doing that,” says Paquette. “The video is a reaction to Ford’s erasing our fine works of art, but also to how ephemeral the art form is.”

When URS first started painting bike lanes, they were known to leave notes like “City broke, we fix—no charge.” (You can read about their cost-effective, statement-making art in the very first issue of dandyhorse.) Those DIY lanes were covered over by the City, usually pretty quickly. The “Wile E. Ford” mural, as the URS artists are calling it, will also be painted over later today or tomorrow—this time to make room for the next art work in the exhibition.

We know our mayor thinks the idea of a connected network of bike lanes across our gridlock-choked city is “Looney Tunes”—making this a fun little act of levity that also highlights very real concerns about safe cycling in this city.

Photos by Martin Reis.

Doug Tielli. Photo courtesy of the artist.

FILM AND TALK: The Art Gallery of Ontario’s Free After Three program (free entry for high school students after 3 p.m. Tuesday through Friday) is presenting a screening of the graffiti documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. The Academy Award–nominated film is about a French man’s efforts to find and befriend Banksy—but in the end the camera ends up turned back on him. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Toronto graffiti artists Sean Martindale and Pascal Paquette. All of this is part of the AGO’s Toronto Now Series. Art Gallery of Ontario, Jackman Hall (317 Dundas Street West), 4 p.m.–6:30 p.m., FREE.

FUNDRAISER: Hearken back to the days of yore at an evening to raise funds for the Toronto’s First Post Office museum. Single Thread Theatre Company and the Town of York Historical Society are presenting Petticoats, Scoundrels and Soldiers: The Faces of 1812, a show with music and humour about the War of 1812 as seen through the eyes of some of its most important figures. St Lawrence Hall (157 King Street East), 7:30 p.m., $15–$25.

POETRY: Stop by Canada’s longest running poetry reading series tonight and listen in on three great poets. On stage this evening at the Art Bar poetry series will be Alessandra Naccarato, a two-time finalist in the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word; Jane Munro, a finalist for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award; and English poet Rob Welch. Paupers Pub (539 Bloor Street West), 8 p.m., FREE (donations accepted).

MUSIC: Toronto folk singer Doug Tielli spent a few months on Toronto Island, where he enjoyed life at a slower pace and recorded songs for his recently released debut solo album, Swan Sky Sea Squirrel. You may not have heard Tielli’s solo work before, but he’s a fixture in the local scene as part of acts such as The Silt, Drumheller, and The Reveries. Holy Oak (1241 Bloor Street West), 9 p.m., PWYC.

Urban Planner is Torontoist‘s guide to what’s on in Toronto, published every weekday morning, and in a weekend edition Friday afternoons. If you have an event you’d like considered, email all of its details—as well as images, if you’ve got any—to events@torontoist.com.

The Young Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s little-known free section, was the site of the jam-packed, January 20 opening of NOW, a collaborative installation by Sean Martindale and Pascal Paquette—part of the AGO’s Toronto Now Series.

Both artists are typically known for their street art—Martindale, for his urban interventions (such as pocket planters made of advertising posters and tree planter alterations) and Paquette, who works under the name Mon Petit Chou, for graffiti. And yet, Martindale sees their AGO stint as a perfect opportunity for showing how street art and gallery art tend to inform, and not isolate, one another.

While the Young gallery serves as the anchor for the two artists’ creative vision, it seemingly could not contain it.

The AGO gift shop is now the site of Gift Shop Gift Shop, a parallel store created by Martindale and Paquette that is peppered with self-referential items. Shoppers can buy souvenirs of the gift shop itself, like a 25 postcard set containing shots of store products, or liquefied overstock re-formed into acrylic cubes.

Martindale wanted this project to explore the role that the gift shop plays within the AGO. “We recognize that a lot of people go to the gift shop without going to the gallery, and that a lot of people feel more comfortable in a commercial environment than a gallery environment. We wanted to address that,” he said.

The artists will also be engaging with FRANK restaurant. They’ll design custom items for the menu and host an affordable dinner that they hope will attract a diverse crowd. They’ll even be directing tours and other activities at the AGO’s Weston Family Learning Centre.

Visitors to the installation are invited to contemplate pressing social questions and pin proposed solutions to the wall.

Having the Young Gallery as the project’s home base suits Martindale and Paquette’s purposes very well.”We’re happy that we are in the free part, because that suits us in our practice that Pascal and I both have of doing stuff out on the street and in public where it’s readily available,” Martindale said. “Part of our goal of this project was to address [the gallery’s obscurity], to show that this space can be made a bit more visible, and that contemporary projects can play a bigger role there.”

While the gift shop and FRANK installations reflect on the AGO itself, the Young gallery is bursting with commentary on Toronto today. Video projections documenting the artists spray painting the word “NOW” repeatedly using early graffiti styles, or continually painting over the work of other local graffiti artists, pay homage both to the art form, past and present, and to the complicated relationship we have with it in this city.

“We wanted to address that it is an ephemeral form and that there’s a big push to eradicate it a lot of the time,” said Martindale. “A lot of people don’t recognize the difference between a permission wall and a non-permission wall, or tagging from a more developed piece.”

Sitting side-by-side with the installations is a plethora of signage, leaflets, and other documents that the artists have splattered over the gallery, all emblazoned with their Toronto NOW branding (including a play on the City’s official logo).

The artists are also compiling a NOW Service Bureau Public Directory of (real!) grassroots organizations with official sounding names such as the Department of Public Memory that are available to step up when the city fails to provide adequate support.

No other opening in the Young Gallery’s history had been so well attended (the crowd was double the previous record), and so it appears there is an appetite for Martindale and Paquette’s DIY vision.

NOW: A Collaborative Project runs until April 1, 2012. Learn more at nowexhibition.com.