June's global theme is 'CURATE', and we are lucky to be joined by illustrator, teacher, and author Tom Froese.

Froese is known for lively maps and bright, printmaking-inspired textures, and the award-winning work he's created for clients including Airbnb, Yahoo!, GQ France, The Wall Street Journal, and Canadian Tire. As a Skillshare Top Teacher, Tom has helped more than 120,000 students build creative confidence through concept-driven classes, and he hosts the podcast Thoughts on Illustration. He’s also the author of Drawing Is Important, a practical guide to building a daily drawing habit. For CURATE, Tom brings a maker’s perspective on how artists choose what to pay attention to, shape raw ideas into clear visual stories, and design a practice that filters the noise into work with intention. 

Speaker Interview

Each month we ask our presenters some probing questions to give us a deeper glimpse into their life and relationship with creativity:

1. How do you define creativity and apply it in your life and career?
   Creativity how we solve problems in spite of challenges and constraints. This is basically what it means to have a job in any discipline or industry. As an illustrator, it just means that the problems I solve are visual, and my tools are art supplies.
   
   
2. Where do you find your best creative inspiration or energy?
   In consistent practice.
   
   
3. What's one piece of creative advice or tip you wish you'd known as a young person?
   If you’re a beginner and worried you don’t know what you’re doing — don’t expect so much of yourself. Don’t be upset with yourself. If you really want to be good, learn how to do it, and practice, practice, practice.
   
   
4. Who (living or dead) would you most enjoy hearing speak at CreativeMornings?
   Paul Rand or Ben Shahn.
   
   
5. What practices, rituals, or habits contribute to your creative work?
   Having a daily drawing practice (so on the nose) and teaching!
   
   
6. When you get stuck creatively, what is the first thing you do to get unstuck?
   I spin my tires most when I’ve lost touch with the point of what I’m doing, or when I’m unaware of how stuck I actually am. As soon as I realize either of these things, I step back and write until I’ve figured out what my sticking point is. Then I can move in and troubleshoot the issue properly.
   
   
7. What myths about creativity would you like to set straight
   First, I think myths have a bad name. I feel like we could use more creative myths in our life (in one sense)! But seriously, I wish people would stop calling illustration “drawing”. Illustration is more than drawing, it’s an entire artistic discipline that just happens to include a lot of it.

Musical Guest

🎵 Our live musical performance will feature Michaela Slinger, a Vancouver-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist known for her warm, genre-blending sound🎶

Drawing from pop, folk, and soul influences, her music pairs candid storytelling with rich, textured production, exploring themes of growth, vulnerability, and self-discovery. With a growing national profile and a reputation for heartfelt live performances, Michaela brings both intimacy and quiet power to the stage.

Presenting Partner

TBA

How to Register for this Event

Join us on June 5th from 8:15-10am at the Vancouver Art Gallery by registering here.

At each CMVan event, the 30-second pitch segment gives audience members a chance to step on stage and spotlight upcoming local creative events happening around the city.

We send out a more detailed newsletter with the below events to our mailing list once a month. Subscribe to receive the next one.

For now, you can click on the below links to learn more about each of these creative events.

1. THANK YOU TO ALL OF YOU WHO SUPPORT CMVAN (seriously) Become our next Supporting Partner.
2. Release Day: A 24 Hour Celebration (now until May 29) 
3. Creative Forces Feature: Jim Carrico (Tyee series) 
4. Highlights from the Collection: Vancouver Art Gallery (now open)  
5. New Works by Joey Mallett and Mia Weinberg at the Cultch (April 28-May 9)
6. Figure | Out: Figure & Landscape Art Show (May 2-23)
7. Alternative Creations Studio: Art Sale (May 4-22)
8. Where the light gets in: Art Show (May 6-31)
9. AI Ethical Futures Lab (May 6)
9. Likemind Vancouver: Coffee & Conversation (May 15)
10. Reality Check LIVE with The Tyee nd Rachel Gilmore (May 21)
11. Sip 'n' Paint Growlers (June 5)
12. Help Design the Grandview-Woodland Bridge Mural (June 5- July 11)
13. First Saturday: Visit artists where they work (June 6)
14. Bodwell High School Swim Camps for ages 7-15 (June 29-August 14)

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The next CMVan event is happening on June 5th 
and will feature illustrator, teacher, and author Tom Froese. Get your ticket here.

“Survival of the Loudest: How a Vital Venue Beat the Odds”

Jim Carrico is a Creative Force! In the early 80s, he was right there at the very start of Vancouver’s DIY art scene where he founded Red Gate. Decades later, he is still the guardian of this iconic Vancouver venue. From the very beginning, Red Gate has always defied boxes - hosting everything from Japanese ambient sets to underground punk rock bands, all while having the pay-what-you-can system.

He describes Red Gate as a "cultural wildlife refuge”.

Read the full interview to hear Carrico talk about the importance of having spaces like this for ‘eccentric weirdos”, and his years of work to protect this non-corporate, non-hierarchical venue for the community.

Go check it out!
https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2026/05/01/How-Vital-Venue-Beat-Odds/ 

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Creative Forces is a Tyee + CreativeMornings/Vancouver series that spotlights people in the community who are using their creativity as a force for good. Nominate someone here.

Our theme for May is CREATE. It was chosen in collaboration with our global partner Adobe and illustrated by Ana Grigorovici.

This marks the first time we have ever worked with a global partner to select a monthly theme. Because at CreativeMornings, we believe everyone is creative, and Adobe couldn’t agree more

Here's some resources to inspire your own reflections on this month's theme:

• May's Themed Playlist: Create
  Listen to songs about creativity and the act of creating in our playlist for May's theme CrEATE curated by our community around the world. You can also add your own. Learn more.
  
  
• Release Day: May 29th
  It's time to finally share that special thing you've been working on. This month-long program includes accountability groups and practical tips, and is presented by CreativeMornings, Creative Quests, and Adobe. It will end with a Release Day party on May 29th. Pledge a commitment to yourself and sign up to participate.

The postcard of our May 2026 speaker Kris Krüg was illustrated by local artist @grateful_ched

The text is from our interview with Krüg, and reads: "The future belongs to the curious the experimenters, the ones willing to break things and put them back together in new ways."

All audience members will receive their own copy of this limited edition postcard, printed by Mitchell Press Ltd, at our May 1st event. Get your ticket.

May's global theme is 'CREATE', and we are excited to host renowned photographer and creative technologist Kris Krüg. He has spent more than two decades exploring how new tools reshape culture and how culture should reshape the tools. 



As Founder and Executive Director of the BC + AI Ecosystem Association and curator of the Vancouver AI Community Meetup, Kris Krüg has helped turn “AI” from a closed technical club into a living, cross-disciplinary community of artists, researchers, entrepreneurs, students, and Indigenous knowledge keepers. His perspective is rooted in making: his photography has appeared in outlets such as National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker, and he often shares works-in-progress, experiments, and lessons learned in public. For the CreativeMornings theme CREATE, Kris will trace the creative path that brought him to the edge of AI: what’s possible when machines join the studio, and what we should be wary of as this revolution accelerates.

Speaker Interview

Each month we ask our presenters some probing questions to give us a deeper glimpse into their life and relationship with creativity:

1. How do you define creativity and apply it in your life and career?
   Creativity is the courage to put something unfinished into the world and let other people finish it with you.
   
   I came up as a photographer. Grateful Dead website, Nokia ad campaigns, 130,000+ photos on Creative Commons before Creative Commons was cool. The whole practice was: show up, make the thing, post it tonight, argue about it tomorrow. That habit, publish in public, iterate in public, is the same muscle I use now running the BC + AI Ecosystem Association. 2,500+ members, 210 tickets sold for our January meetup at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, eight cohorts of Creative Pros, and we're still basically figuring it out in the group chat at midnight.
   
   So for me creativity isn't a mood or a talent. It's a practice of staying public while you're still wrong. Burning Man taught me that. The Grammys red carpet with a First Nations chief in full regalia taught me that. Photographing the BP oil spill for Nat Geo taught me that. And now coaching a room full of nervous executives through their first prompt, same lesson: make the thing visible before it's ready, and the community will meet you there.
   
   
2. Where do you find your best creative inspiration or energy?
   Three places, in this order:
   
   One, the cabin on Galiano Island. Phone off, forest on, nothing to prove. Most of my best thinking happens while I'm not thinking.
   
   Two, the room. Monday nights at the Multimodal Media Lab on Howe Street for Film Club with Kevin Friel. Tuesday office hours on Zoom. Whatever Luke Minaker and Mayumi Rollings are cooking at Tiny Ghost Studios. I get lit up by watching a 19 year old break a tool a vendor said couldn't be broken, and by watching a 60 year old VFX veteran rewire their whole practice in a weekend.
   
   Three, the elders. Carol Anne Hilton at Indigenomics, where I've been CTO, teaching me ceremony before innovation. Indigenous leaders who keep reminding me that 10,000 years of governance is also technology. That tension, the fastest tools in human history sitting next to the oldest protocols on this coast, is where I do my best work.
   
   
3. What's one piece of creative advice or a tip you wish you'd known as a young person?
   Ship the draft. Seriously. Ship the ugly, half baked, "I'll fix the kerning later" draft.
   
   I wasted a lot of my twenties polishing things in private because I thought the world wanted a finished artist. The world doesn't want a finished artist. The world wants a person it can follow, argue with, and build alongside. Every good thing in my life, the Nat Geo call, the Burning Man crew, BC + AI, the Space Centre stage, came from something I posted when it was 60% done and slightly embarrassing.
   
   Open source your process, not just your output. The people you want in your life are hiding in your drafts folder.
   
   
4. What's the wildest thing you've ever done?
   Gulf Coast. I cold pitched National Geographic from a hotel parking lot, got a yes, drove four states solo, slept in the car, shot oiled pelicans and fishermen who'd lost everything, then stood on stage at TEDxOilSpill in DC two weeks later with the photos still wet. No plan, no per diem, no permission. Just a Prius, a Nikon, and the correct amount of stupidity.
   
   
5. What are you reading these days?
   Indigenomics by Carol Anne Hilton (rereading with a pen this time). Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio. Blindsight by Peter Watts when I want to feel small. And a rotating stack of Substacks.
   
   
6. What fact about you would surprise people?
   I'm a hard introvert. I run a 2,500 person community, I speak on stages, I host weekly office hours, and I recharge by going silent on Galiano for three days with no humans and a kettle. The extroverted public KK is a performance I genuinely enjoy and then I need to go lie in the moss.
   
   
7. How does your life and career compare to what you envisioned when you were a sixth grader?
   Sixth grade KK wanted to be a skate video editor and a hacker, and maybe a war photographer if he got brave. Current KK runs an AI association, makes art teaches, writes, and occasionally crashes executive retreats. So roughly 80% accuracy…
   
   
8. If you could open a door and go anywhere, where would that be?
   
   Back of Fernando de Noronha, Brazil. Or a specific cove on the west side of Galiano nobody's named yet. Either way: ocean loud enough to drown out Slack.
   
   
9. What keeps you awake at night?
   The speed gap between what the tools can do and what our institutions know how to govern. We're writing 2035 code with 1998 policy.
   
   
10. What myths about creativity would you like to set straight?
    That creativity belongs to artists. Creativity is just repeated courage under uncertainty. A good nurse is creative. A good city planner is creative. My accountant is creative in ways that genuinely frighten me. The myth of the gifted few is mostly marketing, and it's expensive to believe.
    
    
11. What are you proudest of in your life?
    BC + AI. We started in a panicked group chat in 2023 and 28 months later we're the largest public interest AI community in the province. 2,500+ members, 265 tickets for one meetup, eight Creative Pros cohorts, an accredited Responsible AI Professional certification in the oven with Martin Lopatka and Sarah Downey, and a room full of people who trust each other enough to argue in public. That trust is the actual asset. Everything else is scaffolding.
    
    
12. If you could do anything now, what would you do?
    Six months, no laptop, one camera, one notebook. Travel the coast from Haida Gwaii to Tofino documenting the people building the next economy here. No deliverable promised upfront. Come back with a book, a show, and a much quieter nervous system.
    
    
13. What music are you listening to these days?
    A lot of Snotty Nose Rez Kids and Haviah Mighty. Some Godspeed You! Black Emperor when I'm writing. Fugazi when I'm running. Ambient stuff from Jon Hopkins when I'm editing photos.
    
    
14. What was the best surprise you've experienced so far in life?
    The Grammys red carpet 2019 standing beside a First Nations chief in full regalia while pop stars walked past pretending not to stare.
    
    
15. Where is your favourite place to escape?
    The cabin on Galiano. No WiFi on purpose. Wood stove, ocean, a stack of books, one kettle. If I haven't been there in a month, people around me can tell before I can.
    
    
16. What was the best advice you were ever given?
    "Build trust before you need it." I think I got a version of it from Dave Olson in Vancouver in like 2007 and it's been the operating system of my career ever since. Every good thing that's happened to me was a withdrawal from a relationship account I'd been quietly depositing into for years.
    
    
17. What books made a difference in your life and why?
    Indigenomics, Carol Anne Hilton: reframed economy as relationship. Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer: reframed science as reciprocity. Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes: reframed the photograph as grief. Neuromancer, William Gibson: reframed the future as already unevenly here, as he later put it. Four books, four reframes, roughly one per decade.
    
    
18. When you get stuck creatively, what is the first thing you do to get unstuck?
    Walk. Seawall, forest, anywhere my feet move and my hands are empty. If that doesn't crack it, I call one of three people who are legally obligated to tell me the truth (Mark Busse is one of them) and describe the stuckness out loud. Usually the description is the fix.
    
    
19. If you had fifteen extra minutes each day, what would you do with them?
    Write letters. Real ones, to specific people, thanking them before I need anything from them. My inbox is already a crime scene, so this wouldn't be email. Paper, stamps, the whole slow ceremony.
    
    
20. What has been one of your biggest Aha! moments in life?
    Realizing the bottleneck was never the camera, the software, the budget, or the gatekeeper. The bottleneck was my willingness to be seen mid process. Once I dropped that, everything else, Nat Geo, Burning Man, BC + AI, the stages, the students, arrived as a consequence, not a goal.
    
    
21. What is the one movie or book every creative must see/read? Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. If you only have 45 minutes, watch Koyaanisqatsi. Either will quietly recalibrate how you think about making anything at all.

Musical Guest

🎵 Our live musical performance will feature ORRA, a Vancouver-based indie pop duo crafting lush, emotionally charged songs that explore identity, connection, and the complexities of early adulthood.🎶

Led by singer and keyboardist Sarah Orr alongside drummer Cam McGregor, their sound blends shimmering guitars, swelling synths, and punchy rhythms into intimate, cinematic moments. With listeners in nearly 100 countries and growing radio play across North America, ORRA is quickly emerging as a distinctive voice in Canada’s indie music scene.

Presenting Partner

Alternative Creations Studio is being recognized through a generous anonymous gift made in their honour.

Alternative Creations Studio is a collective that connects and empowers artists with developmental disabilities To experiment and hone their skills while co-creating inclusive communities where everyone can flourish. We believe in the transformative power of art and are always seeking opportunities to collaborate with like-minded people by sharing studio and gallery space. hosting community workshops, and participating in art shows and other events.

How to Register for this Event

Join us on May 1st from 8:15-10am at the Vancouver Art Gallery by registering here.

At each CMVan event, the 30-second pitch segment gives audience members a chance to step on stage and spotlight upcoming local creative events happening around the city.

We send out a more detailed newsletter with the below events to our mailing list once a month. Subscribe to receive the next one.

For now, you can click on the below links to learn more about each of these creative events.

1. Donate/Become a CreativeMornings/Vancouver Support Partner (email vancouver@creativemornings.com)
2. Release Day: A 24 Hour Celebration (May 29)
3. Creative Forces Feature: Brewster Kahle (Tyee series)
4. Highlights from the Collection: Vancouver Art Gallery (now open)
5. Help Eastside Boxing give at-risk youth a fighting chance to thrive! (Donate)
6. Basecamp: A residency for creators, entrepreneurs, and community builders (apply now)
7. Health Marketing Meets Creative Design (April 15)
8. Likemind Vancouver: Coffee & Conversation (April 17)
9. The Wilson School of Design’s Graphic Design for Marketing grad show (April 23)
10. Ehab Guitarrista Flamenco (April 23)
11. CMVan May Event: Kris Krüg (May 1)
12. First Saturday: Visit artists where they work (May 2)
13. Reality Check LIVE with The Tyee and Rachel Gilmore (May 21)

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The next CMVan event is happening on May 1st 
and will feature renowned photographer and creative technologist Kris Krüg. Get your ticket here.

We have a digital pioneer and Internet Hall of Fame inductee walking among us!

Meet Brewster, a Creative Force, tech wizard, the “internet librarian” who co-founded the “Wayback Machine” which has now archived over one trillion websites!

Back in the 90’s, Brewster helped develop the first-ever text search system that let’s people search databases on remote computers. Since day one, he has been guided by this mission: providing universal access to all knowledge for free.

Check out the full interview with Brewster:
https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2026/04/10/Brewster-Kahle-Creative-Force/

In our ever-expanding digital world, you won’t want to miss this one!

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Creative Forces is a Tyee + CreativeMornings/Vancouver series that spotlights people in the community who are using their creativity as a force for good. Nominate someone here.

Our theme for April is EMBER. It was chosen by our Poulsbo chapter in Washington and illustrated by Sarah Gordon.

The literal meaning of ember is a small piece of burning or glowing coal or wood in a dying fire. But as a metaphor, it means so much more.

Our Poulsbo chapter had this to say about the significance of this month’s theme:

“Embers represent the quiet, enduring remnants of fire—what remains after the intensity fades. They carry a smoldering potential, a subtle strength that holds heat long after the flames have gone. As a quieter community outside the city, we may not always burn the brightest, but we never burn out. Our spark lives in reflection, resilience, and the space we have to pause, think, and grow."

Each month, a different CreativeMornings chapter chooses a theme for all global CM talks taking place in cities around the world.

This year, many of our monthly themes will be in that chapter’s local language.

The hope is that this will give each theme a richer meaning and foster deeper connections to other communities and cultures.

Here's some resources to inspire your own reflections on this month's theme:

1. April Themed Playlist: Ember
   Listen to songs about burning embers, old flames, and the quiet strength glowing deep inside you in our playlist for April’s theme EMBER curated by our community around the world. You can also add your own. Learn more.
   
   
2. Release Day: May 29th
   It's time to finally share that special thing you've been working on. This month-long program includes accountability groups and practical tips, and is presented by CreativeMornings, Creative Quests, and Adobe. It will end with a Release Day party on May 29th. Pledge a commitment to yourself and sign up to participate.

The postcard of our April 2026 speaker Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin was illustrated by 4th year student from IDEA Program at Capilano University, Yohahnah Loker.

The text is from our interview with Clark-Bojin, and reads: "Our brains are pattern seeking machines, the more unique things we fill it with, the better patterns for creating growth we find."

All audience members will receive their own copy of this limited edition postcard, printed by Mitchell Press Ltd, at our April 10th event. Get your ticket.