Mural, mural on the wall
Public art makes a comeback in downtown Winnipeg
Stacey Abramson

Winnipeg’s first mural festival has left downtown and surrounding areas speckled with vibrant planes.

The five giant sheets of vinyl hanging in and around downtown are a bold step in the right direction for both public art and the use of discarded wall space.

Selected from 10 designs, the five murals are each thematically and stylistically different. Perhaps the most noticeable mural is located on the south side of The Empire Cabaret. Reading like one of the National Film Board’s famous Canadian Vignettes, Tom Andrich’s The 1919 Strike depicts many aspects of the historic uprising. Andrich’s piece is also the most accessible of the works displayed. Its placement near Portage and Main gives it another element of historic significance because many confrontations during the Winnipeg General Strike occurred nearby.

Location is a key element for each work’s success. Anders Swanson’s Three Sisters is on the deteriorated Starland Theatre at the start of the North Main district, and the piece creates a beautiful juxtaposition of earthy tones and landscape against the backdrop of the crumbling buildings that surround it. The images of death, decay and renewal are incredibly telling of the area over which it looks — North Main has been going through the same process itself.

Looking west onto Portage and Main, Yannick Picard’s Sentez! pops off the wall of the Fairmont Hotel. Although the work may appear celebratory at first glance, its message of environmental damage and resource consumption quickly becomes clear.

Most of the works are on main drags, allowing passersby to get full views, but Guadalupe Serrano Quiñonez and Alberto Romero Morachis’ Cartography for New Cosmopolitans peaks out from the south side of the Manitoba Museum. The images of bodies knotted and flowing over a topographic landscape sit delicately together, and it’s a refreshing and beautiful plane of colour in the midst of stone and sky surrounding it.

The only work featured outside the downtown landscape is Mike Valcourt’s Jackson Beardy — Woodlands Group of Seven Tribute at The Forks. A beautiful dedication to the struggles and triumphs of Cree artist Beardy, the work introduces viewers to the styles that many influential aboriginal artists created during the last century.

The care and dedication Valcourt put into this piece is unique. Taking cues from painters such as Daphne Odjig and Norval Morrisseau, Valcourt trimuphantly melds history and tradition without missing a detail.

While it’s great to see works such as these being commissioned, the fact that they’re movable is a bit troublesome. It would have been much more impressive if the works were done right on the structures rather than on movable vinyl sheets.

It’s a shame that this art will someday sit in an archive somewhere out of constant public view.

However, it is wonderful to see that public art projects have actually been set in motion. Here’s hoping for many more in the future.