Category — The Arts

Richard Tetrault high above Hastings St. at work on the Orwell Hotel mural.

My post last week about the new mural emerging on the wall of the Orwell Hotel at 456 East Hastings St. was improvised from materials at hand, included some errors, and failed to indicate the broad community roots of this project.

David Eddy, of the Vancouver Native Housing Society, sent me this update today:

The mural was commissioned by Vancouver Native Housing Society (VNHS) at the Orwell Hotel, a renovated SRO which we manage and operate for BC Housing.

The mural is an urban Aboriginal initiative whose major sponsors to date have been BC Housing, and the City of Vancouver’s Great Beginnings program. We have also received significant donations from the Royal Bank, the Strathcona BIA, Britannia Community Services, and General Paint. There was no federal stimulus grant received for the mural. It is all BC money.

We have been very fortunate to have commissioned Richard Tetrault, Vancouver’s pre-eminent muralist, as the project’s artistic coordinator and we engaged members of the DTES community in the design process. The artists involved in the design and application, Jerry Whitehead, Richard Shorty, Haisla Collins, Sharifa Marsden, Don Howell, and Nicola Campbell are all Aboriginal.

The concept is based on VNHS’ plan of developing social enterprise through our social and supportive housing portfolio: to create employment for urban aboriginals and ultimately provide income to VNHS to invest in sustaining and increasing affordable housing. [Read more →]

In councillors’ in-box this morning, this very interesting review of public art from cities around the world from Merle Goertz, who writes: “Here’s what World Class Cities do for public art. Please view. Very well done and informative presentation, and no Vancouver. Not one cheap looking, uninspired, oversized engagement ring or semi-phallic, whatevers, like are foisted on the public in False Creek.”

(Warning: this is a big powerpoint file, so it make take time to load.)

You may not agree with Goertz’s opinion of Vancouver’s art, but this collection is remarkable.

The new mural appearing on the Orwell Hotel, 456 East Hastings.

The Orwell Hotel at 456 East Hastings St. is the latest site for a mural co-ordinated by Strathcona artist Richard Tetrault. (Another is nearby inside Bruce Eriksen Place.)

This mural is part of a federal stimulus grant that “involves system, structural, life safety, internal finishes and sustainability initiatives for 55 social housing units.” (UPDATE, July 15: Funding is also provided by the city’s Great Beginnings program, the Strathcona BIA and RBC.)

Tetrault’s crew group is swinging off the swing stage six days a week and will complete the project in August, weather permitting. The mural is the latest in a long series of Tetrault-inspired projects that are making East Vancouver into an open-air gallery.

Andrew Owen and politician at the new gallery wall between Woodwards' and the Cambie Hotel.

Vancouver artist Andrew Owen, who now has a show at the Marion Scott Gallery in Gastown, has taken over the walls of the old Slam Gallery, a two-story building attached to the side of the Cambie Hotel, for his very unique brand of public art.

Cambie regulars have enjoyed Owen’s work on the building’s Cordova St. frontage for years, but this month the public  gallery has been extended along the building’s long east wall, directly across from the new Woodwards’, where Owen and other artists, many from the Downtown Eastside, are displaying their work.

Much of Owen’s work is taken straight from the street, including the remarkable Brilliant Cut, a very large piece in the Marion Scott show that carves down through the multiple layers of street posters to excavate months of informal public art. [Read more →]