BURST
When financial pressures abruptly shuttered the Vancouver Mural Festival last year, after nearly a decade of turning neighbourhood walls into vibrant public canvases, the city’s street art scene lost its biggest stage.
But instead of letting the paint dry, artists like Drew Young, one of the festival’s founding curators, are reigniting the movement with this weekend’s Astro Arts Festival.
Young and his collaborators are launching a grassroots comeback, transforming a corner of Mount Pleasant into an outdoor gallery. Six new murals will be unveiled, while 30 artists paint live on-site, creating works ranging from graffiti and traditional street art to large-scale experimental pieces.
“We want to continue the legacy that was started with the Mural Festival,” Young told Postmedia.
Unlike the previous festival, which relied on public funding and sponsors, Astro Arts is artist-led, community-driven and collaborative. While corporate sponsors remain, their funding is not tied to specific murals, allowing artists full creative control over their work.
“They are painting murals, which typically cost from a few to tens of thousands of dollars, to create whatever they want,” explained Young. “It’s truly art for art’s sake.”
Fuelling the Vancouver mural revival is the Astro Club, a creative hub co-founded last year by Young and Steff Love. Housed in a repurposed industrial building, it now supports more than 60 working creatives and includes a workshop, photo studio, boardrooms, gallery space and a mural production company.
The walls of 165 West 4th Ave. have been transformed into a vibrant tapestry of murals in anticipation of this weekend’s festival. Towering above them all, Young’s bold design dominates the building’s western facade.
“It’s all about energy,” Young said of his mural. He described the piece, The Obsidian Void Wake s, as an orange orb of heat above shimmering black obsidian, symbolizing the energetic spark that’s carried from the Mural Festival to this weekend’s Astro Arts.
“It represents an unextinguishable creative spirit in Vancouver,” he said.
Two years ago, Young organized an event where dozens of artists painted murals freely on the walls of the sprawling alley behind the Astro Club. The success of that project, known as Astro Alley, became the foundation for this weekend’s festival.
“Everyone just came alive. It was like we remembered what we were doing this for,” the artist said.
The inaugural festival coincides with the return of one of Mural Festival’s most popular events — The 100 Amigos , an exhibition curated by Young, Pablo Zamudio and Douglas Coupland. Opening Friday, it will feature 100 original 12-by-12-inch works by local artists.
Astro Arts will also feature DJ sets, beer gardens, immersive installations, open studios, artist talks, art raffles and an artist market.
At its height, the former Vancouver Mural Festival turned public art into paid, sustainable work for hundreds of local artists, offering fair pay, high visibility and revitalizing neighbourhoods from Mount Pleasant to Burnaby.
Today, many artists still rely on mural projects for up to 70 per cent of their income.
“Opportunity has dwindled locally,” said Young. “We are in a lull right now, until development picks up again and there is a demand for more projects in new building hallways, lobbies and facades.”
In the meantime, this weekend’s festival will showcase the talent of local muralists available for hire, reinforcing the message that Vancouver’s art scene isn’t going anywhere.