If the world is truly sane, Amy Nugent and Jesse McKee are two Vancouverites the city ought not alienate: energetic, artistic, creative, committed cultural champions, in many ways the faces of the new and vibrant arts community.
That they and others have grown disaffected with something seemingly on the surface as benign as the Vancouver Mural Festival speaks volumes about disconnection at times between city hall and those it purportedly serves.
To wit: Nugent has developed and raised funds for several arts organizations. She won the mayor’s arts award last year for her dedication to arts boards and is a former president of the local Artspeak entity. McKee is an experienced art curator of multiple exhibitions, a notable writer and the head of strategy at the 221A gallery/non-profit. They embody rational, progressive values and are the proverbial poster models of the city we want to develop.
Early last year they found themselves invited into the early stages of the festival’s development, to meetings with the mayor and a developer benefactor, and quickly determined it was going to be run by fiat. They wisely fled.
Nugent, McKee and others in the arts sector argue persuasively that the mural festival, now in only its second year, has quickly lost the plot. They assert that powerful interests have commandeered the exercise, expedited and circumvented the traditional selection process for public art and used quickly summoned, comparably large sums to advance the interests of political and business branding over those of the district’s residents in Mount Pleasant, the Downtown Eastside and most recently Strathcona.
Don’t get the picture wrong: this unhappy story should not be confused with what are often gloriously attractive results in festooning neighbourhoods with bright, beautiful art. For certain, there are significant issues involving cultural diversity and marginal perspectives in the results, but this is more a question of process, a question of whether the end justified the means – and on those questions there is no question the city is found wanting.
Rather than move modest startup funds through the city’s historic methods under its cultural services department, it flooded the zone with relatively large sums through the engineering department. In doing so it ducked policies that call for public art review processes, a rational allocation of resources and adjudication to maximize harmony. The top-down was on.
In this hasty way, though, the city has commissioned swift tonnage: at least 50 projects this year alone, but on a quota-based and not a quality-based bang for the buck. The levels of sudden benevolence, McKee and Nugent note, eclipsed exponentially what the struggling artistic community had typically fought to receive from Vancouver.
All told, some $550,000 has gone into the festival over two years, including more than $300,000 this year from developers and tech companies to bombard light industrial and residential space.
Of course, while the neighbourhoods are prettier, the plights of their residents aren’t.
In the process, too, the city has seemingly done away with the local method that supported longtime organizations and reviewed arts funding. In essence, the juries have been replaced by a judge, and no one should underestimate the cost of this lost process that served to equalize opportunity.
No question, many districts in the city want a facelift and, done properly, public art can be provocative and conversational. The challenge is how, and this exercise demonstrates that there is a quick, wrong way to go about it that loses the advantage of community support.
A great example of the disconnection is the phrase on last year’s flagship mural on the Belvedere Court at Main and 10th, the site of no small dispute between the owner and tenants, some of whom have been evicted. In this case the community group was consulted – for what purpose, it now seems unclear – and proposed “Our Place, Our Home.” The festival’s eventual choice: “The Present Is a Gift.” Quite the different perspective in those two slogans.
The term for this is culture washing.
Kirk LaPointe is Business in Vancouver’s vice-president of audience and business development.
