Destination: Art is a series uncovering some of Canada’s unique, unexpected and under-the-radar art experiences. With spring in the air, adventure on the mind and many looking to explore more Canada, CBC Arts is adding some new attractions for readers who want to discover the treasures hiding in their own backyard.
Public art can teach us a lot about the history of a city. And in Vancouver, it preserves all kinds of stories from the past — both the good and the bad — and takes on new meanings as our perspectives change with time.
There are pieces tucked in back alleys and built into their surroundings, and others meant to be heard and not seen. You may not realize something is a piece of art at all without an explanation. Maybe that’s part of the hidden beauty of it.
CBC Arts talked to experts who have explored some of the best public art Vancouver has to offer. So next time you pass through these areas, take a minute to look a little closer at these pieces — they might have something to say about the very ground you’re walking on.
Weekend Chime (2021)
Where is it? 800 Robson St.
Vancouver’s head of public art, Eric Fredericksen, says that although artist Brady Cranfield’s Weekend Chime is conceptually very simple, it’s taken longer to realize than most of the projects he’s worked on for the city.
It can also only be experienced for two seconds each week.
In the middle of Robson Square, four red horns are mounted on a lighting pole and connected to a carillon chime system that makes sounds similar to church bells. It plays the same two notes every Friday at 5 p.m. — some might recognize it as the melody sung on the word “weekend” in Vancouver-based band Loverboy’s Working for the Weekend.
“The idea of the weekend [is] something that’s really important in labour history,” says Fredericksen. “It was not a concept for manual labourers, and it’s often connected by people to the rise in unionization — the declaration of workers that they deserve days of rest.”
With more and more people working remotely, it’s become harder to separate the professional from the rest of our lives. Work can happen wherever we are, and this jingle is a reminder that maybe we should be thinking more consciously about when we stop doing it.
“It’s meant to be this prod, to say, ‘Why don’t you think about stopping work? Why don’t you go for a walk? Why don’t you call your friend?'” says Fredericksen.
stillness & motion (2013)
Where is it? River Green, 5111 Brighouse Way
Any piece of public art that involves a digital aspect can be hard to pull off, according to Cameron Cartiere, a professor and researcher specializing in public art at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Even if an idea is conceptually strong, she says, there are “seldom enough funds, or any funds, for maintenance [of the piece].” But stillness & motion has managed to hold up for over a decade now, and it’s one of her favourites.
Installed on the glass walls of a pedestrian overpass, it features a translucent image of a rookery on one side and an LED panel on the other. In the daytime, you get an intimate view of life-sized herons resting in their nests. At night, that LED panel shows a bird, animated to beat its wings in a continuous loop.
The artists, Jacqueline Metz and Nancy Chew, see it as an observation of “how culture interprets the land and how the land shapes culture” — it contrasts stillness with movement, and natural landscape with city life.
Urban Indian (2000)
Where is it? CRAB Park, 101 East Waterfront Rd.
Alasdair Butcher, founder of Vancouver DeTours, runs walking tours revolving around art and what it can tell us about our city’s history — even the often-overlooked pieces hidden in parks and back alleys.
At the entrance to CRAB Park, there’s a stone inscribed with Urban Indian, a poem by Fred Arrance, the former director of Indigenous non-profit Aboriginal Front Door Society. The poem details how Indigenous peoples’ customs and traditions become lost as they navigate a society that is built to suppress them. It was installed in 2000 as part of Portrait V2K, a project that collected stories representative of Vancouver at the turn of the millennium and saw multiple plaques and story stones placed throughout the city.
Arrance’s activism was one of the reasons why CRAB Park went from being an industrial dumping ground to one of few waterfront parks on the east side of Vancouver, Butcher says. He thinks this heart-shaped stone positioned right at the entrance is a “really beautiful” way to honour Arrance’s work.
“[Urban Indian] acknowledg[es] that the city has been built over unceded Coast Salish territory,” says Butcher. “And the fact that it’s on a rock, on the very foundational materials of territory, of the earth, of the land — it’s a very different representation of Indigeneity than a lot of the stuff that you’ll see in the more famous works.”
“It’s a much more political piece, and one that talks about the challenges facing Indigenous residents of the city today.”
Four Boats Stranded: Red and Yellow, Black and White (2001)
Where is it? Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby St.
Next time you walk by the Vancouver Art Gallery, look up — you’ll see art before you even step inside.
Known for the iconic East Van Cross, Ken Lum is also the artist behind Four Boats Stranded. In this work, he “play[s] with tensions around racial identity in ways that I think many people would not get away with,” says Fredericksen.
On the roof of the gallery, there are scaled-down versions of four prominent boats in Vancouver’s history: a First Nations longboat, Captain Vancouver’s ship, the Komagata Maru and a cargo ship that carried migrants from Fujian province in China. Each boat is painted a single colour — red, white, black and yellow, respectively — inviting viewers to reflect on colonial stereotyping of racial, cultural and historical identification.
The building is also symbolic.
“The art gallery was originally built as the courthouse, and it’s this neoclassical building that was really meant to sort of assert colonial power over space, out all the way to the farthest western edges of the empire,” says Butcher. “And in those days, there really was only one story that mattered, the ‘official’ story, which was the British, Anglo-Canadian story.”
Even now, the gallery remains a site of protest and mourning; from 2021 to 2023, its southern steps featured a temporary memorial for the 215 First Nations children whose remains were found at a Kamloops residential school site.
“[This piece] has all these different tensions within it that [are] touching on really intense points in Vancouver’s history, and is doing that at the centre of the city, at a site of protest,” says Fredericksen. “I would love to have more discussion around that … more people knowing that it’s there and being able to engage with it and consider what it might mean to them or to the city.”
Presence (2020)
Where is it? 2286 Ontario St.
When the pandemic forced Canada to close its borders, Argentine mural artist Graciela Gonçalves Da Silva — who also uses the handle “Animalitoland” — was stuck in Vancouver, so she decided she might as well make the best of her time here.
She reached out to the Vancouver Mural Festival, a partner of Butcher’s DeTours, and they arranged a wall for her. In light pinks and yellows, she painted a vaguely humanoid creature who seems “innocent, but also a little bit weary,” according to Butcher, as it cradles a gloomy-looking ball of darkness with outlines of facial features — a visual representation of how it’s important to embrace uncomfortable emotions and learn from them.
For Gonçalves Da Silva, working on the mural was a way to explore the uncertainty and isolation of that summer, and to connect with any passersby who were hungry for some kind of human connection. She put up a sign encouraging people to ask her questions as she painted, and passed out mini-journals where people could give her adjectives to describe how they were feeling, which she’d take back home with her at the end of each day.
“She would translate them into Spanish, and then she would get to sort of understand what people were saying,” says Butcher. “And that’s very exhausting. When you are learning a language, when you get to the point where you’re learning the definitions of emotions, you kind of feel them.”
Hope Through Ashes: A Requiem for Hogan’s Alley (2020)
Where is it? Dunsmuir Viaduct
Anthony Joseph is painting a large mural that depicts prominent members from Hogan’s Alley, a once-vibrant Black community in Vancouver. Joseph is painting his mural on a viaduct, whose construction in the 1970s displaced the community.
Hogan’s Alley was the unofficial name for an intersection at the edge of Strathcona that used to be a cultural hub for Vancouver’s Black population. It was destroyed in the 1960s to make way for the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts that connect downtown and East Vancouver. Anthony Joseph’s mural Hope Through Ashes: A Requiem for Hogan’s Alley pays tribute to people who were once pillars of Hogan’s Alley.
The mural was part of the Black Strathcona Resurgence Project, led by artist and curator Krystal Paraboo in partnership with the Vancouver Mural Festival, which brought together Black artists and businesses to work toward reclaiming the neighbourhood. For this mural, Joseph painted directly onto the side of the Dunsmuir Viaduct — the entire piece spans about 45 metres in length.
“What [Joseph] has done with this piece is painted the history of that neighbourhood through a series of vignettes, mainly around [the] main personalities and characters of that community,” says Butcher. One of these figures is sprinter Barbara Howard, the first Black female athlete to represent Canada in international competition, who later taught in Strathcona and was the first racialized person to be hired as a teacher by the Vancouver School Board.
“I love murals [and] art pieces that are really good storytelling devices, because … as tour guides, it really helps us, particularly for something like that where the neighbourhood is not there,” says Butcher. As you move down the overpass, the mural’s content “goes chronologically, right up until the culmination of the destruction by the city.”
“It’s [painted] on the instrument of the community’s destruction,” he says. “It’s very powerful.”
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