If the name hadn’t already been taken, Toronto might have been known as the
Grey Lady. Even the recent flourish of condo development has added little to the city's palette.
This is where
Street Art comes in.
For the past two years, this tiny sub-section of the city's transportation division has been underwriting murals all around town. Its latest, a two-sided piece by Ian Leventhal in the Mt Pleasant underpass at Bloor, is due to be finished next week. Another of his works is visible to motor commuters just off Bathurst Street at the 401.
"People are finally starting to notice the art around the city," says the program's manager, Lilie Zendel. The
22-storey mural of a Phoenix on 200 Wellesley, the apartment building that suffered the hoarding-related fire last year, is probably helping out on that front. (There’s talk that one may end up being the world’s highest, though it has some competition from the 70m high piece by German artist Hendrik Beikirch in
Busan, South Korea.)
"We're trying to encourage walking," Zendel says, "and one of the ways you do that is to improve public space." She says they took some inspiration from Philadelphia’s 30-year-old
mural program that started out as a graffiti prevention initiative and grew into itself over the years.
In addition to subsidizing and orchestrating these murals–it pays no more than 70 per cent of the cost--Street Art has put up an artist directory to help business owners commission their own pieces if they like.
The latest program, to be announced shortly, is called Outside the Box, for which they’ve hired two artists to create wraps for traffic light boxes, from which the city spends an inordinate amount of money each year removing tags and other graffiti.
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Lilie Zendel