Conservation team works to preserve Yates mural
Piece commissioned for 1967 Centennial to be repaired, rehung in updated library
The colourful and explosive mural known as West and North, which adorns the University of Alberta’s Education Building, is one of Norman Yates’ most treasured gifts to the city.
But the beloved artist and teacher, who died at age 90 in 2014, created another mural 50 years ago, which the City of Edmonton commissioned as a centennial project. This one is lesser known, but a characteristically striking and abstract representation of Alberta’s landscape.
The blue-and-yellow mural lived in the Edmonton Room on the main floor of the Stanley A. Milner Library, which opened in 1967, but in recent years it has been in the lower level of the library, largely out of public view.
Because the mural happened to be on a semi-load-bearing wall, directly in the path of the library’s latest and most extensive round of renovations, it had to be removed.
After a lot of deliberation, research, and conversations with EPL, the Edmonton Arts Council’s conservation team decided they could save the mural, using an Italian technique called stacco a massello.
“This kind of stuff doesn’t happen every day, but it is a traditional way of removing art, murals and frescoes,” said David Turnbull, the Edmonton Arts Council’s public art conservation director.
This project is one of the biggest the team has undertaken.
First, the conservators brushed diluted fish glue on the mural’s face and applied two layers of strong, Japanese tissue paper — which would hold the paint in place.
There was less than one metre of manoeuvring space behind the artwork, so the conservators had a small access hole cut in the cinder block stairwell.
They scored the plaster with an angle grinder and used chipping handles, hammers and chisels to remove several inches of plaster from the back of the mural wall.
Since the mural was so large — an estimated 4,500 kilograms or 10,000 pounds — and there was no room for a crane, the team removed it in parts.
Following some of the piece’s natural lines and colour changes, the conservators cut the mural into about a dozen pieces, taking care to sandwich them with foam and wood to keep them in tact.
Then they loaded them into a van and drove them to their conservation lab in the west end.
The mural pieces, which now lie face-down on the lab floor, look like part of a giant jigsaw puzzle with the pieces face-down.
Before they reinstall the art in the renovated library, they’ll remove more excess plaster, fill in any cracks and install several layers of backing material.
Each step is designed to be reversible, in case the mural ever has to be moved again.
Eventually, “it will look like it was just picked up and moved,” Turnbull said.
“That’s the goal.” Though the conservators know a lot about Norman Yates and his significance to Edmonton’s art history, they don’t know as much about the pictograph-covered mural itself, about which little is written.
Luckily, Yates wrote a letter to Morton Coburn, then the Edmonton Public Library’s director, on June 2, 1969, with a detailed description about the work.
He wrote that he wanted people to come to the art with their own interpretations, but he offered “in general terms” his thoughts and feelings at the time.
The blue-yellow sequence, he said, “bears relationship to the nature cycle of night-day, wintersummer, cold-warm, action-inaction, life-death.”
The pictographs were intended to represent “the first presence of the intelligent man” in the prairies, and though they too do not have set meanings, some could be interpreted as stars and mountains.
“Thus, interlocked with the great forces of nature are the symbols of the first inhabitants and the present inhabitants, the old with the new,” he wrote.
Tina Thomas, Edmonton Public Library’s executive director of strategy and innovation, said the mural’s future location in the library is still up in the air. They have a few spots in mind, including a space in the atrium on the first floor, across from the cafe and restaurant.
“We are excited to be able to keep it,” she said.