THE RUST RETURNS AS EVENT PROMISES MORE MURAL MAGIC
During the initial Rust Magic Street Mural Festival last September, $20,000 worth of anticipated funding vanished, just like that. Adding insult to injury, so did the unborn fest’s biggest wall-as-canvas: a 12-storey spot on Capital Tower on 101st Street was pulled due to emergency street repairs.
Organizers Trevor Peters and Annaliza Toledo needed that cash and hoped for that space. But they said to hell with hurdles and went boldly ahead with the city-spanning public art project anyway.
The artists they’d commissioned from Barcelona, New York City and Edmonton added 15 new permanent murals to the city, not to mention three gleaming graffiti works on food trucks. It was a legitimate gamechanger around here, turning heads at every level.
Yet the organizing was daunting, exhausting and cost the two — professional mural painters who started in the street art scene — out of their own pockets. Peters mentions the community helped. Paint Spot, for example, let them pay back for paint as they could. Every little boost they took gladly.
“We made it happen,” Toledo says, “through friends and family and our own money. “We’re still paying it off.” That, in a nutshell, was last year. So what’s the plan for Rust Magic 2017? Well, it’s Edmonton, so make the beast bigger, of course.
This year’s event, running Friday to July 31, is confirmed to have 20 new walls donated by private businesses, around 25 artists — the work created by an even split between local, western Canadian and international artists from New York City, France, Mexico and Spain.
It will include gorgeous portrait work by Carly Ealey of San Diego and Taiwan’s Dabs1 YIA’s old-school cartoons. Vancouver’s Dedos is back (his blue woman just north of City Market Apartments was an inaugural festival highlight). Oklahoma City’s Kristopher Kanaly uses red-cyan stereoscopic colours to good effect, and he’s in. Locals A.J.A. Louden, Alex Labarda, Demer and Evan brunt are all confirmed, too.
The full list of the artists, with pictures of their work, is at rustmagic.ca. A mural map exists too, with new locations including five in Old Strathcona, two on 118th Avenue and three on 124th Street.
“We definitely have a wish list of artists we’d love to bring into Edmonton,” Toledo says.
Toledo adds she’s excited about a talk Friday night at Latitude 53 by Stash, a New York City graffiti legend who’s shown in galleries with one-time vandal JeanMichel Basquiat and activist Keith Haring. The 6:30 p.m. Friday event is a fundraiser for the festival — $20 to get in.
Peters discusses bringing in the outside talent directly.
“Our agenda is to open up people’s minds and inspire artists here to go big, because if you don’t see it in real life, you’re never going to do it,” he says. “When you see it in your city, artists can be inspired: that’s the quality, that’s the level.”
Peters says response to last year’s event was “overwhelmingly positive,” including a nomination at the Mayor’s Celebration of the Arts for courage to innovate.
“That was huge for us,” Toledo says with a smile, “just to be recognized on a city level.”
The Edmonton Arts Council also contacted the duo out of the blue, offering $25,000 in support. That’ll help pay for the 100 or so cans of spray paint every wall slurps up.
“They gave us a surprise phone call,” Peters says, “and said we love what you’re doing. That was very, very motivating for us.
“They wondered when we were going to get in touch with them.”
Peters and Toledo set out to help prove what so many international cities already know: that street art, with its own language, style and techniques, is where some of the most cutting-edge art in the world goes down.
An example: the next place Cleon Peterson did work after he painted the side of Have Mercy and El Cortez off Whyte Avenue, a work outside of but in the same spirit as Rust Magic, was a large piece directly under the Eiffel Tower for Paris’s Nuit Blanche.
Another: At this year’s Old Strathcona Art Walk, I had to wait in line to take a photo of friends under two of the best Rust Magic murals, the giant hand by San Francisco’s BIP and the Nothing Gold Can Stay by Edmonton’s Justin Moose.
Over the last year, in his company Fresh Canvas Art Co., Peters says he’s seen a spike in clients wanting authentic-looking street art in their businesses and homes.
“It’s a dream come true,” he says with a laugh.
Toledo says people are asking for a lot of Oilers work in the street-art style “because they did well this year.”
The two hoped to paint a mural during last year’s event, but that took them until November as they were busy assisting other artists during the fest. This year, they’re “just going to be the best hosts we can be,” Peters says.
In a separate commission, the two are currently finishing a gorgeous wall for grassroots design initiative Vignettes, which will host an event in the former Reuse Centre (10004 103A Ave.) starting Sept. 25.
While it’s not one of the Rust Magic murals, the timing and involvement of the organizers makes it a kind of cousin, an unofficial 21st mural.
Paint on his jacket, Peters says it was hard work: “It was a lot of brick, a lot of old plaster, so it was a challenge. But we wanted to do something the community could stop, take a picture of and figure out later.”
The two used a type technique — “flanging” — where letters bring on a third colour in the overlap. They recently used the same style in an LRT mural that reads “Hello.”
Just before Peters and Toledo arrived for the interview, a kid on a skateboard stopped and took a shot on his phone of the unfinished mural, infrastructure made iconic.
The script on the Vignettes Building reads “No dull days” when seen from a distance.
“It was a shout-out to the community to stay vibrant and stay positive,” Peters says.
So is his and Toledo’s festival. Whether dull days are gone for good, at least we’ll have fewer dull walls, and amen to that.