Mural Festival kicks off with artists taking to the streets
Whatisadam has begun work on his latest creation on a wall in the Plateau
Like a lot of teenagers, Adam Vieira did his fair share of tagging and graffiti when he was in high school. What sets Vieira apart is he took that penchant for painting on the walls of buildings and turned it into a career.
The Montrealer of Portuguese origin, who goes by the moniker Whatisadam, has created a couple of dozen large-scale murals, here in Montreal but also in Denver, New York City, London and Miami.
He began work Thursday on his latest creation, which he is producing as part of Mural Festival, on a wall near Coloniale and Duluth Aves. in the Plateau.
The festival kicked off Thursday and runs until June 17, with most of the wall-painting action happening near St. Laurent Blvd. between Sherbrooke St. and MontRoyal Ave.
Vieira studied animation at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University. Shortly after graduating, he began printing posters of his art, which he has glued to walls around the city. That gradually led him to creating large-scale murals.
“One of the reasons I started doing street art right after university was just because I had nothing going for myself,” said Vieira. “I wasn’t represented by a gallery. I wasn’t doing any arts shows. Street art just allowed me to create art as much as I wanted and for nobody in particular. I was just doing it for myself. And social media is what propelled me to make a career out of it. People who followed me on Facebook and Instagram, they’d see my work on the street, take a picture of it, and link to my accounts, and that opened up my art to the world, to a global audience. That’s when I started getting requests from people in different cities.”
His work is very Canadian, always focusing on Montreal, Quebec or Canada.
One of his trademarks is images of a maple syrup can — kind of a homage to Andy Warhol’s paintings
of Campbell Soup cans.
The mural he’s creating this week also has a Canadiana theme, but he didn’t want to reveal more details.
But murals don’t just get promotion on social media. They also generate the ultimate grassroots promotion right there on the street.
“It’s like an advertisement of your work,” said Vieira. “The mural stays there. Tourists and people who live there are just constantly seeing it. So it’s like a billboard for your art. The more murals you do, the more your name gets out there.”
He is one of the three owners of the Station 16 gallery on St-Laurent Blvd. near Prince Arthur St. and the gallery is closely linked with the Mural Festival. They sell limited edition silkscreen prints of work by artists at the festival and a print-launch each day of the festival with an artist from the fest. There is also an exhibition focusing on the work of Spanish artist Ricardo Cavolo, who was a participant at last year’s festival.
Street art just allowed me to create art as much as I wanted and for nobody in particular.