Mural celebrates Canada
Unveiling of community art along LRT line finds warm welcome with its Anishinaabe theme
Neruda Arts’ mural, celebrating Canada’s 150th year, graces a wall along Charles Street in downtown Kitchener.
KITCHENER — Under a deep blue umbrella, Femmy Birks soaked in the striking image dancing before her eyes in the cold Saturday morning rain beside a downtown Ion station.
The 150-foot mural stretching before her along a Charles Street retaining wall, featured a faceless female focal point. Birks found her fascinating.
“I love the woman in red,” the Waterloo woman said before taking in the official unveiling ceremonies for the Canada 150 public art project that went up in August.
“I love the form. It’s just a great image. And then all those things that are in her dress. Is that an eagle?”
Yes, that’s an eagle. And the moon. And standing pines.
It’s all in her majestic, prancing-in-yellow-boots image.
The fancy shawl dancer was the work of local First Nations artist August Swinson, one of seven creative craftspeople to design the Canada 150 mural, a Neruda Arts project.
The cost? About $44,000 with the cities of Kitchener and Waterloo pitching in alongside a Canada 150 grant and money from the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund.
About 150 volunteers painted it in June, inside a Waterloo curling rink.
It was hung in two sections in August. It is sealed and meant to last decades, as long as the Indigenous imagery and themes of the Canadian experience are relevant.
As long as the woman in red — she has no name, Swinson said — keeps dancing.
“Females are significant in the Ojibwe culture, in the Anishinaabe culture,” said Swinson, a Kitchener resident. “So I thought it was fitting it was the centrepiece of the mural.”
The colours, Swinson said, are more significant than the images swirling within the dancer. Red and black and white and yellow are the four traditional colours of the medicine wheel, he said. Four sacred colours at the heart of the mural.
But will the brilliant hues and entrancing shawl dancer be respected? This patch of
concrete, near Cameron Heights High School, has been a graffiti magnet in the past.
Kitchener Mayor Berry Vrbanovic even ordered city workers to clean up the wall last week after the wall surrounding the mural had been tagged.
“One thing I’ve noticed wherever murals get painted in the city — whether it’s here, the one on River Road or whether it’s the laneway along Hall’s Lane — nobody ever touches the murals,” said Vrbanovic as a fat hawk watched the mural ceremonies from a nearby tree branch.
“They respect the art. That says so much about how important public art is to our communities going forward.”
And when the Region’s $818million dollar light rail transit project is completed with regular trains running through the Kitchener market station beside the mural, its brilliant images will reach a moving audience with every trip up and down the line.
“We see our stations enlivened with great public art,” Regional chair Ken Seiling said. “We have a thriving arts community here that we want to celebrate.”
And the mural with no name, with its faceless woman in red doing a shawl dance, can be a focal point for that celebration. So create your own personal name for the mural, or her.
“Everybody will interpret the mural differently,” explained Isabel Cisterna, artistic director for nonprofit Neruda.
“We want them to remember the way it resonates with them.”
For Birks, the mural’s ‘woman in red’ is a lively, invigorating image.
“It’s got motion to it.” she said. “It’s got good movement to it.”