Eastside Culture Crawl: A Recap
by Wendee Lang
Walking through the downtown eastside, past nondescript facades, nosy Vancouverites cannot help but be overwhelmed with curiosity. What exactly goes on behind the doors of the city’s oldest homes and warehouses?
Once a year, the Eastside Culture Crawl provides answers to this very question. By encouraging artists to open their homes and workshops to inquisitive passersby, the event shines a spotlight on the eastside and its dense creative diversity.
Beginning in 1997 with the participation of three studios and 45 artists, the Crawl, now in its 18th year, has grown to include more than 400 hundred painters, photographers, furniture makers, potters, glassblowers, weavers, printmakers, sculptors and other visual artists in 79 buildings.
Even stretched over four days, to take in all of the Crawl’s talent is a feat. Plodding along the map, you are likely to be waylaid, lost in conversation with creators whose passion is palpable. And this is the great draw of the crawl: meeting the makers themselves. Sometimes awkward, sometimes tired, sometimes perfectly at ease, the vibrant presence of so many visual artists in so small a neighbourhood provides a vivid range of colours to the cultural mosaic that is East Vancouver.
Among those who colour the landscape is street photographer Louise Francis-Smith. Bringing to mind the work of the infamous Fred Herzog, Francis-Smith’s images provide a curiously intimate examination of life in Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside.
Speaking to Louise, a long-time resident of Strathcona, one realizes that these photographs are the creation of someone who has not simply walked down the neighbourhood’s patched and pitted streets, but of someone who knows the subjects of her photographs by name – someone who has breathed in the warm aromas of New Town Bakery and inquired into the whereabouts of the man who feeds the pigeons at Carrall and Pender. They are the photographs of an artist who has truly lived in the area she so warmly depicts.
Another such colourful artist is industrial designer and furniture maker, Sholto Scruton, whose black walnut hutch beckons to be touched upon entry into the workshop.
Isolated apart from the artist, Sholto’s pieces would no doubt be breathtaking. However, speaking to him about the tradition of woodworking, passed down from his grandfather to his father, and then to him, infuses the pieces with a new depth. Like the fir from his father that provides the workshop a stunning set of doors, the wood is more than simply a material – it is a method of storytelling and a container of history.
Many of the buildings housing the Crawl’s artists could be described as such: containers of history. Having ascended creaking stairs to her workshop for the past twenty years, walled by whitewashed bricks of a bygone era, painter Galen Felde agrees. In many ways, the building at 339 Railway is as impressive as the works it houses.
Galen explains that it, like much of the surrounding neighbourhood, has gone through a number of transformations since beginning as a warehouse for Imperial Rice Milling Co. – some more meaningful than others. In 1986, facing an eviction notice from the city of Vancouver, the studio served as a site of resistance for the artists under threat. Lobbying the city for their right to remain, their efforts eventually culminated in the creation of a bylaw allowing artists to live and work in warehouse studios across Vancouver. It was the first of its kind in Canada.
Bringing together creativity, narrative and history, the Eastside Culture Crawl is wholly unique and succeeds not only in providing a greater understanding of visual arts, but of the downtown eastside as well. By showcasing the diversity and unbounded talent of the neighbourhood’s residents, the Crawl affords a deeper understanding of an area often spot lit solely for its poverty.