The 18th Annual Culture Crawl started in Vancouver, Nov. 21. This event is a four-day showcase of local Vancouver artists.
The 18th annual Eastside Culture Crawl saw four days of Vancouver artists’ crafts, visual arts and designs in display.
The Culture Crawl started in 1997, when 45 visual artists participated in an open studio to raise funds. Back then only 200 people made the rounds. As time progressed, the crawl became a popular annual art exhibit, where artists from all over Vancouver put their work on display. Now, more than 450 artists take part in the crawl, with 20,000 people attending over the four days.
Artists event open up their studios and allow spectators into their creative worlds. Artists need to be in the boundaries of the crawl and must pay a $150 fee to participate. Artists such as Katsumi Kimoto, Lucas Wolf and Nick Gregson take part this year. Gregson, a graduate of Emily Carr University, is known for his murals and graffiti type art on Commercial Street. During the crawl, Gregson painted on canvas while spectators walked by. Currently, Gregson is working on a staircase project, where he will be painting staircases in Yaletown.
Nick Gregson paints during the 18th annual Eastside Culture Crawl in Vancouver. Many artists presented their work, but Gregson decided to give his viewers a first-hand glance of how he makes art come to life.
Although this event is popular, it is still not a well-known event as Colin Turner, a professor at the Art Institute of Vancouver, pointed out after taking his art classes to the crawl for the first time.
“I love that it shows you a depth of the art that is in Vancouver, where most of the year it’s in Vancouver and then when the art crawl comes out it’s like ‘WOW!’ How many people have seen it? A lot of people are surprised it existed. A lot of people don’t know about it,” he said.
The point of the Culture Crawl is to raise local interest in visual art, to give artists a place to present their work. With a variety of seminars and workshops, the crawl hopes that people will learn more about fine art.
