Get Inside an Artist’s Headspace, and Actual Space, at the Eastside Culture Crawl

The Eastside Culture Crawl reaches the grand old milestone of 25 this year. In most cities this would be a significant achievement, but in Vancouver, where studio space is being devoured at a gluttonous rate by developers, it’s kind of miraculous.

East Vancouver neighbourhoods have been particularly hard hit, with Moloch-ian redevelopment grinding its way across the landscape. But in spite of everything, artists persist.

The crawl began in 1995, when a group of creative folks decided to open their studios to the public. Two years later, the event had a name, courtesy of artist Richard Tetrault, and a mascot in the form of a crow. The rest is history.

The Eastside Culture Crawl has grown prodigiously over the years and today includes more than 500 artists and artisans in studios across East Van from Victoria Drive to Burrard Inlet. This year, events and studio tours take place Nov. 12 to 14 and Nov. 18 to 21. There are opportunities to visit studios in person and attend events online. See the FAQ here.

Monique Motut-Firth is a first-time participant in the crawl; it’s the first time her studio space is on the event route. “I’ve been attending for years, visiting art friends. I’m really excited. I like to see people and people can come see me!”

She’s also participating in an artist talk. As a multidisciplinary artist, Motut-Firth’s work spans genres, including collage, drawing, painting and animation.

One of her bodies of work is Polly’s Dolls, a project she started after her grandmother died leaving behind a house packed to the rafters with stuff — hundreds of canning jars, old birthday cards, paystubs and stacks of magazines and Sears catalogues from bygone days.

Before she passed, Motut-Firth’s grandmother had mentioned that there was treasure in her house. She didn’t mean a cache of jewels or gold coins, but all of the things that she had carefully kept over the years. This collection of perfectly ordinary stuff was, in fact, the treasure.

Motut-Firth kept a selection of catalogues in five-year increments, and from this continuity of history Polly’s Dolls was born. The project took the better part of two years to come to fruition.

“Every time friends came over, they got handed a pair of scissors,” she says. The images, cut from magazines and catalogues, comprised some 400 linear feet, a labour of love.

People still bring Motut-Firth their collections — caches of Popular Science magazines and mail-order catalogues, handing them off with great care. The process of taking possession of someone’s precious materials is an emotionally fraught enterprise, but Motut-Firth sees the process of reactivating someone’s archive as a serious responsibility.

The quality of her collage work — sweet, sad and undeniably idiosyncratic — honours not only her grandmother but also the countless unknown Canadian women and men whose frugality, ingenuity and deep well of creativity built the fabric of rural culture in British Columbia.

It’s a heritage of craft that carries on in an event like the Eastside Culture Crawl, which includes not only artists but also artisans and craftspeople — shoemakers, potters, weavers.

As an artist who works primarily with paper, humidity is an enemy. Finding a studio space in Vancouver is a challenge, even for someone working with a less delicate and temperamental medium. Motut-Firth has moved studios a number of times, and in her current space the threat of dampness and leaks have posed another set of issues.

The experience of trying to find studio space that is safe, affordable and adequate is an ongoing issue in the city. In 2019, the Eastside Arts Society, which operates the culture crawl, issued a report entitled "A City Without Art?"

In the years since it was written, some things have marginally improved, and some things have not. As the crawl’s executive director Esther Rausenberg explains, the city is still losing space, especially for “hard-to-house” artists. These aren’t unruly folks, but people working in mediums that are messy and require special equipment, like sculptors and potters.

“The permits that are required in the city of Vancouver to get a kiln are over the top!” says Rausenberg.

When artists who work with special equipment are forced to find new space, the challenges are multiple and complex. “Moving heavy equipment is not like someone doing digital photography on a laptop,” she says.

The struggle to retain space is an ongoing battle. Although Rausenberg stresses the communication with the city has been open, with many meetings, there is still a residential creep into areas that were previously industrial or commercial.

There are other less obvious problems as well. While rents for studio space have been relatively stable, the spaces themselves are getting smaller and smaller. “There’s no such thing as a 1,000-square-foot studio anymore,” says Rausenberg. “Now it’s 100 square feet.”

This trend towards the diminutive has implications for what kind of work can be created. “Artists are either doing things in part, or making smaller work, but there is a stifling of the creative process.”

Vancouver painter David Wilson, whose large-scale canvases often depict dark, rainy nights in the city, has worked from home as well as different spaces in his career.

“My first studio space in Vancouver was located in Gastown over 20 years ago. It was in a small old building at Abbott and Cordova that I worked in for about seven years,” he says. “I tried out a couple of spaces, but they were either restrictive in practice or the landlord was more focused on making money than providing an adequate space.”

His current location in the Parker Street Studios has allowed him to make the work that he wants to create.

“I’ve been there two years now and having located a space that is conducive to my large-scale works has proven to be pivotal in moving my practice forward. I’m now creating and selling work that would be nearly impossible to do from my home-based studio.”

While there is consensus that a city without art isn’t really much of a city at all, Vancouver has not invested in the way that larger centres have, like Paris and New York, says Rausenberg. The idea that investment in the arts is somehow seen as frivolous or a waste of taxpayer money is very shortsighted, she adds.

In terms of the impact of tax dollars spent, culture is a drop in the bucket next to subsidies that resource industries like oil and logging enjoy.

The return on this investment is also benign, Rausenberg says. “The arts aren’t scarring the Earth or trawling the waters and taking every last little bit of what’s there.”

The philosophy of the crawl has always been about inclusion, access and a profound lack of elitism. This goes both for the artists as well as the attendees.

Artists are free to make what they want to make without the constraints of the gallery system and the public is welcomed into the process to see what happens in different studios. “Activities like the crawl have a major impact: they break down barriers, and artists are able to express themselves without constraint,” says Rausenberg.

Coming on the eve of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s recent announcement of Michael Audain’s $100-million gift towards the creation of a new gallery, the smaller, scrappy nature of the creative spaces that make up the Eastside Culture Crawl take on even greater significance and poignancy.

If ever there was a time to plan a visit, meet with artists and buy some work, that time is now. Before they all pack up and move to Winnipeg.