MURAL Festival
The MURAL Festival is an annual international street art festival held every June since 2013 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It aims to celebrate the democratization of urban art in the city of Montréal. Artists from around the world are invited to participate in the festival every year and contribute with their personal perspectives of the art. The art itself is part of the free art movement which stems from the free-culture movement. Thus, all murals immediately enter the public domain as free content or open content when they are created and there is an absence of copyright laws. All the art is free to be viewed and photographed. It has been described by the festival's co-creator as "an extension of the Mile End", and the festival's self-proclaimed mission is to "democratize art".
The festival is a free event open to all ages, and it is held on several streets in Montreal, such as the Saint Laurent Boulevard, Sherbrooke Street, and Mount Royal Avenue. Along with the mural projects are a variety of street vendors and food trucks that cater to the public. The three most important partners of the MURAL festival are Fido, LNDMRK, and Saint Laurent Boulevard. However, there are also numerous other partners such as Hennessy, Red Bull, and Poppers that are also involved and some participate in the street vending.
The event has had a lot of success thus far and has even won the Grand Prix of Québec tourism in the Montréal region. The MURAL festival is extremely popular on social media platforms such as Instagram, standing at 197k followers. The Instagram popularity of the murals and the festival extend to a lot of other Instagram users in Montréal. The hashtag handles #montréal and #mural include a lot of user photos of the urban art projects worked on doing the festival.
Artists
History
2013
The inaugural edition of the festival took place in June 2013. During the four-day event, more than 25 local, national and international street artists worked separately and in concert across twenty building facades chosen to be covered. Boulevard St-Laurent was closed to vehicular traffic between the Sherbrooke and Mont-Royal arteries. Every evening, festive activities was organized on site. The festival ended with a free musical show presented in collaboration with Osheaga, the Oshee & Aga Block Party, headlined by DJs Ryan Emsworth, Grandtheft, Prison Guard, KenLo Craqnuques and Jeanbart & RRKelly.2014
In 2014, the MURAL Festival was held between June 12 and June 15, 2014. During this year, the festival started Le Market, a pop up shop in the Parc du Portugal. This market allowed festival attendees to listen shop local stores while listening to live music. MURAL also worked with ExCentris Cinema to present screenings of street art and graffiti related short films. Every day, the MURAL Block Party had live stage music in the parking lot behind Station 16 Gallery on St. Laurent. In the same lot, the popular Parisian artist :fr:Kashink|Kashink painted the festival's sponsored mural this year in the same lot. This mural took over from the En Masse mural displayed during the previous year's festival.2015
For MURAL's 2015 edition, the festival extended their 2014 period of 4 days to 11 days, from June 4 until June 14. These news dates coincidentally overlapped with Grand Prix weekend. Boulevard Saint-Laurent was again closed off to traffic from Sherbrooke Street to Mont-Royal Avenue, in order to accommodate artists and festival attendees to look at the street art. Twenty new murals were painted for 2015s festival, which brought the number of murals created since the festival first to a whopping 50. This festival also allowed visitors to partake in guided tours and attend presentations films on the subject. Le Market continued, allowing festival goers to shop local market stalls and visit street art galleries.2016
The fourth annual MURAL Festival ran from June 9 to 19, continuing the 10 day long festival period from the previous year. In 2016, MURAL co-organizer Andre Bathalon mentioned his goal for the festival: for attendees to watch artists at work, so they can gain an appreciation for the detail that goes into each piece. Bathalon continued, "The goal is really to attract the attention, so we're not doing any subtle concepts. All the drawings are edgy, punchy so they really make you stop to say 'Wow'." 2016's festival featured world renowned artists from 8 different countries. They had 29 local, national, and international artists, and five earlier murals were replaced with new murals for the new year. The festival started from "mural central" behind the LNDMRK offices, goes up St-Dominique and the eastern side of St-Laurent then down Clark—all of these spaces are "pedestrian only" during the duration of the festival. In 2016, MURAL Festival was officially recognized as the "largest gathering of urban art in North America… bringing MURAL's permanent public legacy to more than 60 major works."For the first time in festival history, ScHoolboy Q—a popular rap artist—performed on a stage in the main "performance" parking lot on St. Laurent.
2017
The 2017 MURAL festival ran from June 8 to 18, from 10am to 10pm. This years events were described as "ambitious and festive", in order to celebrate festivals 5th edition—the largest edition so far. By this time, MURAL wanted to consolidate itself as one of the world's largest urban art happenings. They continued to show murals, music, exhibitions, pop-up installations, conferences, films, and their local pop-up shops.This year, the festival size grew to include the area of Old Montreal, while partnering with the local merchants association. They also re-configured the concert area on St-Laurent to accommodate more visitors. The most notable artist to perform this year was Grammy-nominated singer Post Malone.
About twenty new murals were created in 2017 to enhance to add to the long map of murals, spanning from the Quartier des Spectacles up to Mile End. Aaron Li-Hill, Canadian artist living in New York, also produced a large-scale art installation to adorn Saint-Laurent Boulevard all summer long. Additionally, the Montreal famous Leonard Cohen mural was painted by Montreal artist Kevin Ledo for this 5th edition of MURAL Festival.
2018
This 6th edition of MURAL Festival ran from June 7 to 17. After several years of rapid growth from their first festival in 2012, MURAL has "hit a steady groove" while organizing their most recent festival.This year, MURAL Festival presented a substantial and permanent art installation developed by Cyrcle, a street art pair from Los Angeles, California. This art piece covered two floors of the underground parking lot at Lune Rouge entertainment company headquarters, in the heart of downtown Montreal. Another headlining installation was presented on Parc Avenue by popular Los Angeles artist Michael Reeder.
2018's festival was visited by more than 1.5 million people, and the festival itself made some major upgrades to accommodate its growing popularity. The festival's main St Laurent market space also grew to include even more temporary retail spaces and food trucks. The festival also released a VIP experience at a cost, which gave customers "discounts on alcohol, exclusive access to numerous musical events and conferences, 1 ticket for a guided tour of the murals, and the chance to meet both artists and influencers in the main VIP Terrace and exclusive Green Room. The Green Room is an inside chilling zone with a private terrace."
A Montreal Gazette article mentioned that the festival "typifies Montreal's cachet, bringing together a wide array of eclectic talents to create
something captivating." Although it is now more acclaimed than ever, the most recent festival was criticized for expanding too rapidly, therefore outgrowing the music venues for 2018's musicians. 2018's performers included Playboi Carti, Pusha T, and Maky Lavender.