The time has come, after an amazing decade, for us to say goodbye to Wall-to-Wall Mural & Culture Festival. This has been the most challenging and spectacular project of our lives. Moving forward, we are very proud to be able to take everything that we have learned and to apply it all to our year-round programming as Synonym Art Consultation.

The goals behind the festival were to create engaging mentorship opportunities, to bring together artists from various  disciplines, to create meaningful and rewarding employment opportunities, to build and nurture long-lasting skill sets for artists and organizers, and to encourage a contemporary street art movement in Winnipeg by incorporating art into people’s everyday lives. We can say, confidently, that, in one way or another, all these goals have been achieved.

Along the way, we made mistakes, we experienced burnout, we struggled to ask for help when we took on too much. In response to these setbacks, we brought in community partners, curators, and mentors that guided the project in ways we never thought possible. It is a lifelong process developing healthy work habits in the creative sector and we are so excited to keep exploring how to best support artists, community, and ourselves.

We found that creating projects centred on artistic freedom can lead to powerful storytelling that highlights social change. Often, even the simple acts of putting positive imagery, bright colours, and having artists occupy space in Downtown created room for conversation and community development.

As you can surely tell, however, the work is not done. We are ready to push ourselves further, while keeping all the values, partnerships, skills, and energy going outside of the glorious, beautiful chaos that was Wall-to-Wall. This means more public art, more mentorship, and more innovative programming will be coming your way soon! So as we celebrate (and sleep!), we want to thank you from the bottoms of our hearts for supporting Wall-to-Wall Mural & Culture Festival. 

Yours,

Chloe and Andrew

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More on Wall-to-Wall Mural and Culture Festival :

Wall-to-Wall Mural & Culture Festival started as a collective dream and mission to bring accessible art into peoples’ everyday lives. 

Wall-to-Wall, which takes place on Treaty 1 Territory / in Winnipeg, Manitoba, happens annually each September. The community-focused festival highlights equal parts mural, music, and mentorship and culminates with a finale celebration, bringing together communities around art, music, dance, and more.

Wall-to-Wall Mural & Culture Festivals acknowledges that we benefit from living and working on the stolen, ancestral, and traditional territories of the Anishinaabeg, Ininiw (Cree), Anish-iniw (Oji-Cree), Dakota, and Dene Peoples, the homeland of the Métis Nation and that we are sustained by water sourced from Shoal Lake 40 First Nation.

Wall-to-Wall is committed to curation that uplifts artists, mentors, musicians, and performers belonging to under-supported communities, particularly those who identify as Black, Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, People of Colour, 2SLGBTQIA+, artists with disabilities, and any and all people who fall within these intersections.

Wall-to-Wall was founded by Synonym Art Consultation.