Harbourfront project replaces graffiti tags with original artwork

Dennis Hanagan –

Graffiti taggers unknowingly provided a job opportunity for two young artists—the real kind—in Little Norway Park at Bathurst and Queens Quay this past summer.

Friends of Little Norway Park (FLNP) asked Harbourfront Community Centre if it had artists who could clean up four benches in the park that had been tagged and replace the scrawlings with proper art.

“They were getting very tired. There had been some tagging done,” Karen Warner, HCC’s director of fundraising and communications, said in an interview.

With a grant from the city’s StreetART Toronto program HCC hired two college students with arts backgrounds for its summer Graffiti Transformation Project. One of their tasks was to transform the Little Norway benches.

They cleaned and sanded them. After that, with inspiration from the 40-foot tall, hand-carved maypole in the park’s northwest corner, they came up with ideas for images to paint. The sun, the moon and constellations were some.

HCC posted the benches’ new look on its website and Facebook. The community responded with a “wow!” said Warner.

One of the artists, Jannai Goddard, takes satisfaction from her bench painting. “It felt nice to put art in my neighbourhood that I know people who I live around will enjoy.”

Parkdale-High Park artist Jim Bravo, who has completed several murals around the city including one outside the Sherbourne subway station, worked with the young artists. “They were certainly eager to get things going and the dynamic was jovial,” he said.

The trio also spent time developing concepts for a mural on Croft Street in the Bathurst-College area to commemorate 1906 Great Toronto Fire casualty John Croft. “I learned a lot of history about the community. We researched a lot about Toronto history and the Great Toronto Fire,” said Goddard.

Artist Jannai Goddard and the bench she painted.

Artist Jannai Goddard and the bench she painted.

Harbourfront Community Centre has another major arts project in the works that Bravo is helping with. It’s a huge mural of eight panels, created by youth in HCC’s workshop programs, to be fixed to the centre’s north exterior wall.

Three designs will be posted on the centre’s Facebook page and website and the community will be asked to pick their favourite. “They (the youth) are pretty excited about it because it’s nice to be able to create a piece of work that stays in your own community,” said Warner.

She believes the mural projects help launch young artists off to a good start in the working world. “Youth may be nervous about working with adults or businesses. It may be something they’ve not had experience at,” she said.

“It’s a fantastic way for them to engage with their community. It gives them great confidence when they see their opinions and their creative talents are being respected and admired.”

Taggers won’t likely spoil the Little Norway art, Warner hopes. Over the past 15 years HCC has initiated art projects that have resulted in 30 to 40 murals all around the city. “Rarely have those murals been tagged. For the most part they’ve been respected,” said Warner.