Reclaiming a community through public art
An interview with Monica Wickeler
Photo credit: Monica Wickeler
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See this art on the city's map here
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This above image of angel wings was created by Monica Wickeler for Plank Road Market on Danforth. The mural has multi-coloured feathers and a blue background, adding brightness to a previously vandalized wall. View more of Monica's work on her website.
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Asha Swann 00:02
Have you ever seen a photo on Instagram of someone standing in front of a painting of a pair of wings? If so, you've probably seen one of Monica Wickeler's murals. On this episode of Toronto's Artery, Monica and I spoke about how art can be a powerful tool to reclaim neighbourhoods and empower communities.
Asha Swann 00:23
Can you remember the first time that you started painting? And was there a moment where it clicked that this was what you wanted to do?
Monica Wickeler 00:29
I've been, I think creating for my entire life. And I know that's cheesy, and you hear people talking about that. But I also believe that we are all creators. And I just got lucky to do it for the majority of my life. So I studied industrial design, thinking that I would follow in my dad's footsteps. He was an engineer, and I love studying industrial design—welding, woodworking, drawing, three dimensional fabrication, it was all wonderful. And then I found out that the majority of jobs for industrial design are desk jobs. And I'm not suited for a desk job. But yeah, right out of school, I knew that I wanted to do something creative.
Asha Swann 01:12
And did you always lean towards the arts when you were growing up?
Monica Wickeler 01:15
My mother was a creative maker; ceramic artist. So my father was an engineer, also just a builder extraordinaire. So the norm was to be creating, I realized now that that was, you know, a wonderful way to grow up. And my brothers and sisters, and I would build fortresses, and it was nonstop fun. We had access to my dad's workshop, and yeah, my mom ran ceramic workshops. So there was always creativity around me. And I feel like that's just my natural way of life.
Asha Swann 01:50
I love to hear that because my mom also—my mom was a photographer. So I always feel really lucky that my mom also, like, always really encouraged me to do writing and to do music and to do all these things. And then I hear that so many kids, like don't have that. And I'm like, Oh, that was actually pretty—I felt pretty, like, lucky when I look back.
Monica Wickeler 02:08
Yeah, I am grateful every day to be surrounded by creative people and in artistic world, for sure. When I moved to Toronto, I fell into the public art scene, first in murals for advertising. So 20 years ago, I was painting murals, but for a company called Murad, and that's where I started learning how to paint in large scale, we were in crews, like in a team. It's also where I learned how to work at heights because we were on swing stages, or boom lifts, scissor lifts. And we would need to paint it exactly like the artwork with no artistic freedom. But some of the imagery was photorealism. I learned from some very talented people how to create large scale, sometimes we would be painting, you know, a portrait for an ad like HMV, the record store. And I remember it was a portrait of a little boy. So we were painting skin tone and it was really important to get it perfect. But it was three storeys high. So when we were standing on the swing stage and painting his eyebrow, his eyebrow would be about 10 feet wide. So we would be standing in front of it painting, you know, we'd often have to get down to sidewalk level, run across the road and have a look, say, "Does that look right?" It would take us months to paint a single ad. It was a great start in large-scale painting, for sure.
Asha Swann 02:10
Do any of your murals that you've done stand out as being the most difficult?
Monica Wickeler 03:35
That's an interesting question. I think that most difficult—I don't put them on my radar as the level of difficulty. Every single project is so unique and has its own challenges. And the challenges that come with every unique project is like half the fun, right? Stand in front of the wall. And you wonder how you're going to gain access to the wall and whose permissions you're going to need and what hydro wires you'll need to cover. And all of the challenges are actually part of the fun. One of my favourite walls to work on was a project that I collaborated with, the Laneway Project in Toronto. The artists that I collaborated with, Nyle Miigizi Johnston, and Nyle and I, that was the second or third project that we had collaborated on. What a wonderful time, that guy is so talented. So Nyle and I painted—we reclaimed an entire laneway, Central Hospital Lane, that runs parallel to Sherbourne Street.
STORYTELLING MURAL AND HEALING CORRIDOR
Photo via Monica Wickeler for MuralRoutes
"Toronto’s first Healing Corridor theme connects the surrounding Healthcare Centers and the values in the Indigenous Cultural story of the ‘Gift of the Jewelweed’ mural with the medicinal plants in the healing gardens. This combination of ideas all centered around the idea of Healing comes at a time when these communities need it the most." Source: MuralRoutes
It wasn't just the mural that was important. I mean, the mural was important for sure. It was a depiction of a story that his grandmother would tell him about the gift of the jewel weed but the other part of that project was we collaborated with the Laneway Project. That's what they do, they reclaim laneways. So this laneway, you know, was a little rough to walk through, could use some love. And we identified it as that. So the Laneway Projects planted gardens, community would come out and still comes out, and tends to those community gardens. They planted three trees in one of the lots. And we had, Nyle and I also ran a weekend—which turned into a week, because it was so much fun—Indigenous youth jam. So we had some young Indigenous artists that had never painted large scale — they're creative, but they'd never painted large had the opportunity to paint large scale. And what a great experience that was for everybody involved. It was really fantastic.
Asha Swann 03:37
That sounds so fun. How would you go about preparing for something that was so huge like that?
Monica Wickeler 05:07
Lots of dreaming, the very first step is dreaming about it. It was funded by ArtworxTO, we also got some funding from Animating Toronto Streets. So it was a well-funded project. It really starts with dreaming. So writing proposals and asking for money to do something.
Asha Swann 05:55
Do you find that the city has been very supportive of you collaborating with artists and kind of like reclaiming these public spaces?
Monica Wickeler 06:03
I think years ago, the city of Toronto or StreetARToronto was encouraging public art to take place as a way of discouraging vandalism and hiring maybe people that work in the graffiti scene to be paid for painting and to have access to legal walls. And there definitely is a crossover with graffiti artists and public artists. And I'm finding more and more illustrators are entering the world of public art. StreetARToronto's and the City of Toronto claimed last year or the year before as a year of public art. And so there has been definitely some nice support coming from the city for public art. Montreal is also a great place to visit for public arts, I mean, all over the world. But Miami has a district, the Wynwood district and every single surface is painted with public art.
Asha Swann 06:58
Have you ever faced pushback from people when you tell them that you're doing public art or murals?
Monica Wickeler 07:03
Sometimes, and especially from young people, I get more of a jaw-drop. So rather than push back, it's like, "You do what for a living?" I can recall one time that me and another artist were on the top of scaffolding, painting a mural, and the schools—a local public school—was out for lunch and a little crowd of probably, like, 10-year-old girls were walking past the sidewalk. And when they looked up and saw that it was me and another woman painting, they said, "Wait, is it just you guys painting this giant mural?" And we were like, "Yes." And they were like, "Women can do that?" We were like, "Yes!" I think the jaw drop thing is my favorite experience.
It's like, I'm involved with facilitating youth jams, which is if you think about jamming, people ask me what do you want to jam might be. But if you think about musicians jamming—so you get to the guitarists, who get the kind of vibe together and they'll have a jam—and they'll play unscripted. Facilitating youth jams is getting an area where we can all paint outside a slightly larger scale together and having emerging artists next to established artists so that you can jam together, riff off each other's style and learn and encourage. And a bit of a mentorship's going on. And so not only does it create community, within the community that you're painting in and reclaiming the space, but also creates community within the artists. And it's very empowering for everybody. When I'm in that situation, I get re-inspired seeing some of the new ways of approaching a wall kind of gets me back to the studio and trying new things for sure. I mean, especially after coming out of this isolation with COVID, that we're remembering and putting value back on to the idea that we need community. We need to feel part of a community and we need and how healthy it is to be part of a community. So when I see people coming out now, people stopped to watch for sure. And that community, I think that's the most important thing.
Asha Swann 09:10
Do you feel like the public art community suffered during the pandemic? Do you feel like that was a big, like a big deal for them to kind of be isolated and everyone indoors?
Monica Wickeler 09:20
I think everybody was definitely impacted. I think, personally, my projects didn't stop because I could work on the walls and be isolated from other people. So I would set up my site and I would put my caution tape around so nobody could come close. So we were okay, but you know, what a different vibe that was painting during that time.
Asha Swann 09:45
Have you had a chance to do murals in any other large cities like other than Toronto, like have you travelled at all to do murals?
Monica Wickeler 09:53
Yeah, I've painted all across Canada and my favourite piece and it was unofficially installed, was a piece that I did in Iceland, in a laneway in Iceland. While I was there, I grabbed some aerosol paint from the hardware store and painted a set of wings, you know, that people could Instagram themselves in front of and I left my Instagram hashtag and I got so many people sending me photos of themselves in front of that pair of wings in in Iceland for years and years and years afterwards.
Asha Swann 10:26
Yeah, that's amazing. How do you find that the public art scene in Toronto compares to other places in Canada?
Monica Wickeler 10:33
I think that Toronto is pretty conservative. I think that Toronto, there's not a lot of risks taken with the imagery. I think Toronto, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to be safety certified. And, you know, when I visit Montreal to see the mural festival that happens every year, I see people on top of the scissor lifts in their sandals, and with no harness—not that I'm a believer, I'm safety girl—so I think you should be as safe as you possibly can when you're working. But in Toronto, you need to have a hard hat on and safety boots, and you have to have your WHIMIS training, and you need to have working at heights and you need that on and on and on. You know, so Toronto is, it's not without its barriers to create stuff in the public. And I think it shows, you know, I think it shows with the artwork that we have, it's very conservative.
Asha Swann 11:26
Have you ever been stopped by the bylaw officer or anything and trying to ask to see your permits?
Monica Wickeler 11:32
You know, as soon as anybody hears that rattle of the can when I'm shaking my aerosol to get it ready, there's usually somebody running around the corner to see what I'm doing. It's without exception that somebody will do that on every project I'm on and saying, "Do you have permission to paint this wall?" You know, but then again, I am a middle-aged woman. And if I put my safety vest on, I think I can get away with painting just about anywhere. Nobody's gonna suspect that I'm you know, so that, that there is a shift happening for me. And that's kind of nice.
Asha Swann 12:06
Well what do you feel like the city could be doing, maybe with the next mayor, to promote more public art?
Monica Wickeler 12:12
I mean, just add to the funding pot, we need more funding, we need more cultural funding, but I don't know. I don't know if that's gonna happen. We'll see. Let's get a nice strong female lead role there. That's what I'd like to see next year.
Asha Swann 12:24
Do you have any places on your bucket list where it would be your dream to do a mural?
Monica Wickeler 12:29
Yeah, for sure. My family is all in Luxembourg. And whenever I go to Luxembourg, I'm dreaming about painting something in the city there. But I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. I think something closer to reality right now is, I've planned a trip to Oahu, Hawaii, and I'm putting my feelers out to find a wall to paint a little piece while I'm there.
Asha Swann 12:51
That'd be awesome, for sure.
Monica Wickeler 12:52
Add a little splash of colour to Hawaii, why not?
Asha Swann 12:55
Do you feel like there's anything that people should know about public art that they don't already know?
Monica Wickeler 13:01
People as in the viewers, or?
Asha Swann 13:05
Yeah, people as in like the viewers or the general populace, or people who might not be as involved in the art scene.
Monica Wickeler 13:12
I think the message that I'd love to give to the general public is to keep your eyes peeled for public art. And it's not only the large-scale murals, but sometimes it's the little sculpture that's embedded in the sidewalk. And sometimes it's the guerilla-style mural of the welded piece onto the parking sign or take the laneways and take the alleys when you're on your way to somewhere and keep your eyes open up high and down low and you're gonna see public art in every corner of Toronto that's really going to surprise you. Keep your eyes peeled for it and appreciate it. I wanted to just touch briefly on the idea of public art being a really cool way of reclaiming a space, an unused space or an undervalued space. Maybe being used a lot by the community, but undervalued. And public art is a great opportunity to come into that undervalued space and to add, you know, not only large-scale murals, but like I was saying with the laneway project, like little gardens and maybe some lights and some colour and just, like, taking back those spaces. I think those spaces are really important, like some of the back-through ways and the lit alleys in the laneways it's so important to reclaim those and that's a great way to feel the community and feel proud of where you live.
Asha Swann 14:40
Yeah, I definitely understand where you're coming from for that and I think it can be really empowering, like, for a community to see that people are taking a lot of pride in where they live.
Monica Wickeler 14:49
Like Jane Jacobs said it the best: if you leave the window broken and don't fix it, the next thing somebody's going to dump their bag of garbage and the next person is going to leave their old winter tire there and the next person is gonna leave a fridge and a stove and you know, it builds up to being someplace that you wouldn't feel safe to walk through. But if the window gets broken in, and you fix it straightaway and then you paint a nice bright pink frame around it and then you put a mural next to it and plant some gardens, it just creates such a safe place for the community to be.
Asha Swann 15:20
This has been an episode of Toronto's Artery, a podcast about art in the heart of the city. For more episodes and to see a map of the art we discussed in today's episode, head to torontosartery.com
Thanks for listening!