Thanks to the Up Here urban art and music festival, which returns for an eighth edition Aug. 19-21, Sudbury has become a lot more colourful in recent years.
Murals commissioned by the festival are created each summer. Up Here has just announced this year’s muralists.
The 2022 Up Here murals were curated by Anong Beam, a painter, mother, paintmaker, and curator, living and working in her home community of M'Chigeeng First Nation on Manitoulin Island.
In 2017, Beam launched her own line of plastic-free, watercolour and oil paints known as Beam Paints, inspired by her culture and pigment gathering of her youth.
Aside from curating this year’s muralists, she will also be creating her own mural using a new outdoor paint she developed.
For murals, Beam is bringing Christian Chapman from Fort William First Nation, Ont., who creates two dimensional mixed-media artwork that fuse elements of computer-manipulated images, painting, drawing, and printmaking, and whose approach is informed by storytelling and serendipity.
Joining Chapman is Born in the North, a creative studio owned and operated by twin brothers, Chris and Greg Mitchell, whose work — inspired by their Mi’kmaq heritage, music exploration, and Canadian upbringing — is focused on examining the relationship between humans and nature.
You’ll also see Alex Bierk, whose painting practice focuses on his experience with addiction and loss, being a new father, and archiving his experience in small-town Ontario.
The mural locations, and the artists participating in the Power Up Project — the initiative that invites local artists to paint hydro boxes around Greater Sudbury — will be revealed in July.
A limited number of all-access, entry-guaranteed passports to the eighth edition of Up Here are on sale now at a price of $90. Individual tickets go on sale July 7 at noon, when the complete schedule will be revealed. Visit UpHere.com for more information.
