More SCYAP murals pop up in Saskatoon thanks to heritage grant
- Andrea Ledding | January 02, 2018
SCYAP recently celebrated the completion of a $50,000 Heritage Canada grant Canada 150 Mural Project by displaying the top and winning murals. The top design by April Doepker was installed outdoors this year at 206 2nd Ave South for all the city to see, although originally it was going on the SCYAP building itself at 253 3rd Ave South, so the show was called “Change of Plans.” When the owner of the SCYAP building changed his mind, they found a second location nearby.
“This is a theme of Reconciliation,” said Doepker, describing her winning piece of an Indigenous woman holding colourful people in her palms. “The little people are the young people, and she’s like the mother...the people are coming together and sharing their ideas.”
Art makes the whole city look better, noted Doepker, who has worked at SCYAP for nine years and does graphic design, usually implementing other people’s visions. It was exciting to be able to put forth one of her own when past participants of SCYAP’s Urban Canvas Project and friends of SCYAP were invited to submit. She was surprised and happy to be chosen. Three other finalists also executed large panels to be installed across the city, but Doepker’s was the winning design executed on an entire building wall several stories high.
Doepker posed in front of a framed print of her design, and visited with Mayor Charlie Clark and other attendees at the celebration, including several other artists who took part in executing her mural and the other finalists’ murals.
Silvana Shamo was a 2011 participant of Urban Canvas who works at SCYAP as an art instructor, and her executed wall mural is slated to go to a local non-profit organization. She says art helps her with life and self-esteem issues, and feels a lot of happiness in passing along art skills to others while making the world a more beautiful place, inside and out. Her enthusiasm for the program is shared by Lisa Lam, a SCYAP Urban Canvas grad from two years ago, whose design ultimately wasn’t chosen but she still learned a lot in the process of submitting one.
“I had so many ideas and only one canvas, so I put all my ideas together — it was a really good thing to learn...to blend it all together and put it into one,” said Lam, adding that SCYAP is a lot like that process — artists, writers, organizers, instructors all come together to make a wonderful program.
“I loved doing it,” said Chris Scott, another finalist and former SCYAP Urban Canvas graduate. “I was playing with apps and filters and ran a couple of reference layers through and smashed everything together, then threw a starblanket into the background.”
Scott loves creating art and returns to SCYAP to create because he loves it, bringing his family along as well — one of his young sons was looking forward to an open art studio event they regularly attend. Scott’s large wall mural will also be displayed at a Saskatoon organization.