Eleven murals expected to be completed by the end of the month
World Pride 2014
Welcoming the coming of World Pride next year Church street has been selected to undergo a transformation of the artistic kind. The project is set to recognize the struggles and culture of the Toronto LGBT community as portrayed by the community through murals. The project is being launched to prep for the upcoming global event that will forever change the status of the LGBT population in Toronto, and how that population will be seen by the world from that point on.
While some of the murals have already been completed, the Church Street Mural Project was officially launched at the Bank of Montreal at Church and Alexander streets on Saturday, Oct. 19 officially being dubbed the Church Street Mural Project. “This project began as a little idea when we were trying to figure out what we can do to create a legacy project for World Pride 2014,” said councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam at the launch. The murals are meant to represent the diversity of the population and will act as a way to represent Toronto to the world in June.
A total of 11 murals will grace buildings along Church Street, with some still in the works.
“We wanted to show the diversity of the (LGBT) community, so we got artists with a history in the community and they made submissions based on the stories they heard and their own experiences,” Ware said. The topics of the murals represent diversity but they also act as a commemoration of the 1981 bathhouse raids that sparked fury and protests. “One of the things we didn’t want was a bunch of montage murals,” Fowler said. “We wanted to show different parts of the community and we wanted artists working in different styles with diverse backgrounds.”
