Graffiti News

A large memorial mural is going up on the wall at 159 East Hastings Street in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. According to Global News, lead artists Kyle Shipman and Jesse Gouchey began the legacy project in the week of 17 August 2026, working alongside roughly a dozen contributing artists. Jamie Hardy, the street artist known as Smokey D, is painting the lower section.

What the mural depicts

The mural shows Trey Helten painting Angel Gates. Both were Downtown Eastside residents who have died, which makes the image a double memorial: one person is remembered in the act of remembering another. Trey Helten managed the Overdose Prevention Society in the Downtown Eastside and died in April 2025. Angel Gates was a well-known resident of the neighbourhood who had lived at the Balmoral Hotel.

Kyle Shipman told Global News: "This is our way of finally getting to mourn the loss of our friends and get a little bit of closure."

The city supplied the wall and the paint

The funding arrangement is the part worth noticing. According to Global News, the City of Vancouver provided the site and the paint, while the Overdose Prevention Society secured donations to cover the rest. A fundraiser is running to meet unexpected expenses.

That is an unusual division of labour. Cities are more often the party that removes paint from walls than the party that supplies it, and formal public art commissions normally run the other way around: the commissioning body sets the theme and invites artists to propose work for it. Here the municipality contributed the surface and the materials, and the people who already knew who they wanted to mourn decided what would go on it.

A mural with an end date already set

The wall stands on the former site of the Balmoral Hotel, which was demolished in 2024. The lot is slated for redevelopment as social housing. The mural, in other words, will eventually come down.

In street art that condition is closer to a premise than a flaw. Murals are rarely permanent, and redevelopment, repainting and weather usually decide how long any given wall lasts. For a memorial mural the impermanence reads differently, though. A painting made so that someone is not forgotten may not outlast the construction schedule for the lot it sits on. That does not change what the work is for, but it does raise the value of recording it while it exists.

Memorial murals are a form of their own

Memorial murals have their own long-standing conventions within street art. They are painted on the street where the person actually lived rather than in a gallery; many of the people who walk past knew the subject; and flowers or candles often accumulate at the base, so the painting keeps functioning as a place and not only as an image.

That is the difference from a portrait hung in a museum. The audience is specific. The wall at 159 East Hastings Street addresses the people on that block first and the rest of Vancouver second.

Global News reports the finished mural is expected to be among the largest artworks in the city. Work is expected to take about a month from its start.

Worth photographing while it is up

The shorter a mural's expected life, the more a dated photograph and an accurate location are worth. Wallscape's map shows what is already recorded nearby, and photographs taken on site can be added to the feed so the same wall can be followed over time.

Source: Global News