Graffiti News
An Ontario town is painting its crosswalks for veterans
In West Nipissing, Ontario, street art is moving off the wall and onto the road surface. According to BayToday, the local Royal Canadian Legion Branch 225 is installing memorial crosswalks honouring veterans and those currently serving, with full support from municipal council.
The work will sit where people walk over it every day.
Where and when
Two locations, according to BayToday. The first is all four corners of King Street at Queen Street in Sturgeon Falls. The second is the intersection of Booth Street and Waterfront Street in Cache Bay.
Work begins near the end of August, and each site is expected to take two days. The town will close those intersections while the painting is done.
No municipal money is involved
The funding structure is what makes this project worth noting. According to BayToday, the Legion did not request any funding from council. The project will be paid for through community donations.
What the municipality is providing is not money. It is permission, and a road.
Mike Pilon, West Nipissing's Chief Administrative Officer, told council: "This is very relevant to our municipality and supports our local Legion branch and our veterans. This is a worthwhile project." The proposal was presented to council by Jerry Foriotte, a Veterans Services Assistant from the West Nipissing Legion.
That is a route to public art that never passes through a budget debate. The community pays, and the municipality approves the surface.
What gets painted
Similar crosswalk projects have already been installed in nearby Callander, BayToday reports. The usual design is a painted image of a soldier in silhouette, often with the words "Lest We Forget" beneath the figure.
The message is simple and so is the form. What changes it is the placement. A mural is something you stop and look at. A crosswalk piece is something you walk across.
Painting on a road has its own specification
Part of what makes this interesting is that the material requirements are strict. Road-surface artwork gets driven over, scraped by snow-clearing equipment in winter, and soaked by rain.
According to BayToday, the paint used is approved for road use by the Ministry of Transportation and contains a gel coat and rubber compound that is both reflective and slip-resistant. The work is guaranteed for five years.
Set against ordinary mural practice, that is an unusual arrangement. Most aerosol work on walls carries no guarantee at all, and can be gone in months, as the removal now under way at Oceanwide Plaza in Los Angeles shows. Painting on a road turns the artwork into infrastructure, and infrastructure comes with specifications and warranties.
Street art as an act of remembrance
Memorial crosswalks have become a recurring form across several municipalities. What this project demonstrates is that the definition of street art is wider than it is often assumed to be. An unsanctioned tag and a council-approved road painting have entirely different legal standing, but both are painted on the surface of public space and both are seen by everyone who passes.
Wallscape does not rank one above the other. The question is whether it is worth recording. A piece like this may be repainted in a different form after five years, which means the only way the current version survives is as a photograph.
If there is road-surface work in your town, it can go on the map with its location attached. The feed shows what is being logged in other cities.