Street Art... in Yellowknife?

When I say Great White North, you say STREET ART!

What?

My thoughts exactly.

In the Old Town

In between eating, reading, wandering, napping and drinking, I somehow found the time to wander the streets with my camera and taking photos of the street art. I was honestly shocked and surprised by how much of it there was. Maybe it was because Yellowknife is so small that it was so obvious, or maybe because I spend too much chatting with R who waxes on about art and galleries and how he wants to meet a girl who just wants to go to art shows with him, that I notice more. Who knows?

Art Shows on Rocks maybe?

Since I have a tendency to buy prints everywhere I go, I visited tons of galleries on this trip. The paintings, the sculptures were absolutely stunning. I’m not quite in my art-buying-for-1000s-of-dollars prime so I merely looked, loved and left. Even the cemetery was beautiful, and more peculiar, the graves were surrounded by white picket fences.

This beauty was on the side of one of the art galleries

From what the research I’ve done, Yellowknife has a thriving art community. Yellowknife was established as the capital of the Northwest territories in 1967 (so it’s the same age as my mom!) around Great Slave Lake. It’s known as the Gateway to the North and it really shows. Yellowknife is a modern, cosmopolitan city, yet still holds true to the traditions of the North – ice roads to the Northern communities, float planes, kayaks, canoes, and steps away from an Aboriginal reservation. According to this handy little brochure, Yellowknife is named after the knives used by Dene of the area and fashioned from the naturally occurring copper gathered from the Coppermine River. I’m not sure where the street art has come from, or what it means. Yellowknife has asked for proposals for art pieces to adorn the street lights – seems like a great program to bring colour to mundane aspects of city living – which, in a city as beautiful as Yellowknife, is so apparent – the grey contrasting with the blues and whites of the icy lakes, the clear skies and the rock formations. I’m not even sure it has to mean something, though R would probably loudly disagree. I’ll let you be the judge: