City launching 1st legal street art wall to curb graffiti in Hamilton

Hamilton street artists are getting a fresh canvasdowntown where they can paint 'graffiti' legally.

The City of Hamilton is launching its first legal wall for street art in Woodlands Park on Saturday.

For the next year, any emerging street artists are invited to paint on a wooden wall that stretches100 by8 feet.

The pilot project wasproposed in the city's graffiti management strategy tominimize illegal graffiti and tagging.

ButWard 3 Councillor Nrinder Nann, who sits on the city's "keep Hamilton clean and green" committee, explained that the committee decided to steer away from its initial discussions about deterring young people and toward providing them with a chance to foster their art skills.

"How do we instead support young people to actually refine themselves into what's considered street artists?" she said. "There's a potential here to mentor young people because we have some great graffiti street artists in Hamilton."

Nann, the committee, city staffand local artists includingConcrete Canvas Festival founders Scott MacDonald and Leon Robinson worked together to make the wall a reality.

Nannsaid that she's noticed an increase in graffiti across the city, but was not able to determine why it was happening only that the city seemed to be in a cycle where tagging has become more popular.

She hopes that the wall "piques" people'scuriosity, regardless of whether what they do is illegal or not.

"You don't need to disclose who you are or what you do in terms of street tagging that's illegal," she said. "But I want to encourage those folks to consider learning a little bit more about the art form."

In a press release, the city saidthat the wall will continually evolve "as artists add new work and paint over each other's work." This will reflect a tradition of graffiti artists, which Nann said is a subculture of painting over each other's tags to raise the bar and create a mutual competition.

City parks staff will monitor the wall for any inappropriate content, and staff, artists and community members will evaluate the success of the project next summer.

The city expects artists to be painting on site on Saturday from 9 a.m. to dusk.