Vancouver’s Astro Arts Festival To Be A Full-Blown Block Party For The Arts

Mount Pleasant might be known for its independent restaurants, breweries and cafes but it’s also home to one of the densest concentrations of street art and murals in the world. If you find yourself strolling through the neighbourhood’s alleys and backstreets, you can find everything from figurative to surrealist art showcased on the walls of its buildings. And this August, the Astro Arts Festival wants to celebrate this rich legacy. 

The festival was conceived by artist/entrepreneur Drew Young and arts advocate Steffanie Love following the closure of the Vancouver Mural Festival after nine years of operating. Young was one of the co-founders of the Mural Festival and with this new event, he and Love want to continue the tradition of large-scale public art and freedom of expression in the arts with food trucks, DJ sets, beer gardens all set among immersive art installations and open studios.

“We thought that it was a good opportunity for us to continue the legacy,” says Steffanie Love, co-founder of the Astro Arts Festival. “We understood the importance of having a flagship for visual artists that had a focus on muralism because it’s something that’s very important to the vibrancy of Vancouver.”

Happening from August 8 to 10, the free block party is hosted by the Astro Club, an arts studio established by Young and Love. Since its creation, the club has become a creative space for local artists and provides talent for festivals, public art installations and all kinds of artistic projects in the city.

“There’s a whole economy that was built around murals in the city and a lot of the artists who do work here rely on that as a source of income,” says Love. “And so we hope for the city to continue to celebrate those artists and to have a spotlight on them with this festival.”

Love and Young worked together with the city’s most prominent artists. This summer’s event includes experimental murals, street art works, a graffiti jam and the unveiling of 6 large-scale mural public artworks. 

“Drew is certainly the creator and I’m the maintainer,” says Love. “Our skills complement each other. If we were both creatives, maybe there’d be a little bit more headbutting, but in this way, that’s how we get it done.”

At the heart of the festival is Astro Alley, the place where artists will have the complete freedom of turning the block into an open-air gallery. The idea is to cover the space with over 35 experimental murals, graffiti works and street art pieces that will be painted live through the weekend. 

“It’s definitely done sort of off the radar of the city. It’s cooked like an event permit, but it is being produced in a different fashion than what would normally be done for larger scale permitted public artwork,” says Young. “It’s a jam. It’s here to just enjoy the process of painting. To do what you want to do. It also helps inspire people to see what the process looks like from beginning to end and maybe eliminate a little bit of the mystery and potentially get some people who are toying with the ideas, maybe painting or doing murals or trying to graffiti or new mediums to have a go at it. It’s a demystifying process.”

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Another highlight of the festival is the return of the 100 Amigos exhibition (previously displaced in other venues in the city), showcasing 100 local talents and curated by Pablo Zamudio, Young and Douglas Coupland.

“We’ve created this unique trifecta of curators, more like burgeoning underground up-and-coming or unsung illustrative heroes,” says Young.

The festival will also offer its attendees the chance to win some of the original artworks in a live-painting raffle and art party where they’ll be able to cheer on artists in the Arena Mural Battle.

Even if the festival is just starting, the opportunities for public art display only seem to be growing. Young says he’d like to see the festival expand but with the festival relying largely on volunteers, everything is still up in the air.

“We want to see it expand as much as possible. I mean, we are running a diabolically thin shoestring budget on this and we’d like to be able to not entirely rely on the volunteer run. I think for the first year it’s acceptable and people understand the MO for starting something like this on the volunteer run, but we want to be able to put money in people’s coffers as we grow,” he says. 

Young says he’d like to include more international artists into the event in the future.

“We can bring in talents that have skill sets that might not be that common or prevalent in the city and it just kind of helps everyone level up and grow along the way.”

Astro Arts Festival
165 West 4th Ave.
August 8 to 10