Eastside Arts Festival celebrates the resilience of the East Van arts community

Free, all-ages family event is a highlight of the Eastside Arts Festival.

For the past three decades, The Eastside Culture Crawl has been a popular event on Vancouver’s fall arts and culture calendar. So, it only made sense for the event to expand into other times of the year. The Eastside Arts Festival is the summer season’s celebration of East Van’s dynamic creative community.

The summertime version turns six this year and runs from July 17 to 26 across the Eastside Arts District, an area roughly running from Chinatown to Commercial Drive from the waterfront up to Broadway. Presented by the Eastside Arts Society, which also presents the Culture Crawl, Studio 101 youth workshops and helms the Eastside Arts District initiative, the festival also presents its second, free, all-day outdoor family friendly party at MacLean Park on July 25, from 3 to 8 p.m. Featuring a DJ set from Jody Glenham and sets from Big Rig, Stephen Hamm: Theremin Man, Wack, and Buddie, the event is a co-production of the festival and the Rickshaw Theatre.

“What makes the Eastside Arts Festival really unique for us is that it is our only multidisciplinary event featuring musicians, performers as well as artists,” said Sierra MacTavish, the Eastside Arts Society programs and development manager. “It was birthed out of conversations with people in the community who experienced the Crawl, met the artists and wanted to get more of an experience where they could create as well. “Through working to establish the Eastside Arts District and diving into this community, we found there was so much richness here people don’t experience and how could we invite them in?”

Working with partners ranging from Heritage Vancouver and the Hogan’s Alley Society to local brewers and artists, a full program of artist-led workshops such as Serena Chu’s Ceramic Mini House for Tealights and Incense to Sonya Iwasiuk’s Watercolour Style Mountainscapes and Bella Spirale Dance Projects’ Dance Desk is offered on various days and times. “Besides the many workshops developed with various artists, studio and breweries, we have also developed walking tours with our cultural partners and specific artists,” she said. “These are a really unique opportunity to see how the neighbourhood looks through the eyes of a specific painter, photographer or other artist.

And there is the free day of fun for families at MacLean Park.” The outdoor-live-music-exhibitors-and-more-event in the park is like a little bit extra on top of the already dynamic mix of events being offered at the festival. It too has proven so popular that an additional day of music at MacLean Park is added on July 26, 2 to 5 p.m., with Mizz Lisa, Lyndsay Wills and the No Frills Band, and Sinéad X Sanders.

McTavish, who came onboard post-COVID-19, says the celebration is based around the resilience of the East Van arts community, which lost many studio and artist-run spaces in the pandemic’s aftermath. Like a majority of city residents, the affordability crisis has been extremely hard on the creative community. “COVID was huge for the arts community and had some very difficult impacts, but the resiliency of the community is incredible,” she said.

“Spaces close, spaces open and it blows my mind how, year after year, it keeps going. We had a huge win with establishing the Eastside Arts District and preserving cultural space when the (City of Vancouver) awarded us funds to purchase our office this year.” Located at 716 E. Hastings St., the offices also include an accessible gallery space, as well as a back area classed as Class B artist’s studio space.

“That means that the messy and dirty artists, who are continuously pushed out and have fewer and fewer options, the metalworkers, woodworkers, the dusty and noisy are going to have some protected space,” she said. “My hope is that we can take the positive impacts of this and see it, hopefully, extended as a model for other spaces in the region.” McTavish notes that the Eastside Arts District boasts the highest density of creatives in all of Canada, noting studies support that artists generate a great deal of revenue.

Events such as the Culture Crawl and Eastside Arts Festival keep that information front-and-centre in the public eye.