Lene Trunjer Petersen
The Silhouette

Supercrawl was busy on Saturday night. Everywhere you could see art displays and food wagons, while music was coming from almost every corner. Here I was walking down James St. N., when I saw something different. Well, it was really just a black painted fence, but the unusual part of it was that everywhere people were writing quotes or their names with chalk, and taking pictures of the fence and themselves.

My curiosity won, and I went over to see.

What was going on? Was this actually an intended work of art? Who was the artist behind this? Was there one? Somehow there must be one, or else who started the writing? So I asked around me. Nobody really seemed to know, until this sort of shy guy came up to me, confronting me, asking if I really wanted to know? Yes, of course, I replied.

It all started with an Andy Warhol quote

The artist who stood before me was very reluctant to be a part of my article, but he gave me permission to paraphrase him and his thoughts about art. So what is art really? He elaborated that every one of us has a godly spark of creation. But whether or not it might come from a divine inspiration or a feeling of ‘need’ to create, the most important thing is to follow this tone of creation through. He felt that too many people were wondering about the right way to express their artistic thoughts instead of just doing it. That was why he wrote part of the Andy Warhol quote on the fence:

“Don’t think about making art, just get it done.”

Besides the Andy Warhol quote, he had also hung a few pictures on the fence. While he was writing, someone had asked for the chalk to write some of his own, and that was how the engaging fence writing came to be and transformed itself into a work of unified art.

Memory Wall 

But what were the participants’ thoughts about the writings? I said thanks to the artist and went over to the fence and talked to people. Why were they writing on the fence, and what were they thinking when they did so?

The first person I asked was a younger guy, who answered that he wanted to be part of what he described as a feeling of togetherness. This feeling of being part of something bigger was a very unanimous reply. An older guy pointed out that it was everybody’s ideas, which made it a very inclusive art display. He also liked the idea that it was temporary and, with a good solid rain, the words of chalk would disappear, while the feeling and pictures would remain. Two other women I asked worked in home design. They wanted a picture of themselves in front of the fence for their webpage, to illustrate the varieties of art. Another person shouted graffiti and memory wall, before he turned around to help his kid to draw his own little creation.

What is art?

A lot of different ideas seemed to flow around that evening by the black fence, and it made a lot of the participants reflect on the concept of creation. But what seemed really important was the opportunity to be involved. Art is no longer the right of geniuses or the protected paintings behind the windows of an art gallery. Art is what speaks to your heart; it gets you involved, leaves a feeling of being part of more then just yourself and makes you reflect on art, life, creation and beyond. Finishing up my interviews, I found a piece of chalk and drew my own little cartoon, my statement, among the others who found that the memory wall was a truly significant art piece at the fifth annual Supercrawl.

Edgar’s posters have become the symbol of the No! Downtown Hamilton Casino group, a collection of activists, businesses owners and Hamiltonians that is extensively involved in raising awareness about the casino. Graham Crawford, owner of the Hamilton HIStory + HERitage storefront museum on James North, is a prominent member of the No! Downtown Casino group and has made a different poster opposing the casino every day for nearly the last two months.

“I’m almost embarrassed to say to people how little time it takes to make the posters,” said Crawford modestly. “I can’t draw, so the posters become my editorial cartoons because you don’t have to have much skill to make a poster.”

Crawford’s posters, which he shares through his Facebook page, make it clear that the result of the casino debate is something he cares deeply about. But the posters have convinced a lot of other people to care as well.

“My first ‘the new Hamilton’ poster focused on Supercrawl,” said Crawford, “and even I am social media savvy enough to know that when you get 236 shares in one day about something local that doesn’t involve cats it’s a big deal. The reach of the poster was probably tens of thousands. I’ve never had anything shared that much, ever.”

Everything that has changed James North over the last few years – the galleries, art crawl, Supercrawl – has done so slowly, deliberately and empathetically. Downtown Hamilton has showed us is that there’s a way for development to be good for everyone. Countless arts programs like Roots 2Leaf, the Urban Arts Initiative and Hamilton Artists for Social Change are dedicated to addressing poverty in many forms. What makes Crawford’s Supercrawl poster so affecting to so many people is that it puts into stark contrast Hamilton’s recent downtown development and the type of development that a casino represents - fast, less engaged with the rest of the city and harmful to at least some.

“A casino is completely inward facing by design, not by accident,” said Crawford. “Once they get you in there they don’t want you to leave. It’s why there are no windows. It’s why there are no clocks.”

Certainly PJ Mercanti, one of the main people involved in the proposed casino, is not evil. I’m sure he doesn’t see the city as just a source of income. It’s just that his vision and Crawford’s vision for the future of Hamilton are fundamentally different. One will probably never agree with the other, no matter how much debate. But even if a resolution will never be reached, at least there are people who care enough the city to see that it’s worth arguing about.

Tim Potocic has the job of being one of the main organizers of Supercrawl, and it’s a huge task for a huge event. Last year, 50,000 people attended the festival, and this year’s expected attendance was around 75 000.

Planning Supercrawl for so many people was a year-long job for Potocic. And as that year of organizing was whittled down until just one week was left before the event, the panic set in.

“I had late nights that weekend before, as well as Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” said Potocic. “It’s pretty panicked. I wish we were more organized.”

After Thursday, Potocic’s experience planning Supercrawl starts to sound more familiar to any student who has left a massive assignment until the day before it’s due.

“When I got up on Friday it was full-on,” said Potocic. “I didn’t get home until seven in the morning on Sunday, and I only slept for two hours on Friday night. And that’s the way it is. You just run on adrenaline because you know there’s an end. We know the street has to open up at 8 o’clock on Sunday morning.”

Even by forgoing sleep, Potocic didn’t really get to see much of the festival he was responsible for.

“This is the first year I’ve actually been able to catch one set of one band,” said Potocic. “I saw Change of Heart. They are reuniting to do very few shows, so I needed to see it.”

Before Change of Heart and the huge crowds, Supercrawl began four years ago as something much smaller. Potocic has been there since the very beginning of the idea.

As one of the founders of the Sonic Unyon record label, located just off James Street North, Potocic has always been part of the monthly Art Crawl, but he wanted the event to grow, to really push it and see what it could do.

“We got a big group of people together, there was at least 20 people in a room,” said Potocic. “We said that we wanted to close the street, because we thought it should be closed anyway during the regular monthly art crawls, even at that point in time, and we thought, let’s try to do a street festival. That was literally in June. Then everyone sat around and was like, ‘Yeah, it’s a cool idea.’ And we had twelve weeks to plan it, which is not enough time.”

With the initial plans approved by the city, the next problem was deciding what to call the event.

“We were batting names around, and I was like, ‘Well, its going to be super! Let’s call it Supercrawl,’” said Potocic. “It’s a dumb name, really. We’re specialists in dumb names, so it kind of fits. I mean, Sonic Unyon is a weird, dumb name.”

So with the name decided, the organizers rushed to get everything else finished under the impossibly tight timeline of a couple of months. Instead of happening in September, like the other Supercrawls, the first was pushed to October to give the organizers more time. And when that time was up, Potocic and the other organizers prayed they would be lucky with the one thing they couldn’t plan.

“It poured rain,” said Potocic. “But we still had thousands of people out with umbrellas, and we were like, ‘Huh, thousands of people came out and it was pouring rain, so clearly there’s a need for a street closure festival style-thing, so let’s start working on 2010 right now.’”

Since then, planning future Supercrawls has taken all year, and that means Potocic hasn’t really been able to catch his breath even though this year’s event has just ended.

“I’ve already had two conversations with two agencies that are good friends of mine about what we’re going to do next year,” said Potocic. “We’ll really need to have our wish-list of top five acts that we’re looking at to headline potential stages locked in before the end of the year.”

Though Potocic is responsible for organizing the big stuff, that’s only part of what allows Supercrawl to happen because, ultimately, the whole James Street North community is involved.

“That’s the key to making Supercrawl and art crawl and James Street North as amazing and vibrant as it is, because it is a community initiative,” said Potocic.  “We do a lot of community outreach to make sure that we’re not taking liberties that we shouldn’t. I mean, there will always be critics, but we try our best to reach out with the limited staffing and resources we have to run something like this.”

Next week, part two of this article will look at what the critics are saying and Potocic’s response. Hint: it has to do with gentrification.