The people and art behind the Eastside Culture Crawl

Eric Neighbour pokes his head around the corner, looking up Industrial Avenue toward Main Street. It’s a crisp fall day in early November, a blessedly dry day after a fortnight of street-scrubbing, tree-shaking rain and wind. 

Neighbour, a sculptor and painter, is welcoming me to his studio in the days before the Eastside Culture Crawl. The Crawl, as it’s affectionately known, is a much-anticipated annual showcase of visual art running from November 14 to 17 in 55 locations across East Van’s industrial areas. 

“It’s a full house, so we’ll have to be fairly low key,” Neighbour, who strikes me as soft-spoken in a soothing way, tells me as we step inside the pleasantly warm two-storey industrial building. A week out from the event – which will welcome thousands of people into artists’ studios across the East Side – the open, bright studio is humming with quiet energy. It’s a large space, with over 20 artists nested into all sorts of nooks and crannies, which are brimming with furniture, supplies and other sundries, and art pieces, both finished and under construction. 

Sitting in his corner studio, Neighbour tells me how, in the early to mid 2000s, he created a number of large sculptures and enlisted the public (as many as 1,400 people for one) to physically participate in the projects. 

Since Neighbour started participating in the Crawl in 2015, he said he’s had numerous people visit his studio and reveal that they fondly remember participating in his sculpture projects — some of which are featured in parks throughout Vancouver — years prior. 

In terms of approach, Neighbour embraces the sentiment that ‘if you know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be doing it.’ “In the best case scenario, when you're working on something and you're totally lost, just kind of like fumbling around, making ugly stuff, that's kind of the one moment when you're really, really being creative,” Neighbour elaborated. Once the concept is already there, “you've locked in on what you're doing, then it's refinement, right. So I think if you go into a project with a solid concept, that's a mistake,” he said.

For this year’s event, Neighbour has created two partnered sculptures, a bull and a cow, as well as a new painting exploring landscape composition. The bull and the painting are being exhibited at the Pendulum Gallery downtown, near the Vancouver Art Gallery. Meanwhile, you can find the cow resting comfortably in Neighbour’s studio.

Travelling from Main Street to the east side of Strathcona, our next stop is a huge studio complex that’s been a longtime cornerstone of the Crawl. 

Rose L. Williams, who’s affable and infectiously enthusiastic, has been in her current studio at 1000 Parker St. since 1998, and has been working in the building even longer. She recounted being in and out of the building — now sprawling, bright, and well-signed — in the ‘80s and having to carefully pick her way through dark hallways to find the staircase to the upper floors. 

Williams’ excitable dog, a brown Moyen Poodle named Cobalt, is a regular at the studio (her “partner in crime,” as Williams describes) but is sadly not there due to my visit. 

Having participated in the Culture Crawl for 23 years out of the event’s 28-year existence, Williams was able to offer a perspective on how the Crawl has evolved over the decades. 

“It started as an artist cooperative effort, so we didn't have any management or staff or funds or anything. It was all volunteer (based) amongst the artists who decided to take part. The heart and soul of this whole thing is artists reaching out to support each other,” Williams said, explaining how the participating artists would do all the promotion for the event. 

As the Culture Crawl grew larger, with more and more artists taking part (there are more than 500 artists participating in this year’s event), it transformed from an administrative perspective, with management and staff to handle logistics, marketing, secure grants, donations, and sponsorships, and support artists through the festival. 

“It definitely transformed and changed, I think for the better, because we have people who dedicate their time to representing us,” Williams said.

The role of the Eastside Arts Society and the challenge of artist displacement

One of those people working hard to put on the Culture Crawl each year is Esther Rausenberg, the Artistic and Executive Director for the Eastside Arts Society (EAS). However, the EAS does a lot of work outside of the annual event.

Over the past five years, Rausenberg and the EAS have been particularly focused on the affordability crisis. Property development and a steep rise in the price of studio space has caused a displacement of artists in the community. In 2019, EAS put together an award-winning report — A City Without Art, No Net Loss Plus — contextualizing those challenges based on data from over 2,000 artists in Vancouver’s industrial areas. 

Rising studio costs (a 65% median increase in rent) and the displacement of artists due to cost, redevelopment/demolition, and lack of suitable space (77% of respondents were seeking to relocate at the time), provided the first detailed assessment of the loss of visual arts production spaces in Vancouver.

Overall, the report found that nearly 400,000 sq. ft. of studio space was lost from 2009 to 2019. That’s a trend which has continued according to Rausenberg, with an additional 160,000 sq. ft. lost in the five years since the report. Relatedly, Rausenberg has noticed that the remaining studios have gotten smaller and smaller. 

“I kind of look at that bigger picture in terms of, ‘what does that do for the art form, and how is that restricting people's creativity?’... What's really important for artists is to have that freedom to be able to think and create on a large scale. We're seeing less and less of that and I think that's to the detriment of the art form and the various mediums that visual artists are working in,” she explained.

“It's all about space development,” Rausenberg said, speaking about EAS’s behind-the-scenes work. “We reached a point where we really have to get involved in developing a space… I would say, perhaps within the next four to five years, something like [purchasing and developing a space] potentially could be achieved.” 

In 2022, EAS put together another report — Seizing the Moment: Establishing the Eastside Arts District — a solutions-oriented concept they’ve developed to create an official Eastside Arts District spanning from Columbia Street to west, Victoria Drive to the east, 2nd Avenue to the south, and the port to the north. From a city policy perspective, that could take the form of land use incentives to preserve, replace or expand arts and culture spaces, grants or in-kind contributions (from development and community amenity funds, for example) to support community ownership or utilize city-owned assets, as well as proactively engaging artists and community members in redevelopment and rezoning process, according to the report.

Thanks in large part to the advocacy of EAS, it may soon be a reality. In an October 2024 memo, Margaret Wittgens, the COV’s general manager of arts, culture, and community services, shared that city staff plan to seek direction from council on the creation of an Eastside Arts District in 2025. 

“I'm really pleased with the city and the direction that they're taking things. They understand that time is of the essence, and we need to kind of respond quickly,” Rausenberg said. Ultimately, it’s about ensuring that funding arts and culture is part of the conversation, she added.

Rausenberg stressed that the preservation and creation of art spaces, primarily in commercial and industrial areas, is not in competition with “absolutely critical” support for affordable housing. However, “the conversation can't be just about housing,” she said, highlighting, in addition to housing, the need for a mix of amenities for creative pursuits, recreation, and leisure, to ultimately have a healthier and more balanced society. 

One of the initiatives Rausenberg is excited about is a pop-up studio pilot project, which will provide a temporary studio set up for East Van artists who haven’t had the opportunity to participate in the Crawl because they can’t afford a studio. There will be five artists participating this year at Progress Lab 1422 on Williams Street. 

An artist in her own right, Rausenberg said it’s been a challenge to “flip over into the creative side” of her brain when the organizational work with EAS is consuming much of her time. “It also helps me understand there's a lot of artists who are working full time and then trying to develop their art practice on the side… sometimes that process is going to be slower, because people need to make a living,” particularly with how expensive things like housing, food, and studio space are, she said.

Sharing the importance of nature and ecology through art

All the artists I spoke with are keen to welcome to their studios the thousands of people who attend the Culture Crawl every year. For Williams, the Crawl is an opportunity to get early feedback on her work. 

“It's like market research, especially when you're doing something new or different,” she said. 

“I used to sit and wait for people to talk to me, because I was a shy artist, and then over the years, I got a little bit more bold about engaging with people. But it always ended up being around medium and technique, right? That's okay, but it doesn't allow you to really connect to the art that much. So in the last couple years, I've been trying to talk more about the story of a piece, where it's coming from, like heart and soul, and the inspiration,” Williams shared. 

For Williams, much of that inspiration comes from her natural surroundings, which ties into her emphasis on using eco-conscious materials in her practice. Williams literally makes her art from the trees and plants in the Downtown Eastside where she lives, using the organic materials to stain textiles, wood, paper, creating one-of-a-kind compositions. 

Williams said she recently found Ginkgo, Prunus, and Fig leaves, as well as other leaves with a liquid amber colour, to use in her work. Part of that practice is about adaptation. “Sometimes, when you think you figured it out, the next season when you try it again, there were different climatic conditions, and they don't fit the same, from the same tree. So I’m constantly like a mad scientist, adapting to what mother nature has to offer,” Williams explained. 

Williams is the recipient of this year’s Geoff McMurchy Artist Development Grant, given annually to an artist living with a disability.  

“It's a huge honour, because I worked with Geoff. He was a huge, amazing pioneer in disability arts and disability rights… So receiving this award is very meaningful to me. My work helps raise awareness about disability issues and accessibility, because I make art about going out and walking in the forest, but I can't walk half the time. So it's about privilege, accessibility, and a whole bunch of stuff layered in there,” Williams shared. 

A few twisty and turning hallways away, on the same floor as Williams, is Desirée Patterson’s studio.   

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