Post #87

Even though I settled in Winnipeg at the young age of 5—and only a handful of months before my sister was born—I vividly remember the ways our mother shaped this place into our home. She reached out to cultural communities that connected us to the family we were physically distanced from, enrolled us in activities she knew would ground us, and informally created a map of the city through visual markers. These markers were very important to us because they not only helped my mum navigate the new city in the early 2000s, but quickly became sites of familiarity that distinctively connected us with Winnipeg.

Alison Thomson (Christina’s mother) beside the “bronze woman.” Mural: Charlie Johnston, Mandy van Leeuwen, Jennifer Johnson Pollock, “Welcome to Downtown,” 2002. Dominion Bank Building, 678 Main Street, Winnipeg Manitoba. Photograph courtesy of Christina Thomson, May 30, 2022.

Now hidden behind a park and trees at the South-West corner of Higgins Avenue and Main Street, Mandy van Leeuwen, Jennifer Johnson Pollock, and Charlie Johnston’s mural “Welcome to Downtown” (2002) is one that I will cherish forever. “Don’t you just love how the bronze woman welcomes us in?” my mum would say as we drove from Elmwood to downtown. Because she loved it, I loved it. I would look out for the mural’s bronze woman on the school bus as a child, and although it’s changed over the years, I still make the time to admire it as an adult. Inconspicuous for some, this mural has radically contributed to my sense of belonging and connecting with the place that is Winnipeg. However, I did not grasp how public art contributes to placemaking until I read Haema Sivanesan’s “Here and Elsewhere: Nuit Blanche as a Site of Cultural Simultaneity.”¹

In her essay, the prolific Alberta-based curator and author contemplates the complexities of inclusivity in public art—especially in multicultural Canada, where meta-narratives of inclusion obscure and essentialize the diversity of experience.² Presenting the cityscape as “a site of simultaneity” where “experiences of public space and public life from elsewhere can be mapped onto the built environment of an adopted city,” Sivanesan considers how narratives of unbelonging can foster inclusion.³ Reading this helped me understand why “Welcome to Downtown” was such an important marker for my family. Looking back, I now understand that it showed us what we needed to see; the bronze woman’s gesture comforted us with an invitation to create a new home. Greeting our new-coming and sitting as a personal example of Winnipeg’s simultaneity, this mural illustrates the inclusive capacity of public art.

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1 Haema Sivanesan, “Here and Elsewhere: Nuit Blanche as a Site of Cultural Simultaneity” in Holding Ground: Nuit Blanche and Other Ruptures, edited by Julie Nagam and Janine Marchessault (Toronto: PUBLIC Access, 2021), 234-241.

2 Sivanesan, 236.

3 Sivanesan, 235; 238.

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Christina Thomson