Artist: Richard Tetrault
Year: 1979
Location: 401 Main – Carnegie Community Centre
Dimensions: H. 6 feet L. 24 feet
Best Viewed: From inside lounge area
Summer City Street is an acrylic and collage mural reflecting the energy of the city street in the heat of summer. Tetrault painted the mural in his studio on Powell Street in 1979, and it has been on loan to Carnegie Centre since 1980. The mural incorporates plaster, wall paper, newspapers and cigarette packs collaged onto canvas panels. Cubist-inspired in energy and form, it represents the dynamics and the intensity of the street life of Main and Hastings. All of the figures represent people that the artist saw at this time. This mural was an important precursor to numerous series that the artist painted in the following years, when he continued to use street sketches from the Downtown Eastside as starting points for his paintings and prints.The mural was first exhibited at the Helen Pitt Gallery in 1979, and appears on the book-cover for “Hastings and Main”, (New Star Books, 1987), as well as on the C.D. “These Are The Faces,” (a Carnegie production, 2000). The mural was cleaned and refinished in 2011.
