Astro Arts Festival to return vibrant murals to Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant

The inaugural Astro Arts Festival will take over Mount Pleasant the weekend of August 8-10.

When it was announced earlier this year that the beloved Vancouver Mural Festival would be no longer, it dealt such a blow to the local arts community that they began working towards its successor before the news had even truly sunk in.

Astro Arts Festival will descend upon Mount Pleasant Aug. 8 for a weekend-long block party with live painting sessions, a DJ, beer gardens, food trucks, markets and murals.

The event will be hosted by the Astro Club, an arts studio co-founded by artist, muralist, and former co-founder of the Vancouver Mural Festival, Drew Young.

“It was definitely a very painful thing to see happen at the beginning of this year,” says Young on the closure of the festival, which shuttered due to financial challenges in January.

“The Mural Festival created an entire creative economy over the course of the nine years that it existed.”

Young says the festival aided in bringing together and growing the artistic community in the city, recalling how he could count the muralists he knew on two hands, more or less, when he first initiated the festival in 2006

“Now, it’s pretty easy to count the muralists I know on, like, 100 hands,” he laughs.

The fully-fledged festival is the next phase of Astro Alley, a pilot project Young created in 2023 to give mural artists a space to create without interference. Located in the laneway behind Astro Club at 165 West 4th, the project had been “a massive success,” he says.

“I think artists really enjoyed the fact that nobody was telling them what to do, and how to do it. It was quite a liberating sort of venture.”

A major facet of the inaugural festival is the six large, public artworks that are currently being painted to wrap around the entire block. The grand reveal of the artworks will take place over the course of the weekend, and will set the backdrop for the 30 artists in residence who will be live painting their own works for festivalgoers walking by.

The festival will also include the 100 Amigos art show, highlighting the works of over a hundred local artists.

Young says he hopes the festival will bring a sense of pride, “knowing that we’ve got such a hot bed of creative talent here in Vancouver.”