Where: A one-kilometre stretch of James Street North, in downtown Hamilton
When: September 9–11
What: Supercrawl, an annual arts festival that hosts live music, performance and visual artists, food trucks, vintage-clothing businesses, and craftspeople selling everything from cutting boards to comic books
Who: More than 120 vendors from Hamilton and beyond
Meet some of the vendors, artists, and performers who greeted the weekend crowd of thousands.
“It’s great being back, finally being around people again, and not just running my business online,” says Heather McCulloch, who runs plant shop Grow Up Hamilton. She tabled at Supercrawl with her friend Martyna Domurad, who runs Day Trip Vintage. Both started their businesses during the pandemic.
Heather McCulloch (left), who runs plant shop Grow Up Hamilton, and Martyna Domurad (right), who runs Day Trip Vintage, both started their businesses during the pandemic. (Justin Chandler)
“In the last three years, there are a lot of faces that we haven’t seen,” Domurad says. “I think I have seen 100 people who I haven’t seen in a couple years, so that’s been really lovely.
The friends decorated their booth by placing plants along a table and hanging them from the top of the tent they were under. “We want to make it feel like a little oasis inside, so people are more intrigued to come in,” McCulloch says.
Kaileigh Jones runs Beadwork by Kay, making and selling pieces of Indigenous beadwork. (Justin Chandler)
In another booth, Kaileigh Jones, who runs Beadwork by Kay, was selling detailed pieces of Indigenous beadwork she made by hand.
“[Supercrawl is] one of my favorite things to come to. I just love seeing all the artists and all the creativity everywhere,” Jones says. She also sells online but appreciates the chance to do it in person. “It’s just nice to be able to connect with people, have a story [and] teach them about history and Indigenous culture. It’s just so nice to be face to face.”
Comic creator Frank Bedek made his first ever sale at Supercrawl. (Justin Chandler)
Frank Bedek showed up at Supercrawl with a small table, a chair, and a stack of comics he’d made. “It is a meandering, endless sci-fi crazy thing,” he says of the book, which he printed right before the pandemic and hasn’t been able to put before the public. Bedek set up on the sidewalk to talk to passersby. “I made one sale,” he told TVO.org on Saturday afternoon. “And to me that’s success, since it’s the first sale I’ve ever had.”
Natalie St. Clair and Dave Franciosa make art inspired by popular fiction. (Justin Chandler)
Natalie St. Clair and Dave Franciosa sold art inspired by comics and other popular fiction at Supercrawl. St. Clair describes her work as “pop-culture art that is a bit more subtle and can be enjoyed in your home, where fans will know what they’re looking at, but people who don’t know the pop culture would still think that they look good.” Franciosa specializes in mashups and had prints of creations such as Marvel’s Wolverine combined with Nintendo’s Wario.
For Lyndon M. George and the team he leads at the Hamilton Anti-Racism Resource Centre, Supercrawl was not about selling art but about meeting community members. HARRC asked people to write their ideas on how to make Hamilton more inclusive and clip them on intersecting strings.
Lyndon M. George leads the Hamilton Anti-Racism Resource Centre. (Justin Chandler)
George noted that being at Supercrawl, rather than in an office or online, allows his team to meet people who might not know about the centre. “They may be able to tell their family or friend who might experience racism. Just yesterday, CBC and the police reported on a hate-crime incident here in Hamilton [targeting] the Jewish community. When you’re here in community, you can talk to community about those issues, from different backgrounds, different faiths, and talk about those experiences and say, ‘How can we collaborate to talk about the pain and trauma and the hope?’ And that’s happened this weekend.”
He added that’s it’s also nice to explore James Street North (where the festival took place) on foot. “When you live in downtown Hamilton, you treat James Street as a major artery, but when you get a chance to just walk and talk with people, it’s that kind of energy that you’ve been waiting for the last year.”
David Wallance of Squonk (top) says it was the group's first time at Supercrawl. (Justin Chandler)
A few metres away from the HARRC booth was one of Supercrawl’s strangest-looking attractions: a pair of giant purple inflatable hands. The dynamic digits were there with Squonk, a troupe from Pittsburgh that performed several times at Supercrawl as part of its 30th-anniversary tour. The half-hour set, which included special effects and psychedelic bagpipes, centred on a band that interacted with the hands and allowed the audience to as well.
David Wallace, a guitarist and visual artist who’s been with the group for 15 years (he helped design the pattern on the hands using pieces of magazines) says it can be tough to perform on a hot day. “But we know the audience response makes it so much easier to get into it, even if you’re melting in the heat. Seeing people’s smiling faces is good motivation to keep the energy up and keep having fun.”
Squonk's performance began with a guitarist and a bassist (seen here) strutting toward the crowd. (Justin Chandler)
Squonk used some other props, including giant sunglasses and a nail file, in their performance. (Justin Chandler)
Squonk's David Wallace used cut up magazines in his design for the hands' pattern. (Justin Chandler)
Squonk's finale featured bagpipes. (Justin Chandler)
Here are more sights from Supercrawl.
Supercrawl stretched down Hamilton's James Street North from King Street East to Liuna Station. (Justin Chandler)
Colourful baubles adorning lamp posts and trees were some of many works of sculpture at Supercrawl. (Justin Chandler)
Supercrawl attendees wandered between stacked beehives that were part of an art installation. (Justin Chandler)
Dancers and musicians performed during Supercrawl. (Justin Chandler)
Ellevator was one of the groups that performed on Saturday. Supercrawl had two big stages at opposite ends of the festival area. (Justin Chandler)
This car, crushed by a space satellite sculpture, was one of the only ones allowed on James Street North during Supercrawl. (Justin Chandler)
Many attendees posed with this eerie astronaut scupture. (Justin Chandler)
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