Up Here festival adapts to new normal

Sudbury's Up Here festival has done some serious re-tooling.

The urban art and music festival normally hits the city's streets for a few days in August, but this year will be different.

On Thursday, festival organizers revealed some of their plans to celebrate the arts in our pandemic-weary community.

Christian Pelletier, co-founder of the festival, said they're planning five large-scale murals in different neighbourhoods throughout the city.

"We're still finalizing some of the details, but we have made a conscious effort to try to get closer to people," Pelletier said.

To provided the kind of intimacy they're looking for, Pelletier said they're looking at spaces outside the downtown core, which has seen more than a dozen murals appear since the festival began.

"We were having a lot of success finding walls outside of the downtown, in areas like Minnow Lake and Garson," he said.

"So now that we can bring art a little bit closer to the people, how do we get people from the these different neighbourhoods to be part of this larger project?"

Pelletier also said the artists will be 100 per cent local this year, owing to travel restrictions in place during the pandemic.

But there's plenty of talent to choose from, he said, including Sonia Ekiyor-Katimi, originally from Nigeria, and Sudbury's Chantal Abdel-Nour.

Another addition is guest curator Ra'anna Brown, a master's student at the McEwen School of Architecture.

"As guest curator Ra'anna will be helping us tell stories about the black community in Sudbury and black art in general," Pelletier said. "And so with everything that's going on in the States and in Canada right now Ithink it was really important to kind of empower an artist."

You can find more information about the festival lineup here.