Art everywhere, everyday
Celebrating seven years of Boon Street Art Festival
Boon Street Art Festival is a staple of our Hamilton streets, and their tagline is “art everywhere, everyday”. The first Boon started in 2015, organised by Paul Bradley and Charlotte Issac to bring artists out to play to create dynamic, interesting, art-filled spaces all around Kirikiriroa Hamilton.
They’ve just finished their first suburban festival in Dinsdale and Paul Bradley shared with us some thoughts on storytelling, our urban environment, and fighting for the arts.
The motivation for starting Boon was to make the city active - that was 2015, and half of Alexandra Street was empty, lots of Victoria Street, it was just so bad. I’d moved to Hamilton from Wellington, so I knew if you put art in a place, it brings people.
There’s 60 murals just through the festival, but now people come to us for other jobs - so there’s even more. We never thought we’d get to 60, when we started we didn’t know what we were doing. To start with, it was like trying to give away art: “please can we paint your wall”.
Paving the way for street art
If you create a new civic space, it really only becomes successful when people start using it in ways you hadn’t intended - and it’s the same thing with murals. People go through phases with them - there was a big selfie phase with the puppy mural behind the library. Craig McClure is doing our curation now, but we have the same philosophy. We always have some crowd pleasers - a big realistic portrait or something like that - but then always have some that are just really weird so we can keep extending our audience’s creative literacy. The beauty of doing a whole bunch at once is that people don’t focus so much on just one - because that’s a lot of pressure.
Boon also paved the way for other artworks in our city, like the largest mural in New Zealand on Te Kōpū Mania o Kirikiriroa (Wintec Wall). We’ve learnt a lot through Boon and we guided the creative process through putting together the brief and how to find the right artist for that artwork. We’ve just finished up in Dinsdale for our latest festival, and all the shop owners knew what it was and were so excited. You still get the odd person who’s weird about a carpark being blocked for a few days - but it’s definitely a lot easier.
The right thing in the right space
We always try to get a big mix of artists - gender-wise, culture-wise, ethnicity-wise, a big part of it is the storytelling - like putting the Daniel Ormsby one on the side of the Hamilton City Council chambers, putting Maaori art on Council rather than the Queen (or King). Where each mural goes is important, the context of it is as important as the content. For Dinsdale, we consulted with the community too - to tell us some stories and we made them available for artists to respond to. We like work to be site-specific rather than something that could have been painted anywhere and it starts the creative thinking for the artist too.
We can’t predict what every bit of artwork is going to prompt in every person, but we can try to pick art that is going to do the right thing in the right space. Take Victoria on the River - that’s a space where you want people to feel comfortable and to hang out - having that great big kārearea fits really well in terms of that, it’s a really accessible piece of work and it’s got other depths of meaning behind it, then with the portrait on the other side too. But on Alexandra Street, you’ve got the Underwater Collective piece that’s quite wild - but it’s not a space where people are hanging out, actually you might walk past it every day and notice something different.
That’s one of the things I really enjoy about murals - in our city spaces, we get in our little routines and we all have the paths we tread over and over again. If something appears and jolts you out of that routine, it gives you a new perspective. Everything in the city has either a very commercial or practical use - then you put some art on a wall, and it breaks the norm. A guy once asked me while I was painting, “what’s that advertising? Who’s that for?”. It was outside his comprehension that you would have something for a non-commercial reason.
One of my dreams is to work with developers and architects from the beginning - it’s not uncommon for a building to be designed with a mural in mind. It’s happened in Wellington and Australia. It’s hard to get access to painting new buildings because people are very precious about them, but it’s just about finding someone who’s open-minded.
Fighting for funding
Despite the fact we didn’t get any Council funding for several years, now at local election events, candidates all mention Boon - but we need more than just people who point to the things that are proven. How can we take a chance on new stuff?
Even for Boon, we felt we had to fight hard to get access to funding and when you have this little funding pool. You want the big staples to keep happening - Balloons Over Waikato, the Hamilton Gardens Arts Festival - so there’s no room for anything else. It’s all taken already before people have even applied. What happens when someone else has a cool idea? It makes it hard to get new things off the ground.
It’s hard to blame the funders, in general, if they’re not funding stuff it’s because they just don’t have the money. They have to report back to someone else about how wisely they invested - because it’s framed as an investment. If you’re looking at it from that perspective, of course, you’re not going to take any risks but if you look at the return rate on things like the New Zealand Festival that happens in Wellington, I believe the return rate is around 20:1 - for every dollar spent, you get $20 back in the city.
During the last Council term, I presented to Council that they should have a $1million arts fund - which I think some of them scoffed at, but I was deadly serious. Compared to the overall Council spend, what they would get for that $1million would be bonkers.
To infinity and beyond
We’ve got some super exciting stuff lined up for next year, but some of it I’m not allowed to say yet. We’re interested in playing with the format of Boon After Dark to include projections, a nice extension of paint on walls to projections on walls. We’re looking at facilitating more public engagement with art - especially now we have so many murals - hence the walking tours, we’re planning to do them every quarter. I also want to share the stories more at each site, whether it’s a plaque or something else. Also some projections that interact with existing murals and augmented reality too - I’ve been doing some tests for that, and they’ve been working well.
Very few people thought that the city needed murals, but now if you took them all away, even people who don’t think of themselves as art lovers would be really pissed off. There’s been a couple of times when we’ve done a refresh on a mural, and people get really upset. It is a build-it-and-they-will-come kind of thing.
Paul Bradley is the co-founder of Boon Street Art Festival and a muralist in his own right. You can find his work at the University of Waikato on the corner of K Block, inside Chilli House in Hamilton and Cambridge, down Liverpool Street in the CBD, or on Instagram.
You can also go for a wander and check out all the new murals in Dinsdale with Boon’s handy-dandy map.