Night on the town Nuit Blanche returns with celebration of hip hop, roller skaters, ghost signs in city’s core By: Benjamin Waldman, Eva Wasney, Jen Zoratti, AV Kitching and Alan Small Posted: 9:57 AM CDT Friday, Sep. 22, 2023

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This article was published 22/09/2023 (1090 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Take a power nap, chug an espresso and head into Winnipeg’s core  Saturday night for the city’s annual late-night art party.

This year’s Nuit Blanche festival features more than 80 events and art installations located throughout the Exchange District, downtown and St. Boniface. Most events kick off in the evening and run until midnight, with some concluding in the wee hours of Sunday morning.

While the Canadian Museum for Human Rights has previously participated in Culture Days Manitoba — an affiliated national arts and culture celebration on now until Oct. 15 — the facility is opening its doors to Nuit Blanche partygoers for the first time. It’s an ideal venue due to its contemporary architecture and location, says festival general manager Kurt Tittlemier.

“Since last year, we’ve really been encouraging people to walk,” Tittlemier says. “A good way to take in Nuit Blanche is to start at The Forks and then walk to the Exchange District … and the CMHR is right in the middle.”

The museum is hosting three different programs: a tree root-inspired sculpture, called Synapses, by artist Caroline Monnet; an interactive classical music performance by Savant Flaneur; and a local music showcase hosted by Manitoba Music.

Also new this year is a festival safety policy, which aims to foster an inclusive environment among the estimated 30,000 people who attend Nuit Blanche. The policy includes several points about respectful conduct towards unsheltered individuals.

“Our festival has no gates and our installations are in downtown Winnipeg, there are people that are unsheltered right near where our art is (located),” Tittlemier says. “And those people are welcome there.”

Security volunteers in blue vests will be stationed in Old Market Square and patrolling throughout the Exchange.

The Winnipeg Trolley will be running all evening between the major festival venues, including the Winnipeg Art Gallery — which is hosting a street party at the corner of Memorial Boulevard and St. Mary Avenue — and Centre Culturel Franco-Manitobain. Transportation is free and the trolley location can be tracked on the Nuit Blanche app (available for iOS and Android).

Keep reading for a sample of some of the art on display Saturday night and visit nuitblanchewinnipeg.ca for the full lineup. Head to culturedays.ca for more on this year’s Culture Days festivities.

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Prism House

• True North Square
• 6 to 11 p.m.

“I’ve always been drawn to lighthouses,” says artist and painter Nereo Zorro. “They represent a beacon, a marker, or a centrepoint. A place of safety that bring us back to ourselves.”

For the last decade, Zorro, 37, has been informally constructing such a place in his mind, a “dream project” that combines dance, live mural painting, artificial intelligence, photography, and global music under one roof. On Saturday night, Zorro will invite the public to walk into Prism House, a glowing polyhedron that will be set up in True North Square.

Throughout the night, a rotating cast of DJs will play everything from hip-hop to soul to bossanova. Visitors will get a chance to use the house as a photo booth, with their portraits printed on a grid. That grid will then be cut up into squares, with isolated facial features becoming tiles in what Zorro refers to as a “community mosaic lamp,” mixing and matching individual parts — eyes, ears, brows, and teeth — to create a new, collective sum: a holistic portrait of a city reflected in light.

— Ben Waldman

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Hip Hop 50

• Old Market Square
• 8 p.m. to midnight

On a night in August 1973, in the Bronx borough of New York City, DJ Kool Herc spun the same record on two turntables, alternating between the two to extend the drum break.

But DJ Kool Herc didn’t just lay down a beat that night. He laid down the blueprint for hip hop.

Over the past 50 years, hip hop has revolutionized music. But it’s not just a genre. Hip hop is a can’t-stop-won’t-stop cultural force, its enduring influence shaping music, yes, but also dance, art, fashion, design and language.

To celebrate hip hop’s half century, DJ Hunnicutt, along with special guest DJs Lonnie Ce and $uraj, will perform a video set at Bijou Park at Old Market Square that will spin through the past 50 years. The music will be accompanied by a live graffiti mural collaboration between Winnipeg artist/Graffiti Gallery founder and artistic director Pat Lazo and the Chicago-raised, Honolulu-based artist Melon.

— Jen Zoratti

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IllumiSkate

• The Forks
• 6 p.m. to midnight

Get your skates on! The brain behind last year’s roller skating rink Golda Ferrer is bringing back her love-skate installation but this time there’s a twist; it’s a moving exhibit.

“It’s completely the opposite of a roller rink. This year we plan to be on the move. We are doing a roll out, which is more like a bike jam, popular in many cities in Europe and the U.S.,” Ferrer says.

The installation starts at The Forks for a two-hour rink before setting off to check out the various exhibits on the night.

There are plans afoot to sync the roll out to the Nuit Blanche app to track the roller skaters live as they move through the city.

“We end at the WAG-Qaumajug for the Truth and Reconciliation Street Party. We plan to glow orange in solidarity and lead people to this very important exhibit.”

— AV Kitching

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Kookums Lounge

• Stephen Juba Park
• 6 to 11 p.m.

Wander into the fold of Kookums Lounge for an evening of community building, storytelling and intercultural exchange.

This riverside installation from curator Jaimie Isaac, an Anishinabe ikwe member of Sagkeeng First Nation with settler ancestry, takes the form of a tipi filled with sound, light and archival photo projections.

Instead of animal hide, Isaac has used repurposed sails and tarps to cover the structure, which is supported by the Winnipeg Arts Council. The materials are symbolic of the historic seafaring migration of immigrants to Winnipeg and the modern tent cities constructed by homeless residents.

The pattern of a kookum scarf — a colourful floral fabric that has come to signify the relationship between Indigenous communities and Ukrainian settlers — has also been incorporated into the design.

Tipis traditionally represent the shelter of a woman’s skirt. Isaac invites “storytellers and nappers to rest in the space, listen to one another and reflect on the place (the tipi) stands” on Waterfront Drive at the banks of the Red River.

— Eva Wasney

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Porter-Milady ghost-sign launch

• McDermot Avenue at Rorie Street
• 8:30 p.m. to midnight

A bit of Exchange District history will glow in the dark Saturday night.

The Porter Building, a six-storey brick and stone warehouse built at the corner of Rorie Street and McDermot Avenue in 1906, is the site of the neighbourhood’s second illuminated ghost sign, which will be lit up permanently.

When Winnipeg urban archeologist Matt Cohen and Craig Winslow, an artist and designer with the Portland, Ore., firm Light Capsules, flick the switch at 8:30 p.m., two faded pieces of advertising that adorn one of the exterior walls of the building will glow in the dark.

James Porter and Company, which began selling household goods in 1902, painted a sign advertising its crockery, china, glassware, lamps, silverware and cutlery on the western exterior wall’s top floor of the structure when it moved into the building in 1906.

The Galpern Candy Company took over the building in 1943 after Porter closed, and painters slapped advertising “the home of Milady Chocolates,” over the Porter sign. The longtime city business closed in 1973.

Eighty years later, the signs blend into each other, with the faded yellow Milady sign partially obscuring the Porter words.

The Light Capsules project, which should last about seven years before projectors’ light bulbs burn out, alternates between how the Porter sign would have looked in 1906, the Milady sign in 1943 and how they look in 2023 during the day.

The Porter-Milady sign is the second permanently illuminated ghost sign in the Exchange. Cohen and Winslow set up solar-powered projections in 2017 of a three-layered sign at 281 McDermot Ave., which display signs advertising Stobart Sons & Co., painted in 1907, Christie Grant Mail Order, created in 1915, and Barber-Ellis Envelope Manufacturing, which painted over the other two ads in 1922.

— Alan Small