No worse for wear

After a year of weather, wear and foot traffic, the colourful murals that brightened Graham Avenue have been given a refresh — but the artists behind them say the fading was not necessarily a failure.

The Graham Avenue murals were installed as part of the city’s pedestrian plaza pilot project, funded through Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Asphalt Art Initiative. The city said the murals created a temporary pedestrian plaza to test how people would use the downtown space.

Shortly after the street art was completed in July 2025, paint began chipping away from the designs between Carlton and Garry streets.

At the time, Cool Streets Winnipeg organizer Stéphane Dorge told the Free Press that the wear appeared sooner than expected, and cited challenges including the condition of the street, oil embedded in the pavement from decades of bus traffic and the quick timeline for completing the project.

Street artist James Culleton, who created one of the eight asphalt murals installed on Graham Avenue last summer, returned in June with a team of artists to repaint his Parcheesi-inspired design.

“It was a repaint, like the exact same design just repainted,” Culleton said. “The first time round we had to do all the measuring and scale and everything, and then this time it was faded, but you could still kind of see it.”

“Murals don’t last, but they offer a beautiful moment in art,” he said.

The city confirmed seven of the eight murals were touched up in June, saying the paint used on street surfaces is temporary by nature and wears down under Winnipeg’s climate and road conditions.

It said crews took additional steps this year to help the commercial-grade paint adhere better, including thoroughly cleaning the pavement before reapplying the artwork. Mural locations were also adjusted.

Culleton said he was approached by Dorge to submit a design for the project on the former bus mall. He’s worked on street murals and other public art projects for years, including a crosswalk mural at The Forks.

He said having to repaint street murals is common. Some of his murals at The Forks, for example, are refreshed every year because of the amount of foot traffic, winter conditions and street maintenance.

“It just sort of fades away,” he said. “And if it didn’t fade away, you’d probably end up using a paint that was too toxic.”

For Graham Avenue, he wanted to create something interactive.

His mural is based on the board game he remembers playing as a child, with the idea that people could interact with the artwork rather than just walk past it.

“I thought, well, hey, we should try to do some games so that if people want to play them, then that might be fun,” he said.

The original mural took weeks of planning and design, followed by about a day of installation with a team of artists. The repainting took about a day as well, Culleton said.

He said projects such as the Graham Avenue murals provide valuable paid opportunities for local artists.

“It’s hard as an artist to get any paying gigs.”

The city said the murals are part of a larger effort to reimagine Graham Avenue, and it is exploring the future of the space with CentreVenture Development Corp. and Downtown Winnipeg BIZ.

For Culleton, the temporary nature of the artwork doesn’t diminish its impact.

“Sometimes you make a beautiful piece of art, and it’s like dropping a feather in the wind,” he said. “Maybe you’re the only one who sees it, but it’s still beautiful.”

zoe.pierce@freepress.mb.ca