‘She’s all of us’: mural illustrates ties between Winnipeg and grateful Ukrainian newcomers

Blue and yellow ribbons wrapping around the city’s skyline show the deep connection between Ukraine and Manitoba in a new mural.

Take Pride Winnipeg, a downtown non-profit that seeks to clean up and inspire civic pride, unveiled its newest mural, titled “Pray for Ukraine” in the Exchange District on Monday.

It pictures a Ukrainian woman in traditional clothing stoically gazing into the distance as butterflies and a dove — which symbolize hope, peace and rebirth — flutter around the Esplanade Riel and Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

The installation at Exchange District BIZ at 492 Main St. was painted by Jennifer Mosienko, who’s worked on more than 40 murals across the city.

In Marseille, a shadow becomes art in Banksy’s latest street mural

MARSEILLE, France (AP) — The lighthouse appeared overnight. Painted on a wall tucked away in a quiet Marseille street, its beam aligned perfectly with the real-life shadow of a metal post on the pavement. At its center, stenciled in crisp white, are the words: “I want to be what you saw in me.”

Banksy had struck again.

On Friday, the elusive British street artist confirmed the work by posting two images on his official Instagram account — without caption or coordinates. Fans quickly identified the location as 1 Rue Félix Frégier, in the Catalans district of Marseille’s 7th arrondissement, near the sea.

Since then, crowds have gathered at the site. Tourists snap photos. Children point. Locals who usually walk past the building stop to take a closer look.

Dive-bombed or not, Vancouverites are still pro-crow, researchers say

VANCOUVER - Along her journey towards understanding Vancouver's crows, psychology professor Suzanne MacDonald says she made a friend.

It's a crow that brings her gifts after she set up a bird feeder at her home in the neighbourhood of Kitsilano.

Once, it was a barnacle-covered shell, which MacDonald treasures. Other times, it was "bits of garbage" that MacDonald doesn't fancy much, though she "appreciates the sentiment."

"I think he definitely recognizes me. When other people go out on my patio, he doesn't come to them. He knows me," said MacDonald.

First solo show in WAG-Qaumajuq’s flagship Qilak gallery

Since his last gallery show in Winnipeg, Abraham Anghik Ruben’s focus has shifted from introspection to cross-cultural exploration.

That personal and artistic arc is currently on display at WAG-Qaumajuq in a sprawling retrospective of the master Inuit sculptor’s 50-year career.

It’s a fitting full-circle reunion.

The Winnipeg Art Gallery hosted Ruben’s first solo show at a major institution in 2001 and now, nearly 25 years later, the artist’s work is featured in the first solo exhibit in Qaumajuq’s main Qilak gallery.

Échos croisés: le projet des sœurs Rezaei

L’exposition Échos croisés, proposée par Mancy et Farzaneh Rezaei a pris place, le 27 mars dernier, dans la galerie contemporaine de la maison des artistes visuels francophones.

Dans l’art comme dans la vie, Farzaneh et Mancy sont sœurs. Basées aujourd’hui à Montréal, les deux artistes sont originaires d’Iran. “Nous nous sommes installées au Canada il y a 11 ans,” explique Farzaneh, tout en précisant que ce choix fut motivé par l’envie de découvrir d’autres arts et d’avoir de nouvelles inspirations. C’est la quatrième fois que les deux artistes exposent en duo. Un tandem artistique qui existe depuis toujours, et qui a commencé à présenter leurs œuvres ensemble en 2018.

À travers “Échos croisés,” les sœurs offrent des propositions aussi différentes que complémentaires. C’est la première fois que les deux artistes, en parallèle de leur métier de médiatrices au Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, exposent en dehors du Québec. Dans cette exposition, elles explorent le féminisme et la migration, des thématiques auxquelles elles ont pu être confrontées dans leurs parcours personnels. L’exposition composée d’une trentaine d’œuvres est ouverte aux visiteurs jusqu’au 10 mai.

Corps féminin

Runway show focuses on treasures, not trash

Some of Manitoba’s best-known public figures — including radio host Ace Burpee, activist Mitch Bourbonniere and politician Nahanni Fontaine — walk the catwalk in a fashion show at 109 Higgins Ave. tonight.

Une exposition gourmande ouvre ses portes au CCFM

La galerie d’art du Centre culturel franco-manitobain accueille une nouvelle exposition consacrée à la céramique mystérieusement intitulée Rester sur sa faim. L’artiste Solange Roy y présente des créations gourmandes dès le 20 mars.

À seulement 24 ans, la jeune artiste originaire de Winnipeg expose pour la première fois en solo son travail autour de la céramique.

Et pour ce faire, la nouvelle exposition de la galerie d’art du CCFM prend le nom intriguant suivant Rester sur sa faim… Ici Solange Roy y explore sa relation avec la nourriture, un sujet qui la touche personnellement.

“Cette exposition représente ma relation compliquée avec la nourriture. Cela me touche car ce n’est jamais une relation parfaite, particulièrement pour les femmes j’ai l’impression,” explique-t-elle à propos d’un trouble de l’alimentation développé pendant son enfance.

Le logo d’un francophile de cœur

Originaire du quartier Tyndall Park à Winnipeg, c’est pourtant à Saint-Boniface que l’anglophone Jonato Dalayoan a choisi de s’installer il y a 22 ans. “C’était mon premier domicile, et depuis je suis toujours resté ici avec ma femme et mes enfants.”

Lui-même d’origine philippine, et sa femme germano-philippine, ils ont pleinement embrassé Saint-Boniface, sa culture francophone, et bien sûr son Festival du Voyageur. “Mes enfants vont à l’école d’immersion française et parlent couramment le français, affirme-t-il avec fierté. Je les appelle mes francopinos! En fait, ils parlent très bien le français mais pas du tout le filipino.”

Le Festival du Voyageur, la famille Dalayoan y a donc passé de nombreuses journées à travers les années. Jonato Dalayoan raconte: “Je vis proche du parc Provencher et je me souviens que dans mes premières années à Saint-Boniface, il y avait des sculptures de neige du Festival dans le parc Provencher. C’était toujours quelque chose que j’avais très hâte d’aller voir.

“Aujourd’hui, on va souvent au parc du Voyageur avec les enfants. Le Festival a beaucoup changé dans les cinq à dix dernières années, il y a beaucoup de nouvelles activités, de nouveaux spectacles, de nouvelles musiques, c’était vraiment cool pour toute la famille!”

Quand les émotions se dégagent des formes et des couleurs

L’artiste peintre Xavier Mutshipayi présente pour la première fois ses créations dans l’exposition Nouveaux Horizons à la galerie d’art du Centre culturel franco-manitobain (CCFM).

Il s’agit de la troisième présentation solo du peintre originaire du Congo. L’occasion pour lui de présenter une nouvelle facette de son travail. En effet, si Xavier Mutshipayi est plutôt connu pour son style réaliste, ses créations évoluent ici vers l’art abstrait et l’impressionnisme.

La galerie du CCFM accueille environ une dizaine de tableaux dont la majorité ont été conçus pour l’évènement. Parmi eux, quatre toiles arborent un style abstrait tandis que quatre autres reprennent les codes du mouvement impressionniste. Cette évolution artistique s’est développée au fil des années pour Xavier Mutshipayi.

“Comme pour l’homme, l’artiste grandit et change avec le temps. L’endroit où j’habite et mon parcours de vie m’inspirent dans mes créations. C’est pourquoi il y a beaucoup de portraits dans mes œuvres. À force de travailler, j’ai développé un style, une patte.”

New Jenna Rae cookbook focuses on bakers’ favourite home recipes

There’s a sweet new edition on the way.

Sisters Jenna Hutchinson and Ashley Kosowan are expanding their successful local bakery business with a new cookbook venture. Jenna Rae Cakes at Home: Our Favourite Recipes to Enjoy with Family and Friends hits bookstores Oct. 8 and features more than 100 colourful, family-friendly recipes.

The cookbook is a followup to their first release, Jenna Rae Cakes and Sweet Treats, and is a labour of love that brings together the twins’ individual interests.

“Ash was meant to make cookbooks,” says Hutchinson, whose passion for cake design prompted the entrepreneurial siblings to open their first Jenna Rae Cakes shop in 2014.

Riel, le lien entre les francos d’Amérique

Pour Jocelyn Jalette, bédéiste de Joliette, au Québec, pas besoin d’être métis, ou manitobain, ou encore francophone en milieu minoritaire pour apprécier le combat, le triomphe et la tragédie de Louis Riel. Et voici pourquoi.

Dans La République assassinée des Métis, la bande dessinée de Jocelyn Jalette qui vient tout juste d’être publiée aux Éditions du Phoenix (www.editionsduphoenix.com), des personnages fictifs côtoient Louis Riel et Gabriel Dumont, mais aussi les politiciens Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, Louis-Joseph Papineau et Honoré Mercier.

Une palette de personnages pour mieux placer la résistance des Métis dans un contexte francophone plus large, comme le souligne l’auteur de 47 ans :

“Les liens sont étroits entre la résistance des Métis, Louis Riel et les francophones du Québec. Surtout quand on se rappelle que la lutte pour assurer un statut d’égalité entre le français, l’anglais, et les cultures francophone et anglophone, c’est l’affaire de tous les francophones.”

How Canadian box-office hit ‘Undertone’ got to the screen without public funding

TORONTO - Personal grief, a potentially haunted house and a sound-driven sense of dread helped turn “Undertone” into one of the year’s most unexpected horror hits.

But the biggest twist? The director says he made the film with no government money after his previous work was rejected by Canada’s public film funders.

The Toronto-shot film opened to $9.3 million at the North American box office over the weekend — a scary good debut for a movie made on a $500,000 budget.

For director Ian Tuason, his debut feature’s unlikely path to the big screen is also a quiet critique of how Canadian films get financed.

Brandon-based visual artist focuses on precarious labour in series of portraits

What you’ll notice first in the portraits by Lisa Wood on view now at the School of Art Gallery at the University of Manitoba are not the subjects’ faces, but their hands.

Gesticulating hands, reaching hands, hands covering a mouth. Tattooed hands. Hands attached to wrists wrapped with friendship bracelets and smartwatches, tracking thousands of steps logged over hundreds of shifts. Hands that perform labour.

“I love painting hands,” the Brandon-based visual artist says. “I think that when a viewer sees faces, they’re thinking about that particular person, but when a viewer sees hands, they’re personal, but I think that we can connect more or think more about ourselves when we’re seeing somebody else’s hands.”

The paintings are part of a suite of works that compose SHIFT/WORK: Portraits of Precarity, a multimedia research-creation project that shares the experiences of rural Manitobans navigating precarious work — whether that’s insecure, short-term or contract-based employment — created from more than two years of research.

Stars hit Paris runways, but fall’s real trend was dressing for hard times – and real life

PARIS (AP) — The celebrities came first, as they always do at the Paris runways.

After Oprah Winfrey stole the show in the opening stretch of the nine-day week, Naomi Watts and Kai Schreiber were at Balenciaga. Rooney Mara, Diane Kruger, Alexa Chung, Elizabeth Olsen and Yseult turned up at Givenchy.

Sarah Paulson and Tracee Ellis Ross watched Celine. Chappell Roan was at Vivienne Westwood and then at McQueen, where Myha’la and Sophie Thatcher were also there. Chanel was still to come Monday, and Louis Vuitton capping the season Tuesday.

But this week was about more than the front row.

Children’s book on Ramadan put back on school shelves

A Ramadan-themed children’s book is returning to elementary school shelves in Winnipeg following public outcry.

The Louis Riel School Division announced on Friday afternoon that it was bringing Upside-Down Iftar back into circulation.

The newly released picture book by Palestinian author Maysa Odeh is about a girl and her grandmother preparing a traditional dish for their family to break their fast together after sunset.

It was temporarily pulled from schools last week following a complaint about an illustration of a map.

VistaVision, a vintage format left for dead, is revived in ‘One Battle After Another’ and more

NEW YORK (AP) — When Paul Thomas Anderson told his cinematographer Michael Bauman that he wanted to shoot “One Battle After Another” on VistaVision — a large-scale film format born in the 1950s — he had some questions.

“Question one was: Is this even going to be reliable?” Bauman recalls.

For much of the past 60 years, the few remaining VistaVision cameras have been mostly collecting dust on shelves. Though the format was widely used in the 1950s, when Alfred Hitchcock shot “Vertigo” on it and Cecil B. DeMille used it for “The Ten Commandments,” VistaVision went dormant by the early 1960s.

Yet at the March 15 Academy Awards, a movie made largely with decades-old antique cameras is poised to win best picture. Even in 2026, when most films are shot digitally and AI has begun filtering into moviemaking, “One Battle After Another” has — with film equipment borrowed from collectors and museums — showed that a vintage, analog film system can still astonish moviegoers.

Kids’ book pulled from division shelves over map illustration

A school library-technician is raising concerns about the swift removal of a new children’s book about a Palestinian family preparing to break their fast during Ramadan.

The Louis Riel School Division has taken Maysa Odeh’s Upside-Down Iftar off its shelves in response to a complaint about an illustrated map.

The superintendent says the decision isn’t final, but the case has left one elementary school employee “feeling quite uncomfortable.”

“The process for challenging books is supposed to be quite long and involved,” said the library technician, who agreed to an interview on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution at work.

Dueling documentaries illuminate the promise and perils of artificial intelligence

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Artificial intelligence's dystopian specter has spawned a pair of documentaries dissecting a technology that's depicted in the films as a ravenous parasite devouring humanity's knowledge, creativity and empathy.

The films, “Deepfaking Sam Altman” and “The AI Doc," examine the issue through different lenses while similarly illuminating why the technology evokes both existential fears and utopian visions about how it might change the world.

Both documentaries coincide with an intensifying debate about whether AI will become a catalyst that helps enlighten and enrich people or a technological toxin that insidiously dulls human intelligence while wiping out millions of high-paying jobs that have traditionally required college educations.

Dealing with AI dread

Imaginative production delivers excellent encore performances

When Brush Theatre first brought its flagship production, Doodle POP, to Winnipeg in 2022, the South Korean company was an unknown entity locally.

Not anymore: with its third visit to the Manitoba Theatre for Young People in five years underway, the highly imaginative troupe has scribbled its way into the memories of a generation of theatregoers.

While adult audiences might not appreciate a professional theatre company programming similar shows with such frequency, MTYP hasn’t hesitated to extend return invitations to Brush, which blends miming, clowning, drawing and dazzling projections into unique and approachable stage concoctions, driven by participation from a rapt, ever-changing audience.

A kid only gets one chance to see their first theatre performance, and Doodle POP is just about as fun and engaging an introductory experience one can dream up.

PTE play shines a light on cultural harms caused by forgeries

Drew Hayden Taylor explores art authentication with his signature wit in The Undeniable Accusations of Red Cadmium Light, a play inspired by the ongoing challenges to the artistic legacy of Anishinaabe painter Norval Morrisseau.

Exhibition digs into colonial ideas, societal pressures and resource use of lawns

Carrie Allison has thought a lot about lawns.

Specifically, the Halifax-based multidisciplinary artist thought about the time, money, resources and energy spent on the endless pursuit of the perfectly manicured, kelly-green squares in front of suburban houses; the colonial ideas about value, virtue, class and wealth lawns uphold; and the pressures exerted by societal expectations and full-on city bylaws to control what is a living thing.

It’s those ideas that inform we tend to care, a touring solo exhibition curated by Franchesca Hebert-Spence. The Winnipeg iteration of the show will be presented across two venues — Urban Shaman and within WAG-Qaumajuq’s permanent collection galleries — in collaboration with Marie-Anne Redhead, assistant curator of Indigenous and contemporary art at WAG-Qaumajuq.

“Lawns and grass are very much associated with that sort of, I would say, propaganda of what we value in society,” says Allison, 39, who is of nêhiýaw/Métis/mixed European descent. “They are used to tell people what they should value and how they should use their time.”

$54.7M sale of Frida Kahlo self-portrait breaks auction record for female artists

A haunting 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold Thursday for $54.7 million and became the top-selling work by any female artist at an auction.

The painting of Kahlo asleep in a bed — titled “El sueño (La cama)” or in English, “The Dream (The Bed)” — surpassed the record held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1," which sold for $44.4 million in 2014.

The sale at Sotheby's in New York also topped Kahlo's own auction record for a work by a Latin American artist. The 1949 painting “Diego and I,” depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, went for $34.9 million in 2021. Her paintings are reported to have sold privately for even more.

The self-portrait is among the few Kahlo pieces that have remained in private hands outside Mexico, where her body of work has been declared an artistic monument. Her works in both public and private collections within the country cannot be sold abroad or destroyed.

Travelling sign painter finds his groove on the move

For someone whose writing appears all over the city, Joseph Pilapil’s penmanship isn’t the best.

You’ve probably seen his meticulously formed letters above store entrances, on shop windows and decorating sandwich boards all across the city.

But when it comes to writing on paper, well, the less said the better.

“My handwriting is terrible. When I am writing out my day-to-day stuff, it’s absolutely really bad,” he says, with a laugh.

La créativité franco-manitobaine rayonne: Anna Binta Diallo expose à travers le pays

En 2025, l’artiste visuelle franco-manitobaine Anna Binta Diallo connaît une année charnière. De Vancouver à Toronto, en passant par Edmonton et Winnipeg, ses expositions se succèdent, confirmant la place qu’elle occupe désormais parmi les figures majeures de la scène artistique canadienne contemporaine.

Née à Dakar, Sénégal, en 1983 et élevée à Saint-Boniface, Anna Binta Diallo tisse depuis toujours des liens entre les continents et les mémoires. Ses œuvres explorent les intersections entre identité, nostalgie et nature, dans un langage visuel qui conjugue collage, vidéo, graphisme et sculpture.

“Le collage est depuis longtemps au cœur de ma démarche,” confie-t-elle. “J’aime réagencer des images anciennes, des sons, des fragments d’archives pour construire de nouveaux récits.”

L’artiste collecte cartes, livres et photos qu’elle transforme en compositions hybrides, à la croisée du passé et du futur.