When locals and visitors enter the village of Sutton, they are now greeted by 15 double sided banners installed on the lamp posts on Main Street.
The goal with the banners is to highlight the work of different Sutton artists and to add a pop of colour to the centre of town during the winter season. The banners depict drawings, paintings, sculptures, and other mediums and they will stay in town up until the month of May.
The initiative is driven by Sutton Tourism, who presented the project to the municipality last year. The project was accepted and it was incorporated in the 2022 budget.
As a part of the project, Tourism Sutton has also reserved a space on its website that lists the artists chosen for project with their artwork and contact information.
“We have a lot of artists in Sutton, we have museums, we have a lot of culture, and nothing represented our artists. We had this idea of trying to find a way to show them to the population because they have so much beautiful artwork that we found that putting them on the banners was the best way,” said Heidi Vanha, general coordinator of Sutton Tourism.
The project was carried out with the help of the Corporation de Developpement Economique de Sutton and two local artists that sit on the board of directors of the Corporation Gaétan Boulais and Brigitte Normandin.
After sending out more than 60 emails to Sutton artists, Vanha said they received a positive response and that artists immediately started sending in some of their work.
The Arts Sutton Gallery participated by providing a list of contact information for all its artist members.
“From that point we said okay, awesome, the project is going to work. So what’s the next step? We have to choose. I can’t choose and obviously Gaétan and Brigitte can’t because some artists you can actually recognize their work. I really wanted someone from the outside that didn’t know,” noted Vanha. “We wanted it to be fair.”
Marie-Claude Plasse, cultural agent for the Town of Sutton, and Anne Lord, owner of the clothing boutique Urbaine des Champs, accepted the opportunity to form the selection committee.
“They had an evaluation grid in the end. The artwork was numbered so nobody knew who was who. It was really fair,” said Vanha.
Vanha estimates that there was up to 75 pieces of artwork to choose from.
“That’s why we went with an evaluated grid that was numbered. There was like five questions and they would have to put one to five. Whoever had the highest numbers in the end were chosen,” said Vanha.
A part of the project was to fill in the centre of town with something colourful and eye-catching from October up until the month of May.
“From the moment the fall festival ends at Mont SUTTON, which is around Thanksgiving in October, we don’t have anything to put up. (…) In the summer, all of the festivals start, all the events, so I have plenty of other banners to put up,” noted Vanha. “It was really that fall, winter, spring season when there’s not much going on for festivals. There was nothing colourful in town.”
Vanha told CIDI that if the project continues to garner interest from the artist community in Sutton, there is the possibility of rotating the banners to showcase the work of other artists.
“Some people were like ‘oh you forgot to contact me.’ It wasn’t because I wanted to, we had so many emails. So of course if in the future, maybe not next winter, but for sure the project, if I have enough people interested, it’s definitely something that I’ll do again,” she said.
For those artists that didn’t get the chance to participate in the project this year, Vanha said she is more than willing to include their name on the Tourism Sutton website.
“We actually have a nice place now on our website where we put all of the pictures of all of the different artist’s artwork with their email. If they weren’t in the project or they weren’t chosen, they can be on the website,” mentioned Vanha.
For more information on the artists participating in the project, visit the Sutton Tourism website.
Listen to the full interview below: