The Eastside Culture Crawl is the largest visual arts festival of its kind in Canada and this year is celebrating its 25th anniversary.

Vancouver’s Eastside--an area bounded by Columbia Street to the west, Victoria Drive to the east, 1st Avenue to the south, and Burrard Inlet to the north--is home to the largest concentration of artists in Canada.

We talk with Esther Rausenberg the Executive Director of the Eastside Culture Crawl Society, which organizes the annual event.

After a scaled-back festival in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s festival is back with an open-house weekend from November 18-21. Rausenberg adds, “we've added a curated catalog. There's about 120 artists who are included in it, and that gives you a really good sense of the breadth of mediums that artists are working in and gives you a good idea as to what's going to be seen at the time. We've also added virtual artists talks.”

When asked what’s special about the Crawl, Rausenberg says, “It is that sense of discovery and...not expecting something that you're seeing,...even though I've looked at probably, you know, every single artist on the website, when you see the work in person it's quite different.”

Listen to her interview below.