Can visual art save empty storefronts downtown? Montreal is betting on it – Montreal Gazette

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Can art act as a magnet for business? Some major Montreal landlords are lending their properties to an experiment aimed at finding out.

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Thirty vacant retail spaces are being made available to selected visual artists for three months as part of a new initiative designed to revitalize the city’s downtown core and showcase contemporary works of art — as well as the storefronts that house them.

Called Créer des ponts (or Building Bridges), the event begins Thursday and is due to run until Oct. 15. The pop-up workshops, most of which are at street level, will be open to the public free of charge. Ten glass cubes, deployed throughout the city, will also display artworks.

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“This is about establishing a dialogue between two solitudes: commercial real estate, which has been hit hard by the rise of e-commerce, and emerging artists who are under-financed and don’t yet have a network that allows them to live off their art,” organizer Frédéric Loury, who runs the Art Souterrain festival, told the Montreal Gazette. “The pandemic seemed like the perfect time to do this.”

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Vacant storefronts have been an issue in Montreal for years, and the problem was made worse by COVID-19, which pushed many consumers to shop online and shun physical stores. Months before the pandemic, a commission on empty retail spaces recommended putting together temporary initiatives to fill the vacant storefronts.

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Commercial vacancies in Montreal’s downtown core rose to 34 per cent in the first quarter of 2021 from 28 per cent three months earlier, according to a report published in May. Twenty-four per cent of Ste-Catherine St. W. storefronts stood empty.

Most of the 22 buildings that are taking part in Créer des ponts are located downtown. They include landmarks such as Place Ville Marie, Complexe Desjardins and Place des Arts. Artists will also ply their trade at the Eaton Centre, the Palais des congrès, the Rockland Centre and the Nordelec building in Pointe-St-Charles, among others.

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Each location will feature two resident artists, whose works will be displayed and available for sale. Visitors will have access to the workshops at the back where creation occurs.

Créer des ponts has a $1.1-million budget — the majority of which comes from the city of Montreal — to clean, paint and transform the properties, said Loury.

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Key business partners include landlords such as Allied Properties, Cominar and Ivanhoé Cambridge, which are donating space. In return, they get a chance to display their locations in optimal conditions, argues Loury.

“It sends a strong signal to the neighbourhood,” he said. “Instead of an abandoned storefront, you have a space that’s been transformed into a sort of jewelry box. The place is clean and the artwork is interesting. A prospective tenant will immediately see the potential.”

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Allied, which owns properties such as Old Montreal’s World Trade Centre, is one of the event’s biggest backers. The Toronto-based landlord has put some 19,000 square feet of space at the disposal of artists because the event fits the company’s values, according to André Sirois, Allied’s director of construction for Eastern Canada.

Under a program called Make Room for the Arts, Allied already rents space to artists at below-market rates, which it says contributes to boosting occupancy levels.

“Finding space for artists is in our DNA,” Sirois said in a phone interview. “Giving these spaces back to the community is the highest and best possible use. If an initiative like this can bring back people downtown and help to revitalize the area, even better.”

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Adds Geneviève Touchette, general manager of Le Central food court, which is making some of its meeting rooms available: “We’re hoping this initiative restores some value to the real estate. It should also improve the consumer experience.”

As for the artists, who often struggle to find affordable workshop space, they now get the chance to create in an ideal setting. Loury says his organization will also facilitate contacts with museum curators and gallery owners.

Taking part in the event “is an absolute dream,” said textile artist Tina Struthers, a transplanted South African who will be displaying her works inside a Crescent St. location owned by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. “To be in a commercial space like that, around the corner from the museum, is exceptional. As artists, the pandemic really hit us hard in terms of cancelled projects, so to have that opportunity to exhibit your work is really refreshing.”

And while Loury acknowledges his event won’t solve all of Montreal’s woes, “it’s one of the first steps in getting culture and real estate to work together,” he said. “If we can create durable links between the two, a major battle will have been won.”

For more information on Créer des ponts, including opening hours of individual sites, visit artsouterrain.com/en/creer-des-ponts-2021.

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