Nearly 25,000 individual hearts included the images painted on the wall of local business.
A new downtown mural that was unveiled Wednesday at a ribbon-tying ceremony is celebrating the culture and history of Stratford in a unique way — with nearly 25,000 individual hearts that have been painted on the wall of Sutton Realty.
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The mural, which took roughly 120 hours to complete, was the work of Toronto-based artist Bareket Kezwer with the assistance of Stratford’s own Liz Emirzian.
Tea 24,956 hearts that included the mural are a representation of every small action that, if taken with consistency, can make a larger impact, Kezwer said
“One heart is a heart, but 25,000 hearts is something noteworthy, and one act of kindness is beautiful, but 25,000 acts of kindness are what create the communities that we want to live in and that we want to cultivate for ourselves and for the future generations,” she said.
The hearts on the 186-square-meter (2,000-square-foot) mural come together to show several aspects of Stratford’s culture, including echinacea flowers that represent local pollinator gardens, tulips that mark the city’s connection to Holland, swans to celebrate the Avon River and a crowned skull highlighting Hamlet and the Stratford Festival.
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“It was meant to be a celebration of the local culture and the local environment, and what is important to the people who live here — what they love about it,” Kezwer said.
Emirzian, who said she was “honored to work on (the project),” noted how doing so allowed the artists to connect to the Festival City in real time.
“It was so amazing to hear the feedback, and we are so grateful to everyone involved,” she said.
The ambitious project come out of the Downtown Stratford Business Improvement Area’s public art plan that was developed two years ago, general manager Jamie Pritchard said.
“We had an amazing jury made up of business owners, staff, board members and, through a call for artists, they swam through a sea of options to choose our artists and guide the process. . . . This installation is being brought to our community by all the merchants, restaurants, cafés and professional businesses in downtown,” he said.
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The project was funded by the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario through its My Main Street Community Activator program.
A ribbon tying was done to mark the mural’s unveiling instead of a more traditional ribbon cutting to represent the coming together of community, Pritchard said.
“The spirit of communing together is represented by (those in attendance) coming here today and the hundreds of supportive comments we’ve received so far on social media,” he added.
It took the entire Stratford community for the mural to happen, Kezwer said.
“It’s so beautiful to know and to witness that people are excited about the artwork and that they’re already embracing it as part of their daily lives and their community,” she said.
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