Montreal’s arts and finds: the city that lives and breathes culture
A bilingual metropolis renowned for joie de vivre, creativity and centuries of heritage, Montreal provides an unforgettable summer.
01 Apart from diehard Torontonians, few would deny that Canada’s second-largest city is also its cultural capital. A bilingual metropolis renowned for joie de vivre, creativity and centuries of heritage, Montreal has designated a one-square-kilometre downtown zone as its Quartier des Spectacles. Nothing to do with optometry, it translates as “district of shows” and is packed with arts venues and institutions, a vast outdoor performance space, playful projections and other public, often interactive, art. Its heart is Place des Arts, a complex of performance venues dating from the 1960s to the 2011 concert hall, and Canada’s first public gallery for contemporary art. If there’s a major cultural event in Montreal, it’s probably here;
-
02 During festival season, tens and even hundreds of thousands of people gather in the Quartier des Spectacles during summer’s long days and balmy nights. The biggest events by far, indeed the largest of their kind anywhere, are the just-ended International Jazz Festival and Just for Laughs, which routinely lures American comedy giants such as Amy Schumer and Jerry Seinfeld. This year’s Just for Laughs ends on July 29 so catch a plane tout de suite to see Dave Chappelle and Trevor Noah. The jazz jamboree presents 500 shows, many swaying to rhythms well beyond the genre’s traditional boundaries. Past headliners include Ray Charles, Beck, Diana Ross and Herbie Hancock. The majority of shows are free, alfresco affairs, from local bands to Diana Krall. Les Francos, celebrating French music from around the globe, is among the Quartier’s other festival highlights, while the big ticket beyond is Osheaga, one of North America’s most popular music festivals. Check sites for next year’s dates;
montrealjazzfest.com/en
-
03 Completement Cirque is another hot ticket each July and many of this circus festival’s shows are free, attracting wide-eyed crowds to the city’s diverse public spaces. Arguably, Montreal is the world’s circus capital, specifically “new circus”, which emerged late last century with a focus on human performers, strong stories and innovative aesthetics. Its most famous exponents are the members of Cirque du Soleil, who, alongside other internationally renowned troupes such as Cirque Eloize and Les 7 Doigts, are based here. Many of their performers graduated from Canada’s national circus school in, you guessed it, Montreal. It’s part of Tohu, also known as Circus Arts City. This complex hosts events year-round, as well as a permanent exhibition of circus artefacts drawn from Tohu’s collection of 17,000 objects dating back to the 16th century;
montrealcompletementcirque.com
-
04 Canada’s most-visited art gallery, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, keeps expanding. In 2016, yet another wing was added to this group of buildings connected via underground tunnels. Its impressive international collection includes works by Rembrandt, Rodin, Tiepolo and Chihuly, whose swirling, fiery-hued glass sculpture, The Sun, turns heads outside the museum. Most notable among the Canadian collection are otherworldly carvings by Inuit peoples of the Arctic, bold early 20th-century landscapes by Toronto’s pioneering Group of Seven and their Montreal peers, the Beaver Hall Group, who preferred portraits and streetscapes.
-
05 Numerous works outside the museum form a fraction of this city’s public art. There are 19th-century statues reflecting its French and British past, such as Nelson’s column (pre-dating Trafalgar Square’s in London) and a statue of Montreal’s 17th-century founder, Maisonneuve. An abundance of works from the 1960s and 70s, including stained glass, mosaics and sculptures, are in the underground Metro, which opened in 1966 as part of the city’s rush towards modernity. Hundreds more are from subsequent decades, most recently the monumental sculptures by Jaume Plensa and Michel de Broin installed last year. According to Art Public Montreal, there are 800-plus works to discover; its website details themed walking tours and the best for art old and new is along Promenade Fleuve-Montagne, a pedestrian route created for Montreal’s 375th birthday last year.
-
06 Traditionally unsanctioned street art is so accepted and officially supported in Montreal that it’s blurring into public art. That’s particularly true of murals, which brighten and intrigue the city, spectacularly so in the Mile End neighbourhood, where the Mural Festival has grown exponentially since its 2013 debut. Most murals created by local and international artists across this 11-day event each June are painted over with new works the next year, but some are so loved they become part of the urban fabric, such as last year’s nine-storey portrait of Montrealer Leonard Cohen. There is another large-scale mural of the late singer-songwriter downtown. Several walking tours reveal the choicest street art, such as an official one by Spade & Palacio associated with the Mural Festival.
-
07 Centuries of architecture also draw the eye in this UNESCO City of Design and home of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Only a few buildings from the French colonial period remain, such as historic Old Montreal’s Saint Sulpice seminary and the former governor’s house, Chateau Ramezay. The British took over in 1760 but continental influence continued, most obviously in the 19th-century French Second Empire-style city hall and Gothic Revival Notre-Dame Basilica. This Catholic church’s extravagant art and interior design come alive during Aura, a wondrous show of music, light and projections. The most striking architectural expressions of Montreal’s modernisation are the geodesic dome that was Expo 67’s US Pavilion (now the Biosphere Environment Museum), the jumble of cube apartments forming Habitat 67, and the 1976 Olympic stadium, dominated by a tower inclined at 45 degrees.
-
08 The deepest dive into Montreal’s past is Pointe-a-Calliere, a museum located where French settlers first arrived in 1642. It’s built on pylons so visitors can walk through several significant archeological sites. From 17th-century graves to a 19th-century insurance building’s hefty foundations, Pointe-a-Calliere already held plenty of fascination before last year’s extension. It’s now possible to walk along an 1832 cut-stone sewer to a section of the original fortified settlement’s foundations. Centuries of artefacts are displayed throughout, including objects made by indigenous inhabitants long before the French arrived.
-
09 Societe des Arts Technologiques, better known as SAT, is dedicated to digital culture. Much of its building in the Quartier des Spectacles is for research, training and artist development, but its crowning glory, the Satosphere, is where cutting-edge digital art finds its audience. This 13m-high dome forms a planetarium-style, 360-degree projection screen, where immersive experiences wow patrons sprawled on the floor. The digital music-and-video presentations created for this space can be mindblowing. SAT’s sleek restaurant, Labo Culinaire, gets creative with fresh, local ingredients, and the annual Souk@SAT is among the city’s coolest design markets.
-
BEST BEDS
10 Long after its heyday, when John Lennon and Yoko Ono held a “bed-in for peace” there in 1969, Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth was looking tired when it closed for year-long renovations in 2016. It has emerged transformed, a modernist-meets-contemporary designer destination that’s an art hotel in all but name. Most of the 123 artworks are in public areas, and feature sculptures, photographs and designs integrated into the fit-out, including the typographical montage behind the reception desk. The majority are new acquisitions by local artists, but some were retained from the original collection, including three lithographs by internationally acclaimed 20th-century Montreal artist Jean-Paul Riopelle. Suite 1742 (pictured), where Give Peace a Chance was written and recorded during the bed-in, has been made over with period-inspired furniture and artworks, a cabinet filled with related memorabilia, and a virtual reality experience.