ARTWALKS: Vibrantly Painted Crosswalks for Yellowknife Schools

The Cause

On Earth Day, April 22, 2024, I presented to the City of Yellowknife about a colourfully Painted Crosswalk Project called “Artwalks” that I have developed for Yellowknife schools: Artwalks is a program that will enable Elementary and High School Students, alongside a lead teacher and a local artist, to create colourful and vibrantly painted crosswalks in front of each school in Yellowknife. This program will help increase safety and grow community, develop children’s abilities, and provide exposure for artists.
I will be presenting to the City of Yellowknife again on October 15, 2024 as a budgetary ask and official permission along with letters of support from the local school board(s).
We have 7 local artists who will design colourful crosswalks over the winter months (Nov 2024-Feb2025), and then the classrooms/teachers will collaborate with the artist in scaling up the design and creating stencils for use. They will also use the square footage of the different colours to calculate each colour of paint required. The classroom sessions will occur in April 2024.
Program Director will work with the teachers/artists to order the paint from local businesses. Painting is scheduled to happen in May 2024. City of Yellowknife will provide traffic-barriers for each crosswalk painting day. there will be 20 days in total (1/2 crosswalk for each day, in order to manage traffic).

Who Will it Benefit?

This project will create 10 distinct, local artist designed colourful school crosswalks at our 10 schools in Yellowknife, benefiting all children in Yellowknife, promote safety for motorists, and help enable children to lead a healthier life by giving back a bit more autonomy to children that is being lost due to fast and careless driving.
Highlighting these crosswalks will help to increase safety, but it will also build awareness that the streets belong to everyone, especially our most vulnerable users.
We hope that in designing and implementing these colourful creations in May 2025, it will bring together community members who have already signed up to help paint, it will also be touched up in years to come, and our hope is that it becomes an annual event, creating even more colourful creations to the other school crosswalks.
It will also celebrate the skills of local artists, giving them another form of advertising.
All participants in this initiative are doing this project o a volunteer basis, so if we can secure extra funding to support the artists, that would be amazing.