Mural art festivals

With two world-class mural art festivals bookending Montréal summers, the warm season is a great time to schedule your urban arts immersion. MURAL festival, every year in June, draws artists from around the world to artify walls all over the city, centred around the Main on the Plateau. Come celebrate for a week as block parties, sales, street food and live art take over Saint-Laurent Boulevard on the Plateau, as it closes to traffic and transforms into an open-air museum.

In August, Under Pressure puts graffiti, dance and fun centre-stage over a weekend with its own crop of international artists who create murals on over a dozen walls. There are also artists’ actions on urban property, musical performances, street dance battles and lots of kid-friendly activities to get the whole community involved.

Guided and self-guided tours

If you miss one of the live art festivals, not to worry — the murals produced by those high-colour events remain all year long for your admiration! And there are many ways to tour them to get an intimate inside scoop. Start with the Explore the Plateau’s Maze of Murals tour tailor-made by TourBird, an audio walking tour that allows you to explore at your own pace while revealing the backstory to 25 of the city’s most important art works.

Spade & Palacio is a fantastic tour company that will give you a hands-on introduction to city murals on their Montréal’s Original Mural Tour, a guided walking tour that will also dive into the history of the Main and its importance for the city. Guidatour also had a renowned mural tour, All About Montréal’s Murals, which starts on Saint-Laurent but will take you into the entertainment district downtown,

MURAL itself has an interactive map that can be a great ressource if you prefer to design your trajectory, and to learn more broadly about all the other public art pieces you might encounter while walking around, Art Public Montréal is an invaluable resource packed with info.

Street art galleries

Away from the streets and into the white cube: street art abounds in the gallery world too, and Montréal has a couple of galleries that focus on artists and art forms previously not traditionally considered gallery fodder, whether it’s spray paint paintings, found object sculptures, commercial illustration or comic arts.

Start at one of the two locations of Galerie S16, originally founded by the team behind MURAL, where you can find collectible art by some of the most famous urban artists (as broad as that category might be) both global and local, as well as newcomers on the scene.

Galerie Robert Poulin, on Saint-Laurent Boulevard at the meeting point of Little Italy and Mile End, is another must-visit where the art is often illustration-based and the artists include names that have also dipped their toes into mural art. Galerie Yves Laroche, in the Chabanel neighbourhood, is a reference in the genre: you’ll find incredible works by internationals Ron English, Banksy and Shepard Fairey, as well as by locals like Henriette Valium.

Museum-level culture

If you love the urban arts you love art, so you’ll probably want to visit both the Musée d’art contemporain and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art! Both wlays have inspiration in store thanks to world-class exhibitions. While the MAC presents thought-provoking contemporary art, the MMFA is a generalist museum that runs the gamut from contemporary to historical, bringing in blockbuster temporary exhibitions from around the world (as well as producing their own). While you’re here, make sure you pass by the Glass Court — it’s got officially the best view of downtown’s stories-high Leonard Cohen mural, painted by Gene Pendon and El Mac.

Speaking of incredible paintings and high culture, get a taste of Montréal’s active theatre scene by seeing a contemporary French play at Espace Go, on the Plateau — if only to admire the incredible mural painted all over its street-facing loading dock by local collective En Masse.

Streetwear shops

Shop for some wearable souvenirs of your trip at some of Montréal’s homegrown streetwear shops — a whole scene that’s famous in its own right. There’s the internationally worn Dime, purveyor of highly coveted gear, as well as Artgang, unofficial makers of the best tees ever. Streetwear shop OTH is a global player thanks to its e-comm shop, but its brick-and-mortar HQ is worth browsing, and they carry both international brands and local ones (not to mention their eponymous line). Another cool stop is Pony, on Plaza Saint-Hubert, where all the humorously taglined sportswear is designed and produced by local artist Gabrielle Tittley.

Artful flavours

Montréal has got you covered for delectable food and drink. If you’re looking to refuel form your mural-hopping tours around the Plateau stretch of the Main, you can go for classics like smoked meat at Schwatz’s, brunch at Beauty’s, Patati Patata or Hof Kelsten, ramen at Ramen Ya or Indian at Singh’s. And of course coffee at Dispatch.

But if you want an environment that screams “urban art”, brunch spot Café Mimosa on Saint-Laurent will serve your eggs Benedict with a side of hyper colourful art all over the walls. Same goes for The Farsides, in Old Montréal, where large-scale illustrations of Astro Boy and Betty Boop oversee platefuls of lemongrass chicken wings, lobster pad Thai and Peking duck rolls, perfectly paired with an Island Spritz. Speaking of killer cocktails, Vandale is an Old Montréal restaurant and bar entirely decorated by muralists — the project invited 15 Montréal artists to go nuts with their spray cans. The food by acclaimed chef Alex Payon and drinks by Jake Cristofaro are designed for socializing, with sharing plates of shrimp and carpaccio and a great wine list to wash it all down.