For the Crawl, artist tidy their studios, sweep away the sawdust, scrape away the clay and present their work in a finished state, with usually just a few clues as to how the pieces unfolded. But the work you see is the result of untold hours of focused work and countless moments of problem solving: hitting a wall and persevering, and often of large financial investment. Of course, finished work is what we are striving for but for many artists, the process is where the “art” actually lies. Everyone else gets just part of the story in the form of the final piece.

This year’s festival focuses more than ever on First Nations artists and will animate sidewalks and parks with music and dance.

“We have the largest urban ‘reserve,’ certainly in Western Canada, if not Canada,” said Terry Hunter, executive artistic producer of the festival and executive director of Vancouver Moving Theatre.

The theme of this year’s festival is heart and home, so it also makes sense to honour First Nations artists when the locale where the celebrations happen are on traditional Coast Salish territory, he added.

An innovative mix of cinema and theatre, the show’s venue is as integral to the storytelling as the plot itself.

“When the commission came, we wanted to make a piece that was specifically for the Stanley,” says lead actor Jonathan Young. “Right away, through our initial creative sessions as stage jams, the obvious duality of the venue’s history as a cinema and then live theatre became apparent.”

“That’s mirrored in the central character of Alex Braithwaite [played by Young] and his kind of dual persona. There is also this backline story of the battle between the cinema and the theatre and whether there can be a radical fusion of the two that will reawaken audiences as well as overtake the extreme factions vying for audiences.”

But it is there, interestingly packed into a couple-dozen cargo containers inside the PNE’s Celebration Plaza.

The hugely popular “container art” exhibit is the brainchild of the PNE’s Peter Male.

What started out at last summer’s PNE as a small eight-artist exhibit has become wildly successful and artists are now finding it a great way to showcase their work.

Some of those involved in the art exhibit have ties to Vancouver’s Eastside Cultural Crawl, an annual three-day event in the fall where artists of all stripes open their studios to the public.

Vince Dumoulin, one of 15 artists who painted the previous Beatty Street graffiti mural on a concrete wall that stretches between Dunsmuir and Georgia streets, said his concept will reflect Vancouver’s past, present and future.

“This is a social studies textbook on a wall all about Vancouver,” he said.

The past was emerging Tuesday afternoon with depictions of Captain George Vancouver, Gassy Jack and Squamish Chief Joe Capilano, among others, painted overtop the blue that had been applied over the original graffiti mural a few days before Christmas. He and Milan Basic, the artist who headed the creation of the original mural painted during a block party for the Steve Nash Foundation for kids in 2007, will also paint representations of the present and future.

Underneath the surface, key individuals are boldly shaping new trends, embracing community and collaboration, and discovering local talent.

They are curators, promoters, managers and masterminds, and their involvement isn’t limited to their own fields: It involves breaking down barriers and seeking out new and exciting opportunities, bridging the gap between art forms, performers and their audiences; between technology and tradition, the new and the old.

They are not content with doing their own thing in their own corner, to think of Vancouver as “provincial” or “small-minded” or a “no fun city.”

They are the new movers and shakers of the Vancouver arts scene — the new impresarios, if you will — and they want to put their venues, their artists and their city on the map.

Creative Tech Summer Camps are a fun way for young people to participate in art making, learning new skills, creating the future, and making new friends. All workshops are taught by professional Vancouver artists, and are offered at affordable rates. *additional subsidies available.

W2 is located in the historic Storyeum building across the street from the new Woodward’s complex, in the heart of Vancouver. W2’s partnership with Simon Fraser University School for Contemporary Arts equips our media lab with the most current technology.

Daily details: All camps run from 9:30am – 4pm, at W2 Storyeum, 151 West Cordova. Healthy lunches are included in the summer camp fees.

Registration Info: Register at http://www.creativetechnology.org/page/camp-registration. Pay fees at:http://w2summercamps2010.eventbrite.com/

This is East Van is a community photography project that celebrates the awesomeness of East Vancouver. The project’s creative directors Erin Sinclair and Jason Uglancia feel that something special is happening in East Van, and they want to capture its essence with the help of the community.

Yes, that means you.

This Is East Van is looking for photographs of what East Vancouver means to the people who live here. They want your photographs of the places you work, live and play in East Van. They’re not just looking for those blurry hipster photos you took with that Holga either: they want everything.

By around 3:30 p.m., the line for the Cheaper Show has only expanded by about 50 people, all strategizing about how they are going to get the art pieces they want—all works are $200 and it’s first come, first serve. Although each person is the other’s competition, people are friendly, keeping each other entertained for the next two and a half hours.

For about an hour, it seems like the efforts of those who came at the crack of dawn were unnecessary—the queue has only lengthened by about a dozen people. Then, by around 4:30 p.m., what seemed like a sudden influx of people cause the line to wrap around the Storyeum, down Abbott Street to Water Street.

A new book on 100 emerging contemporary artists from around the world includes three artists who live and work in Vancouver, and will have its global launch here this Saturday.

Geoffrey Farmer, Ron Terada and Althea Thauberger are the only artists living in Canada chosen for Creamier: Contemporary Art in Culture. Creamier is the fifth in a series of art books by the international publishing company Phaidon Press. Every few years since 1998, Phaidon has selected 10 international curators to choose 100 emerging contemporary artists.

Phaidon is launching Creamier on Saturday morning at the Vancity Theatre during Canadian Art Gallery Hop. With a July release date, Creamier won’t be available at the launch, but advance copies will be on hand for people to browse, along with information on how to pre-order a copy. Designed to resemble a broadsheet newspaper in its own box, it’s priced at $45.

Along the way, Dumoulin slowly gained a rap sheet that inevitably caught up with him. By 2004, he’d been charged with theft and was routinely failing to appear in court. Run-ins with the police were almost daily, Dumoulin told the Straight.

“I was at a point where I had to make a choice,” he said in his apartment in the Downtown Eastside. “It wasn’t going to keep being petty crime. It was a decision of whether or not to get more hard-core and really dive into the criminal’s do-or-die mentality.”

Then, when he was in a rundown Vancouver apartment late one night, the police came by to check in on a friend of Dumoulin’s. One officer with an interest in art recognized Dumoulin and noticed a few of his drawings lying around the place. That chance encounter was the excuse Dumoulin had been waiting for. With his girlfriend’s help and the faith of a cop, he got out of the life.

“This is a smaller program than last year,” Redfern said in revealing the new season on Tuesday. “Obviously, without the Olympic funding, we can’t do the same number of productions — I’d love it if we were programming 365 days of the year, but it doesn’t work like that.”

It does, however, work like this: Redfern is excited about the Cultch’s usual innovative mix of alternative works from near and far, and is especially pleased the new season opens with a remount of the Rumble Productions/ pi theatre production of after the quake.

In her art, Kwan is often interested in the bigger picture, looking for ways of mass address which prompt a change in perception for her audience. This extends to her work as an adult programmer at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where she organizes interdisciplinary events (such as Fuse) that bring the public into the gallery’s spaces. Recently, Kwan organized a symposium on public art entitled “Making Space/ In the Gallery” — an exhibit which directly dealt with this idea.

The large, 1.2-x-1.6-metre image, widely viewed as a masterpiece of modern art and hailed as a photographic “tour de force” by the auction house Christie’s, carries one of Wall’s typically banal titles: “Adrian Walker, artist, drawing from a specimen in a laboratory in the Dept. of Anatomy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.”

But if the photograph fetches a price much beyond the high-end estimate of $1.2 million, it will set a new sales record for an artist who once drew freelance illustrations for the Vancouver Sun at $15 or $20 a pop.

The Cheaper Show introduces a unique concept by creating an art exhibition that showcases 200 artists with 400 pieces of art, all priced at just $200 each. It is an excellent opportunity for the arts community of Vancouver as it not only introduces local artists to one another, but also allows people with smaller incomes to buy affordably-priced art.

Over 950 artist applications from over 200 cities from all around the world have been received, and so many people RSVP’d for tomorrow’s launch that the organizers have had to move to a bigger venue in order to accommodate everyone.