You’ve seen it on tote bags, craft-market earrings and beer cans. But who made the East Van Cross?
The illuminated sculpture at Clark Drive and East 6th Avenue is the work of artist Ken Lum, who grew up in Strathcona. The City of Vancouver commissioned it as part of the public art program for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and this year it’s a Best of Vancouver winner for Best Public Art Installation.
From a warning to a badge of honour
Lum based the piece on an old graffiti symbol, the kind scrawled on dumpsters, abandoned buildings and alley walls. Back then it read as a signal to outsiders that they’d wandered into the rough side of town. Lum’s original title for the work is Monument to East Vancouver, while the City’s public art registry catalogues it as Monument for East Vancouver.
Today the neighbourhood is far from that image, and the cross has turned into a symbol of pride, and a design that other local makers keep reinterpreting.
Not only about pride
What stands out is that Lum doesn’t see it as pure celebration. He points out that the work also carries fear, religiosity and survival, and that his own formative years in East Van left a mark, for better or worse. He has even joked that he sees the illuminated cross as his future tombstone, a marker people will associate with him long after he’s gone.
It’s a reminder that the symbols a city loves most often began as something more complicated, and that public art can hold both the grit and the glow.
Where’s your favourite East Van Cross sighting? Tell us below.
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