To celebrate Supercrawl, Hamilton’s year-long arts festival, the McMaster Museum of Art has supported the installation of a new mural by Shellie Zhang, which has now on display on James Street North.
The mural, called To What Do We Owe This Honour? shows a collection of miniature decorative objects against a backdrop of a sky, creating a connection between the intimate setting of one’s home and the shared realm of public space.
The project is intended to prompt reflection on the objects we surround ourselves with and the monuments we adorn our cities with, questioning which symbols reflect our current collective values, whose legacies are given permanence and what histories are given a pedestal.
Shellie Zhang, who was born in 1991 in Beijing, is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. She has exhibited in Canada and internationally at venues including WORKJAM (Beijing), Asian Art Initiative (Philadelphia) and Gallery 44 (Toronto), and was the 2017 artist-in-residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Early this year, the Museum purchased four works of art by Zhang for McMaster’s permanent collection.
Through its MMA in the Community initiative, the museum of art has previously supported Supercrawl art installations by Hiba Abdallah (2019), Robert Hengeveld (2018), John Dickson (2015), Simon Frank (2017), José Luis Torres (2016) and John Dickson (2015).