CBC News
July 16, 2017
Parr Josephee couldn’t take his eyes off the sky-high piece of artwork that graces what used to be a blank wall in the heart of the ByWard Market.
The 18-year-old from Cape Dorset, Nunavut mentored four other Inuit youth to create a massive, colourful mural of a large bowhead whale on the wall of the Bell Media building on George Street.
The mural depicts a tale of a hunter who found a whale that had a more than 100-year-old harpoon deep inside its body.
The team of youth artists spent 11 days this month painting the wall before unveiling it to the public on Sunday. For two of them, it was their first time being in a large city.
“People from the condos, they come down and they say, ‘Oh, I’ve been watching you painting this. It’s been amazing. I don’t know what it was at first, but now I can see the scale of it, the shape of it and now I know it’s a whale,'” Josephee told a crowd of people at the unveiling.
“So, it’s people coming by, getting to know [the kids].”