Smoke Gets in Your Eye – Avenue du Président-Kennedy at Jeanne Mance Street, Montréal, Québec

During the 1960’s, the Bleury and Park Avenue strip around Sherbrooke Street was a haven for hippies. It sprouted The Purple Unknown poster store, one of Montreal’s first "head" shops. So it seemed appropriate that a few years later, a local wall (just one block east of Bleury) sprouted psychedelic smoke-breathing lips.

The decade of the wall mural began in 1971, boosted by a project called Cityscapes, backed by the Benson & Hedges tobacco company. Cityscape yielded three murals, including one on the corner of Crescent Street and de Maisonneuve Blvd. And the public art-for-the-people movement flourished, subsidized by federal grants as well as by private enterprise. By July 1976. 80 murals had been painted on walls all over town. This landmark has been with us since 1972, financed appropriately by a federally funded Local Initiatives Project (LIP) grant. It was created by artists Jacques Sabourin and Claude Dagenais.