As promised in my previous post, I’m sharing more photos of the public artwork I saw in Halifax recently. I really appreciate how this sort of artwork lifts the vibe in a city, and I’m grateful for the public entities that provide financial support for them. (My city of Toledo, Ohio also has a lot of public art, and my next post will show you some of ours, which include the largest mural in North America!)

I encourage you to click on the images to enlarge them and see the beautiful details.

I always enjoy art featuring images of the natural world, and this colorful one with leaves and animals was a highlight for me when I stumbled upon it in an alley near my hotel. It was painted in 2016 but still looks good; I’m not sure if the artist has refreshed it at some point though. I always wonder if it’s frustrating for an artist to watch their work slowly degrade over time.

For the past five years, Halifax has celebrated public art with a mural festival, a week of artists creating murals in various neighborhoods while people watch them work. I happened upon some of the works from the 2025 event on this wall surrounding a parking lot.

Here’s a closer view of one of them, which appears to be a young boy lying in the grass, exhausted after a game of baseball or cricket. As I was searching for the names of these murals, I found a website that has a map of murals all over Canada. Here’s a link to MuralsCanada if you want to explore it for yourself. I found many murals that aren’t on this map though, so still haven’t found names for some of them.

Halifax is home to the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design (NSCAD), and their students often participate in making these public artworks.

This one was also near my hotel, down at the touristy area of the boardwalk. I learned about nudibranchs from this image; nudibranchs are sea slugs that range in size from a quarter inch to more than a foot long. There are around 3,000 species of these colorful and gorgeous little slugs; I found this video showing them in action — take a look.

Slowly, Slowly is Kristen De Palma‘s tribute to her grandfather Nonna as he’s moving to a care facility and will have to leave his beloved garden behind. She says he immigrated to Canada through Pier 21 in 1956; his wife had arrived a year earlier, and her immigration stamp is featured in the top left corner of the mural. I think this is such a beautiful way to pay tribute to him.

They’re creative in finding every possible place to add color to their city, as even these concrete parking barriers evoked smiles near the harbor.

And storefronts were decorated too. This one at the Black Market Boutique on Grafton Street felt so joyful!

I found this colorful image of an eagle on Agricola Street on a day I wandered around a neighborhood further away from the the touristy waterfront area. It’s by an indigenous artist, Lorne Julien. (See a picture of him standing in front of it on his website, here.) This reminds me that I should show you some of the art by indigenous artists in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS), which I enjoyed immensely. I found frequent acknowledgement around Halifax that their city sits on the unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq, and it was wonderful to see a large part of their art gallery devoted to works by members of the indigenous tribes.

“The Mi’kmaq (meeg-mah) are the Indigenous people of Mi’kma’ki (meeg-maw-gi), a territory that encompasses Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, parts of the Gaspé Peninsula in Québec, and Maine. Archaeological evidence shows Mi’kmaw presence in this region for more than ten thousand years.” — From https://discoverhalifaxns.com/plan/mikmaw-culture-halifax/

Here’s one of his works in the gallery, Two Mi’kmaq Catching Loons. It’s beautiful, although the description of their violent hunting technique was rather upsetting to my sensitive heart (I’ve not included it here.)

This moose below is by an artist considered the grandfather of contemporary indigenous art in Canada, Norval Morrisseau. The thick black outline and bold colors are characteristic of his style, and I can’t stop coming back to this one. My photo doesn’t do justice to the colors as they appeared in real life. And his heavy brush strokes remind me of one of my favorite artists, Vincent van Gogh. When I stand in front of a painting like this I can almost feel the artist standing there too, and I think it’s because of that thick paint.

This last example of indigenous art from AGNS is a simple owl printed using a carved stone to transfer the image to paper. The owl is believed by the Inuit to safely shepherd spirits after death, so I guess that explains why he’s running.

If you ever find yourself in Halifax, I guarantee you’ll find plenty of beauty, both outdoors and in. Highly recommended.