10 Public Art Works to Discover

Artist: Ludovic Boney
Location: City Hall, on Côte de la Fabrique

Codex Populi consists of an angled flagpole 23 metres (over 75 feet) in height – the equivalent of a seven-storey building! It is Québec City’s tallest public work of art. Twenty-five necklaces hanging at one end support 9,520 suspended hooks. The hooks symbolize the founding political decisions made during the Québec Conference of 1864, a historic event that led to the creation of the Canadian Confederation.

Artist: Jules Lasalle
Location: City Hall Gardens

A work paying tribute to the 11 congregations of teaching brothers that have been active in Quebec since the end of the 17th century. A wing etched into stone is echoed bronze, outlining an arch that turns the mind to higher things. Behind them, two blocks form an open book in which a bronze flame relief replies to its counterpart hollowed out of the stone, suggesting the passing on of knowledge.

Artists: Lucienne Cornet and Catherine Sylvain
Location: 65 rue Sainte-Anne

Seeming to balance on the logs in rough water, the log driver incarnates the courage and tenacity of those who built this province. He also hearkens back to the golden age of the logging industry, of which the Price family were pioneers. 

Artist: Michel Goulet
Location: Place de la Gare

Forty chairs are set out in pairs on the sidewalk, each inscribed with passages from poems by 40 Québec authors from various time periods. They “express, in the span of a free moment, where we have been, who we are, and the joy of getting together.” The walkway thus constitutes a portrait of society from the city’s origins to the present day.

Artist: Lewis Pagé
Location: 225 Grande Allée Est

Three stylized but highly expressive male figures seem wrapped up in discussion. 

Artist: Paul Béliveau
Location: Avenue Honoré-Mercier

The six masts rising from the median strip represent Jacques Cartier’s ships drawing up at the Saint-Charles River in 1535. Atop the masts, golden metal sculptures float like sails in the wind. The omnipresent bell-tower motif recalls the role of the Church in Québec City’s development and in sustaining the French fact in North America.

Artist: Lucienne Cornet
Location: 100 boulevard René-Lévesque Est

This group of bronzes, integrated into the surrounding architecture and urban environment, deconstructs the movement of an animal in full flight.

Artists: Maurice Savoie, artist and Louis Barrette, metalworker
Location: Saint-Paul and John-Goudie Streets

This whimsical car with its circles and bright colours seems straight out of a child’s imagination. Three passengers are inside, with their suitcase in the back. The engine is an ingenious assemblage of real car parts.

Complete title: Monument to the memory of the Canadian merchant seamen from the province of Quebec who lost their lives at the sea during Word War II
Artist: Raoul Hunter
Location: Pointe-à-Carcy, near the Naval Museum entrance

This monument commemorates the many Canadian merchant mariners who lost their lives in the Second World War, mainly in the Battle of the Atlantic. The first Merchant Navy vessel carrying material for the Allied Forces was sunk at the beginning of the war in 1939. In all, more than 1,600 Canadian mariners died at sea, including 267 Quebecers.

Artist: Joe Fafard
Location: Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde Park

8 steel horses seem to be galloping along the river and Boulevard Champlain, their outlines energized with openwork motifs depicting scenes and figures from the nation’s past. A commemorative plaque explains the importance of horses in the development of New France and the Canadian West.