Riley Brandt

Yves Trépanier, co-owner of Trépanier Baer Gallery, says more art exhibitions could help retain artists in Calgary.

In a short animated film by artists Anne Koizumi and Travis Murphy, a beleaguered group of Calgarians gather to peer into the vacant spots within the city’s fabric. Last summer, during the peak of the boom, the film “Hello Calgary!” was born out of the artists’ wish that Calgarians would actively engage with the arts, politics and urban planning. In it, historical buildings are ransacked to make way for development, The Bow rises and Calgarians go underground for a conference on solutions to sprawl.

Now a year later, Koizumi and Murphy are packing up to leave the city to pursue higher education and new opportunities in Toronto. They’re not the only ones. A wave of artists and cultural workers are migrating from Calgary, leaving a different kind of vacant spot — a void — in the city’s fabric.

What’s going on? The small arts community in Calgary is surrounded by a culture that doesn’t appreciate the arts, according to Amy Gogarty, an artist, celebrated art historian and former Alberta College of Art and Design instructor. As well, Tomas Jonsson, an artist who has lived abroad for four years, found opportunities that he couldn’t have had here, but he is now moving back to take advantage of the close-knit community and strong mentorship. More recently, what has emerged is a picture of a strong and dedicated core of people who fuel Calgary's artistic communities. With their deep connections to the national arts scene and a set of ongoing cultural, economic and infrastructure-based issues, they’re working to address long-term problems.

The arts community in Canada is tightly knit. Despite our country’s vast geography, artists tend to network with one another. They exhibit and work in arts communities from Victoria to St. John’s. Travel to many points in between is common, but a draw to the big three cities (Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver) is overwhelming. All of the artists and cultural workers interviewed have lived in from three to seven different cities; all of them travel regularly throughout the year for professional opportunities and development.

A little bit of history repeating

Calgary’s visual arts community has a strong history. It's home to some of the longest-running, most-established artist-run centres in the country, the strongest commercial gallery scene on the Prairies and a top art college that pumps out almost 200 graduates a year. Koizumi attributes much of her professional success in Calgary to the strength of the artist-run centres, their collegial working environment and exhibition opportunities for emerging artists. However, the wish she expresses in her film is that Calgarians should “care just a little bit more” about the arts and culture that she’s come to value so much during her five years here.

Koizumi’s concern is echoed by Gogarty. When she moved to Vancouver last year, her presence as a teacher at ACAD and a mentor of emerging artists was sorely missed. “When I look back at Calgary,” says Gogarty, “I am amazed at the quality of art produced, the quality of the students… the excellent relationship between different generations of artists and artists working in very different media. However, art in Calgary is a small community surrounded by a culture that generally fails to understand or appreciate the importance of the arts — that can be very discouraging.”

Renato Vitic, director of Truck Gallery, worries that part of the problem is that the visual arts community hasn't publicly celebrated its successes in order to achieve recognition from a broad public. In other words: the arts community has had a major marketing problem.

This was certainly the case prior to 2005. Back then, the community didn’t have a united voice advocating for the arts. In March 2005, the Calgary Arts Development Authority was formed to steer Calgary’s arts community into a more visible position in the public sphere. Now, the arts are a bigger part of the agenda at city hall and Calgary’s arts community has seen increases in core funding to organizations, an improved granting process, and the much-needed Art Space Investment Process is well underway. The process has reviewed applications from 15 arts groups like Stride Gallery and Glenbow Museum for capital project funding.

These vibrant individuals and organizations are helping to change perceptions of Calgary as an oil-guzzling money town famous mainly for flapjacks and 10-gallon hats. It appears to be working. Maclean’s magazine has named Calgary “Canada’s Most Cultured City” for the second consecutive year.

Perhaps the collective disbelief over this accolade suggests that even arts and culture-minded Calgarians suffer from a lack of civic self-confidence. “Calgary seems like a place that is continually trying to assert itself to remedy the idea that it's not a cultural place,” says painter Wil Murray, a Calgarian who now lives in Montreal. He has maintained ties to the community by curating an exhibition at the Glenbow Museum of emerging Calgary painters that was part of last year’s Sled Island Festival. Murray's observation is that Calgary is home to a great number of highly talented and innovative young painters — ironically enough, about half of the painters in the exhibition, Painting: Thick and Thin, attended ACAD and spent the first years of their careers here and then moved elsewhere.

Critical situation

A healthy critical dialogue about contemporary art and ideas is crucial to the development of artists’ practices. In Calgary, though, there is an evident gap.

In terms of art criticism, there are few Calgary writers and even fewer sources that publish. Calgary Herald art critic Nancy Tousley has been covering the Calgary scene since the 1970s and continues to be a highly respected national voice in her role as a contributing editor to Canadian Art Magazine. Still, an often-voiced complaint is that Calgary artists, as well as artists from the West in general, are overlooked and under-represented on the national scene.

Though the consumer market for contemporary art may be limited, print publications from across Canada like C Magazine, Canadian Art and FUSE Magazine (Toronto); Border Crossings (Winnipeg), BlackFlash (Saskatoon), Parachute (Montreal) and Fillip (Vancouver) are persevering with varying degrees of sophistication and criticality. Many of them are available at indie magazine stands and big-box bookstores in Calgary — evidence that there is a market for writing about art. Currently, no national arts magazines are published here at home. Calgary’s artist-run centres do actively publish critical texts about each exhibition and Truck Gallery just launched its 25th anniversary book with 25 texts that span each year of the gallery’s history. But these small-run books are only available at the centres themselves. The reality is that if there is limited written work that documents and engages with what is happening in the Calgary arts scene, there will be a limited audience able to find out about it.

So, is it possible that the arts community is not working hard enough at getting the word out? Calgary's lack of representation on a national scene might indicate that our academic institutions aren't succeeding to train writers, art historians, critics, or encourage writing as a component of artistic practice. Gogarty believes ACAD has done “an outstanding job encouraging writing and critical perspectives on art.” In addition to liberal studies course, the college publishes a student magazine, The Current Projects Journal, and encourages students to pursue writing gigs with local publications. After graduating, however, it is extremely difficult to make a living on art writing alone, as the majority of opportunities in print or online don’t pay writers’ fees. The publications that do, pay poorly — about 10 cents per word. And, without a strong master’s degree program in art history or criticism, emerging writers are forced to find other ways to develop strong writing.

There has been some local action to create more dialogue about art. Shotgun-review.ca was launched in Calgary in 2007 by Nicole Burisch and longtime Fast Forward Weekly contributor Anthea Black. The site is modelled after a sister site of the same name (.com) based in San Francisco's Bay Area that was started by curator Joseph del Pesco. It provides a forum for emerging writers to hone their skills and it encourages debate, since each exhibition can be reviewed by multiple authors. The national arts review site, Akimbo.biz, Truck Gallery’s soap box artist-talk series and ACAD’s stirring culture lectures are other forums where the public can tap into artistic dialogues.

Informal exchanges are also crucial to the development of a healthy community. As Koizumi prepares for graduate school, she laments the fact that in Calgary, she doesn’t “have a group of peers that challenge [her] work.” Despite attending Emmedia’s ongoing group critiques in search of this debate, she feels that within the city’s small and closely knit community, ideological and artistic differences can be divisive instead of constructive. Koizumi thinks that Calgary needs more diverse and gutsy critical voices. “People tiptoe around issues and criticisms” at risk of becoming alienated from peers and colleagues, she says, adding a scene without strong criticism inhibits artistic development.

A community to build

What’s lacking in criticism is certainly made up by friendly collaboration and mentorship. The level of collaboration between arts groups is one of Calgary's greatest strengths. Though artists and various centres are often driven to work together and share resources out of necessity, this environment promotes a level of innovation and interdisciplinarity that Calgary cultural workers and expats alike think is unique to this city. Artist Eric Moschopedis is back in Calgary after earning his master’s of fine art at the University of British Columbia Okanagan because he sees potential for new initiatives here. There are “boundaries to push” in Calgary, he says. He’s currently engaged in a community mapping project, called Imaginary Ordinary, that seeks to place art and performance in uncommon places.

Candice Hopkins, who has recently taken up a one-year post as the Sobey Curatorial Resident at the National Gallery of Art in Ottawa, says that in Calgary, in particular, she has seen a lot of support by more established artists for emergent practices. “I think much credit has to be given to people like Chris Cran, Wendy Toogood and Don Mabie (among many other artists) for fostering these relationships,” she says. Several artists we interviewed mentioned senior Canadian artist Rita McKeough as a key mentor. McKeough helped to build the scene in Calgary in the 1980s, then taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax for several years before returning to Calgary to teach at ACAD. Access to strong mentorship makes Calgary a supportive place to build a practice, and can also draw people back to the city.

Artist Jonsson has lived in several cities since leaving Calgary in 2005 and is planning to move back later this year for precisely that reason. He admires Calgary’s cross-generational community and individuals like McKeough who have a “commitment to keep the scene going and maintain the connections over time.” As former programming co-ordinator at The New Gallery, Jonsson was involved in countless local initiatives until 2005, when he moved to Halifax. There, he met McKeough before moving on to graduate school at York University in Toronto, which led to a series of opportunities in Europe. “I’ve been feeling like a bit of a tourist in all these places — it takes time to really tap into the history of a place,” he says, citing Calgary as an example of a city where he feels strong roots. An interest in bridging community, geography and artistic disciplines has carried through his practice. Now, armed with a master’s degree in urban planning, Jonsson is excited to return to what he believes is an interesting time for Calgary. “I was happy to leave during the boom, when it was harder to make the case for an alternative vision. Now the ground seems a bit looser,” he says, referring to civic dialogues around urban development, planning, arts and culture.

Real estate after the boom

Last year, Fast Forward Weekly identified studio evictions and rising rents as a critical problem for Calgary artists. Yves Trépanier, co-owner of Trépanier Baer Gallery and outgoing chair of the Calgary Foundation’s Arts and Culture granting committee, says if there are no studio spaces or opportunities for exhibitions and employment of one kind or another, then young artists are forced to go elsewhere. Even though institutions like ACAD act as a stabilizing force for our city’s population of mid-career and senior professional artists, writers and curators, the emerging practitioners are highly transient. “Emerging artists enliven the scene in a particular way and it’s very important to retain them,” says Trépanier. He sees the exodus of young artists as symptomatic of two key problems with our arts infrastructure: lack of studio space and the fact that Calgary does not have a major public contemporary art gallery. While the battle to establish such an institution has raged for two decades, moving the project past the idea stage has proved to be difficult and the dream for a major public gallery still goes unrealized.

Artists, funders and arts community movers and shakers like Trépanier became acutely aware of the studio and arts-space crisis during the boom. Now, one year later and mired in recession, getting people together on the issue seems to be working: solutions and partnerships are springing up and the changing economy is once again freeing up real estate. A group of emerging artists is currently renovating the old bottle depot in Inglewood for studio spaces and a gallery and Trépanier says that the Calgary Foundation, CADA and a number of private supporters are working together on a studio initiative designed to keep young artists in the city.

Building blocks

For those who stay and work in Calgary, a dedication to this place is intrinsic to their practice. Artist Moschopedis says that part of Imaginary Ordinary and that of his circle of collaborators, is to work towards creating the kind of city they want to live in. As Jonsson returns, he’s keenly invested in the intersections between art, community and sense of place. For Tousley and Trépanier, the success of their work hinges on a resilient art scene and they both have a huge role to play in supporting dialogue and opportunities for artists.

As for Koizumi, she’s saying “Goodbye Calgary!” for now, but like many artists who leave, she plans to maintain her strong ties to the city and arts community. Artists will continue to travel and migrate to other cities to expand their horizons — the key is building strong communities and opportunities for them to return to. The local community can only benefit from the infusion of new ideas, expertise and connection to national and international networks when these ties are strengthened. Looking ahead, Calgary has a strong and collaborative gallery system, active mentorship and cross-generational participation in the community and the backing of powerful funding agencies. From the voices of Calgary cultural workers, the next steps appear to be an arts magazine, a strong graduate level arts program, continued work towards studio spaces, stable arts spaces for our established centres and a new contemporary art gallery.

Julie Bevan, an educator, writer and curator, is the adult education co-ordinator at Glenbow Museum.

Anthea Black worked in the Calgary arts community for 10 years before moving to Edmonton to take up the posts of artist-in-residence at SNAP print studio and exhibitions manager at the Art Gallery of Alberta.