Photo: Michael Tan, courtesy of Sled Island
Photo: Michael Tan, courtesy of Sled Island
In the summer of 2018, the Crescent Heights Community Association wanted to make Centre Street feel more like a neighbourhood.
What neighbourhood wouldn’t?
“It is our main street in the city,” says community association programs and engagement coordinator Kevin Jesuino. “Centre Street is a major artery that drives straight through our neighbourhood. It’s also the meeting place for most of our residents.”
Centre Street is also part of a neighbourhood in transition, a combination of middle-income, lower-income, artists, and Chinese-Canadian seniors.
It’s also on the Green Line route, with a CTrain line scheduled to be built over the next 10 years, which will have a significant impact on the neighbourhood’s density and demographics.
“We’re a historic neighbourhood, but we’re in a transition time where it’s something vibrant,” Jesuino says.
So, with funding from the Calgary Parking Authority, the community association put out a call for artists to create a mural.
Calgary artists Katie Pearce and Tanner Hamilton wanted to create a mural that was also a bit of a portal into the possibilities of imagination, a digital time tunnel really, to help community members and visitors tap into their childhood selves, back to the time of life when everything is possible.
Pearce and Hamilton are members of Bud’s Collective, a group of Calgary artists best-known for Northern Reflections, a winter art exhibition that utilized A/R (augmented reality) technology. It asked viewers to download an app called Augle on their phones in order to view a number of art pieces that were on display in storefront windows and other spaces around downtown Calgary during the holidays in 2017 and 2018.
Pearce and Hamilton’s Won’t You Be My Neighbour? was chosen from 13 submissions, explains Jesuino, because of its engaging combination of interactive technology and playfulness.
For Jesuino, the combination of community-building themes and high tech added up to a project that he thought could turn a Crescent Heights mural into a conversation starter in all the best ways that artists and their art have historically played in revitalizing neighbourhoods in cities around the world.
“I’m very aware of artists’ role transforming neighborhoods,” Jesuino says.
Pearce, who has a degree in architecture, and a sense of possibility honed and nurtured from growing up in Nelson, British Columbia, is an engaging combination of visionary art maker, city-builder and tech nerd—and brought that sensibility to the creation of Won’t You Be My Neighbour?
“We were looking to extend people’s imagination and imagining more for your community,” Pearce says.
“It’s kind of imaginary itself—and when you watch it, you see it on your phone, but it’s kind of almost still there, but in your imagination.
“We were talking about how people can watch that and see this playful imagination, with a rainbow and a kite—almost a child-like idea of how a community can be an extension of your backyard.
“You can play in your community.”
Katie Pearce and Tanner Hamilton’s mural, Won’t You Be My Neighbour? | Photo: Courtesy of Crescent Heights Community Association
The mural is located at 902 Centre Street, on the south-facing wall of Ducktoes Computers Services.
Pearce says creating it went pretty much the way she and Hamilton planned, except the augmented reality part of the equation created a few unforeseen obstacles.
“Shadows,” she says. ‘That can stop the A/R from activating properly.
“And there were other things like glare, or portions being blocked—it just interferes with the image recognition and won’t activate properly.”
Pearce is also part of a social innovation project, a group of artists who are putting their creativity to use to seek out imaginative solutions to social issues.
Might A/R be put to use as a social changemaker?
“There are a lot of possibilities—I don’t think we’ve explored too many of them,” Pearce says. “In some ways, there’s a little bit of a social barrier right now—because a lot of elderly don’t use technology. A lot of homeless people don’t have iPhones.”
“So there are some level of barriers there,” she adds. “There’s the ability for A/R to find applications where it can be used to create change or for social innovation or different things, but I don’t know if it’s there yet.”
Won’t You Be My Neighbour?—a shout out to the children’s television show Mr. Rogers’ Neighbourhood—has been a hit, Jesuino says. It’s even become a destination of sorts.
The one downside to it all—the mural has been created on a building slated for eventual demolition, which Jesuino says will happen in two or three years, as Centre Street transforms itself.
And while that might seem transitory, Pearce says it fits the timeline of mural makers just fine. (Pearce and Hamilton have a new mural up on the basketball courts behind the National Music Centre in the East Village as well.)
“Murals in public spaces don’t really hang around for more than three years, except for exceptions,” she says.
Pearce believes murals should be turned around after a few years because they start to fade even as they help create connections that make the neighourhoods they live in grow stronger and more connected.
Katie Pearce and Tanner Hamilton’s mural, Won’t You Be My Neighbour? | Photo: Courtesy of Crescent Heights Community Association
In the summer of 2018, the Crescent Heights Community Association wanted to make Centre Street feel more like a neighbourhood. What neighbourhood wouldn’t? A major artery that drives straight through the neighbourhood, it’s also the meeting place for most of our residents.
In the summer of 2018, the Crescent Heights Community Association wanted to make Centre Street feel more like a neighbourhood.
What neighbourhood wouldn’t?
“It is our main street in the city,” says community association programs and engagement coordinator Kevin Jesuino. “Centre Street is a major artery that drives straight through our neighbourhood. It’s also the meeting place for most of our residents.”
Centre Street is also part of a neighbourhood in transition, a combination of middle-income, lower-income, artists, and Chinese-Canadian seniors.
It’s also on the Green Line route, with a CTrain line scheduled to be built over the next 10 years, which will have a significant impact on the neighbourhood’s density and demographics.
“We’re a historic neighbourhood, but we’re in a transition time where it’s something vibrant,” Jesuino says.
So, with funding from the Calgary Parking Authority, the community association put out a call for artists to create a mural.
Calgary artists Katie Pearce and Tanner Hamilton wanted to create a mural that was also a bit of a portal into the possibilities of imagination, a digital time tunnel really, to help community members and visitors tap into their childhood selves, back to the time of life when everything is possible.
Pearce and Hamilton are members of Bud’s Collective, a group of Calgary artists best-known for Northern Reflections, a winter art exhibition that utilized A/R (augmented reality) technology. It asked viewers to download an app called Augle on their phones in order to view a number of art pieces that were on display in storefront windows and other spaces around downtown Calgary during the holidays in 2017 and 2018.
Pearce and Hamilton’s Won’t You Be My Neighbour? was chosen from 13 submissions, explains Jesuino, because of its engaging combination of interactive technology and playfulness.
For Jesuino, the combination of community-building themes and high tech added up to a project that he thought could turn a Crescent Heights mural into a conversation starter in all the best ways that artists and their art have historically played in revitalizing neighbourhoods in cities around the world.
“I’m very aware of artists’ role transforming neighborhoods,” Jesuino says.
Pearce, who has a degree in architecture, and a sense of possibility honed and nurtured from growing up in Nelson, British Columbia, is an engaging combination of visionary art maker, city-builder and tech nerd—and brought that sensibility to the creation of Won’t You Be My Neighbour?
“We were looking to extend people’s imagination and imagining more for your community,” Pearce says.
“It’s kind of imaginary itself—and when you watch it, you see it on your phone, but it’s kind of almost still there, but in your imagination.
“We were talking about how people can watch that and see this playful imagination, with a rainbow and a kite—almost a child-like idea of how a community can be an extension of your backyard.
“You can play in your community.”
Katie Pearce and Tanner Hamilton’s mural, Won’t You Be My Neighbour? | Photo: Courtesy of Crescent Heights Community Association
The mural is located at 902 Centre Street, on the south-facing wall of Ducktoes Computers Services.
Pearce says creating it went pretty much the way she and Hamilton planned, except the augmented reality part of the equation created a few unforeseen obstacles.
“Shadows,” she says. ‘That can stop the A/R from activating properly.
“And there were other things like glare, or portions being blocked—it just interferes with the image recognition and won’t activate properly.”
Pearce is also part of a social innovation project, a group of artists who are putting their creativity to use to seek out imaginative solutions to social issues.
Might A/R be put to use as a social changemaker?
“There are a lot of possibilities—I don’t think we’ve explored too many of them,” Pearce says. “In some ways, there’s a little bit of a social barrier right now—because a lot of elderly don’t use technology. A lot of homeless people don’t have iPhones.”
“So there are some level of barriers there,” she adds. “There’s the ability for A/R to find applications where it can be used to create change or for social innovation or different things, but I don’t know if it’s there yet.”
Won’t You Be My Neighbour?—a shout out to the children’s television show Mr. Rogers’ Neighbourhood—has been a hit, Jesuino says. It’s even become a destination of sorts.
The one downside to it all—the mural has been created on a building slated for eventual demolition, which Jesuino says will happen in two or three years, as Centre Street transforms itself.
And while that might seem transitory, Pearce says it fits the timeline of mural makers just fine. (Pearce and Hamilton have a new mural up on the basketball courts behind the National Music Centre in the East Village as well.)
“Murals in public spaces don’t really hang around for more than three years, except for exceptions,” she says.
Pearce believes murals should be turned around after a few years because they start to fade even as they help create connections that make the neighourhoods they live in grow stronger and more connected.
*These statistics capture events produced by Calgary Arts Development grant investees, and not every arts event that takes place in our city.
Based on data from organizations funded in part through Calgary Arts Development.
Calgary didn’t just get a new library, when the downtown library opened its doors last November. It got a whole new hub that connects various Calgary artists and arts groups to the city through the portal of the library. And if the library staff has their way, the newest library and the oldest—Central Memorial—could dramatically redefine the definition of the word “artist.”
Calgary didn’t just get a new library, when the downtown library opened its doors last November.
It got a whole new hub that connects various Calgary artists and arts groups to the city through the portal of the library.
And if the library staff, including Carolyn Reicher, its service delivery lead of community engagement and strategic events, has their way, the newest library and the oldest—Central Memorial—could dramatically redefine the definition of the word “artist.”
Reicher would like Calgarians—everyone from children to newcomers to old-timers—to make the switch from consuming art to creating it.
“Art isn’t simply something you view, or listen to,” she says. “It’s something you experience, or something you create—or co-create. It involves ideas, inspiration, creativity, innovation, thought, passion, and more.”
What she doesn’t say is that the Calgary Library wants to help enable the city to connect to its creative self.
The downtown library offers an abundance of entry points for Calgarians to tap into their creative selves, at a variety of skill levels and in a number of different media.
Rozsa Arts at the Library is a new program that funds performance arts groups from around town, ranging from emerging and amateur artists and companies to established arts groups.
In 2019, the program plans to focus on five or six amateur or emerging artists/arts groups, meaning priority will be given to performing artists or small groups who might come from a range of different media, including music (vocal or instrumental), dance, theatre, puppetry, spoken word, circus or even magic.
That might not be the library you grew up visiting, but for Reicher, the secret to engaging the community is to activate it.
“The program aligns with the library’s strategic goals of empowering community by connecting patrons to ideas and experience, inspiration and thought. It lowers barriers to participation in the performing arts and supports the library as the preferred path for creative exploration, innovation and inspiration while enriching lives and realizing potentials,” she says.
Before you say wait a minute, aren’t libraries temples to literacy? There’s plenty of opportunities for readers—and listeners, who can access thousands of e-books with a free library card—at the library.
The library also has an author in residence program. In 2019, the inaugural visiting author in residence is Robert L Sawyer.
The author in residence serves as a kind of literary concierge, reading manuscript submissions if an aspiring author has written one (or a chunk of one)—but also is available to do a consultation or maybe even just to lend a sympathetic ear to someone who finds themselves stuck. The program is available to everyone, not just published writers.
There’s also an artist in residence program at the downtown library. Every three months, various artists from a trio of areas—Indigenous art and placemaking, children’s art and illustration and newcomers—take up residence, facilitate workshops, and exhibit their work. The current artist in residence is Samuel Obadero.
A performer at the Central Library | Photo: Courtesy of the Calgary Public Library
With Loft 112 almost right across the street in the East Village, and the Central Memorial Library being the home of Wordfest and its dozens of literary events, the downtown library has become part of a literary hub of the city—which is exactly the role a great library ought to play in every city, Reicher says.
And while there are those who fret that electronic devices are obliterating our love of reading and writing, she says the library has experienced quite the opposite.
“Rather than seeing a decreased interest in reading, Calgary Public Library has seen a persistent devotion to stories, language, reading, writing, and discussing of issues,” Reicher says.
“In fact, new media means new opportunity to engage people in ideas, imagination, and inspiration. As a flagship location, the New Central Library offers excellence in many areas, including unique spaces, innovative programming—the salon series Print(ed) Word, for example—and the connection of Calgarians to new resources, ideas—and each other.”
Reicher points to an entire roster of creative possibilities for anyone looking for ways to express themselves.
That includes a musical instrument lending library and free music lessons at Central Memorial, engagements with Indigenous artists, in dance, visual art and storytelling, western-themed performances that will take place during Stampede, holiday music during December, an instrument petting zoo done in collaboration with the Calgary Philharmonic, and the STREAM program for children (the “A” is for art).
There’s even arts focused program during Alberta Culture Days every September, exhibiting local visual artists throughout the year at various branches, and partnerships with festivals such as Sled Island, Fairy Tales Film Festival, the Calgary Underground Film Festival, Marda Loop Justice Film Festival, and others.
If your idea of community includes art, the library is the perfect launch point, Reicher says.
“Art is one of the things that makes us human,” she says. “Art is one of the things in which the Calgary Public Library is investing, because of the difference it makes in people’s lives.”
Calgary didn’t just get a new library, when the downtown library opened its doors last November.
It got a whole new hub that connects various Calgary artists and arts groups to the city through the portal of the library.
And if the library staff, including Carolyn Reicher, its service delivery lead of community engagement and strategic events, has their way, the newest library and the oldest—Central Memorial—could dramatically redefine the definition of the word “artist.”
Reicher would like Calgarians—everyone from children to newcomers to old-timers—to make the switch from consuming art to creating it.
“Art isn’t simply something you view, or listen to,” she says. “It’s something you experience, or something you create—or co-create. It involves ideas, inspiration, creativity, innovation, thought, passion, and more.”
What she doesn’t say is that the Calgary Library wants to help enable the city to connect to its creative self.
The downtown library offers an abundance of entry points for Calgarians to tap into their creative selves, at a variety of skill levels and in a number of different media.
Rozsa Arts at the Library is a new program that funds performance arts groups from around town, ranging from emerging and amateur artists and companies to established arts groups.
In 2019, the program plans to focus on five or six amateur or emerging artists/arts groups, meaning priority will be given to performing artists or small groups who might come from a range of different media, including music (vocal or instrumental), dance, theatre, puppetry, spoken word, circus or even magic.
That might not be the library you grew up visiting, but for Reicher, the secret to engaging the community is to activate it.
“The program aligns with the library’s strategic goals of empowering community by connecting patrons to ideas and experience, inspiration and thought. It lowers barriers to participation in the performing arts and supports the library as the preferred path for creative exploration, innovation and inspiration while enriching lives and realizing potentials,” she says.
Before you say wait a minute, aren’t libraries temples to literacy? There’s plenty of opportunities for readers—and listeners, who can access thousands of e-books with a free library card—at the library.
The library also has an author in residence program. In 2019, the inaugural visiting author in residence is Robert L Sawyer.
The author in residence serves as a kind of literary concierge, reading manuscript submissions if an aspiring author has written one (or a chunk of one)—but also is available to do a consultation or maybe even just to lend a sympathetic ear to someone who finds themselves stuck. The program is available to everyone, not just published writers.
There’s also an artist in residence program at the downtown library. Every three months, various artists from a trio of areas—Indigenous art and placemaking, children’s art and illustration and newcomers—take up residence, facilitate workshops, and exhibit their work. The current artist in residence is Samuel Obadero.
A performer at the Central Library | Photo: Courtesy of the Calgary Public Library
With Loft 112 almost right across the street in the East Village, and the Central Memorial Library being the home of Wordfest and its dozens of literary events, the downtown library has become part of a literary hub of the city—which is exactly the role a great library ought to play in every city, Reicher says.
And while there are those who fret that electronic devices are obliterating our love of reading and writing, she says the library has experienced quite the opposite.
“Rather than seeing a decreased interest in reading, Calgary Public Library has seen a persistent devotion to stories, language, reading, writing, and discussing of issues,” Reicher says.
“In fact, new media means new opportunity to engage people in ideas, imagination, and inspiration. As a flagship location, the New Central Library offers excellence in many areas, including unique spaces, innovative programming—the salon series Print(ed) Word, for example—and the connection of Calgarians to new resources, ideas—and each other.”
Reicher points to an entire roster of creative possibilities for anyone looking for ways to express themselves.
That includes a musical instrument lending library and free music lessons at Central Memorial, engagements with Indigenous artists, in dance, visual art and storytelling, western-themed performances that will take place during Stampede, holiday music during December, an instrument petting zoo done in collaboration with the Calgary Philharmonic, and the STREAM program for children (the “A” is for art).
There’s even arts focused program during Alberta Culture Days every September, exhibiting local visual artists throughout the year at various branches, and partnerships with festivals such as Sled Island, Fairy Tales Film Festival, the Calgary Underground Film Festival, Marda Loop Justice Film Festival, and others.
If your idea of community includes art, the library is the perfect launch point, Reicher says.
“Art is one of the things that makes us human,” she says. “Art is one of the things in which the Calgary Public Library is investing, because of the difference it makes in people’s lives.”
A performer at the Central Library | Photo: Courtesy of the Calgary Public Library
*In the fall of 2017, Calgary Arts Development commissioned Stone-Olafson to complete market research with Calgarians about their engagement in arts. The research design was completed by Stone-Olafson in collaboration with Calgary Arts Development. A representative sample of 1,004 Calgarians participated in an online survey, and was balanced to be representative of the general population. Calgary Arts Development published this survey in 2018. It can be found here.
Arts-Goers in Their Communities: Patterns of Civic and Social Engagement, National Endowment for the Arts, October 2009.
Good Host Program | Photo: Courtesy of Inside Out Theatre
Inside Out is a disability theatre company equally invested in artistic excellence, community development, and deepening our culture’s accessibility. They offer community-based drama programs to Calgarians with disabilities, and produce and present plays created by artists with disabilities and their allies that insist on and celebrate their place in the public sphere. They work to improve theatre’s accessibility for audience members and to ensure their equity and dignity in attending performing arts in Calgary. Their Good Host Program opens up the theatre-going experience by facilitating accessible performances like ASL interpreted nights, audio described plays, and relaxed performances.
THIRD ACTion Film Festival celebrates what has become known as life’s third act—a term that has been around for more than a decade and was made famous by Jane Fonda with her 2011 TED Talk. For the vast majority of Canadians, the third act will be the last three decades of our life. THIRD ACTion Film Festival celebrates ageing and the accomplishments of older adults to help speed along an age-positive culture shift and empower everyone to envision their best third act. The time has come to rejoice in the vibrancy, promise, and joy of our third act because let’s face it, we don’t have a choice about getting older!
President & Executive Director Mitzi Murray | Photo: Courtesy of THIRD ACTion Film Festival