LEFT TO RIGHT: A rendering of the new Prairie Art Gallery in Grande Prairie, Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, and the concept drawing for the new Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton.
developments in their own communities. A few years ago, Medicine Hat’s public art gallery found a new home for itself (along with its museum and archives) in the city’s $42-million Esplanade development, while further west, Lethbridge’s nationally renowned Southern Alberta Art Gallery will embark this year on a $2.9-million renovation and expansion. In June, the Prairie Art Gallery will open the doors on a new 6000-square-foot facility in Grande Prairie’s new Montrose Cultural Centre (with more to follow once the restoration and attachment of the old gallery next door is completed.) Organizers recently announced creation of the Okotoks Art Gallery in Calgary’s south-end bedroom community, featuring a Class A facility able to host travelling art exhibitions and receive provincial and federal operational funding. Within the city, the Nickle Arts Museum at the University of Calgary will be moving into a new campus home as part of the $160-million Taylor Family Digital Library. Next year, the newly named Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA) will open on the former site of the Edmonton Art Gallery in a shiny, purpose-built Frank Gehry-style building. The slogan for the project has been Building an Art Gallery of National Significance for Alberta, and the Gallery has managed to raise $20 million privately and leverage contributions of $68 million from all three levels of government, for a total of $88 million. Not bad for a dream that only began to take its first serious steps in 2004. The project planners pulled it together with an unusual level of public engagement. AGA director Tony Luppino recalls a community presentation of the building’s proposed designs by four juried finalist architects. They had 250 members of the public, each paying $10 to attend the event, with another 200 watching on closed-circuit TV. Outside, there was an additional waiting list of around 200. Luppino says research and common sense show that museum infrastructure needs to be revisited every 20 years or so, with the idea of an upgrade or rebuild in some form. Given that Glenbow has been bursting at the seams in a visually unappealing and mechanically aging bunker for more than 30 years, new plans are long overdue. This is where the loss of Spalding is most devastating for those who have been waiting for something to happen on a grand scale in Calgary. Artists, curators and culturally savvy Calgarians had high hopes more than ten years ago for the development of the Institute of Modern and Contempowww.gallerieswest.ca
rary Art, a leading-edge art gallery in two historic Telus buildings downtown. Those plans slowly leaked away for lack of funding, and a renewed focus on the Art Gallery of Calgary, a non-collecting public space that grew out of the Muttart Public Art Gallery. Plans were also scuttled for Glenbow’s own ambitions, under former President and CEO Mike Robinson for a high-profile fine art gallery in the new downtown landmark, The Bow — a project that has taken its own recessionary hits. All those culturally savvy citizens had the expectation that Spalding would take a great leap forward with the city’s fine art scene. The ambitious plans are still a good fit for a city that, despite the crisis in the market for natural resources, has acquired a lasting swagger. It would start with an art gallery, purpose-built for the showcasing of regional, national and international visual art, including work from Glenbow’s own collection. Later, other smaller or larger purpose-built entities would follow for other Glenbow collections related to western Canadian heritage, military history, First Nations life, and other indigenous cultures from Asia, South America and west Africa. Based on a campus-style model like that of Los Angeles’ Getty Museum or Atlanta’s High Museum, the art institution would mark a new beginning for a one-of-kind Canadian museum and the exposure of that missing voice Terry Rock and so many others have referred to. According to Glenbow’s current President and CEO, Kirstin Evenden, Glenbow is still committed to developing a stand-alone visual arts institution, a proposal CADA is prepared to support as part of the city’s reinvestment in cultural facilities over the next decade. CADA is requesting a piece of city-owned land and $25 million in provincial funds to be earmarked for Glenbow and, if the Art Gallery of Alberta is any example, this will then have to be followed by major community support, private donations, more government infrastructure largess and that most unpredictable ingredient of all: the right timing. In other words, the economic stars in the sky will have to shine more brightly than they are now. Maybe then, CADA’s vision statement about “a culturally vibrant city that inspires and engages the world” will be more artfully true. Mary-Beth Laviolette is a Canmore-based writer who is the author of An Alberta Art Chronicle: Adventures in Recent and Contemporary Art and the co-author of Alberta Art and Artists: An Overview Galleries West Summer 2009 49