This abstract sculpture by Katie Ohe commemorates the first settlers in the area now known as Bankview. BRODIE THOMAS / For LiveWire Calgary
It started as an update on Calgary’s work towards a third-party public art body.
It turned into yet another debate about the merits of Calgary public art itself.
Councillors received an update during Wednesday’s Community and Protective Services committee meeting on the transition to an arms-length group to handle the city’s public art programming.
Jennifer Thompson, the City of Calgary’s manager of arts and culture said they were hoping to complete their efforts to do so by June. The pandemic put the squeeze on that.
“Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, we’ve had to adjust our timelines pretty significantly,” she told committee members.
Thompson said they’re mindful of the impact the COVID-19 pandemic is having on Calgary’s arts and culture sector.
“This time on has been created, again, trying to balance the impact of the art sector and potential bidders while working quickly to get individuals back to work and grow our local creative economy,” she said.
One of the challenges Thompson said is getting feedback from as many stakeholders as possible. There’s been some concern in the arts community that the external model isn’t the ideal path forward.
Thompson said they hope to be able to come back to council with an update and the final external public art proposal selected.
The update, though without specific recommendation, was received as information by a vote of 5-3.
‘What’s the value proposition?’
The direction to go down the road of an external operator of the city’s public art program was determined in November 2019. Thompson provided an update on that work.
During the update, the question of available and future funding came up from Coun. Jeromy Farkas.
Coun. Farkas asked about the current accounts of Calgary’s public art program and how it would be funded in the future.
Thompson said the current one percent (of infrastructure spend) policy would be maintained.
(It’s one per cent for the portion up to $50 million and 0.5 per cent for the portion over $50 million. It’s capped at a total of $4 million for each capital project.)
Coun. Farkas questioned how much higher Calgarians’ utility rates are because of funding the public art program. Then he went into protecting emergency services.
“At a time when council’s cut fire and police budgets, can you speak please to the value proposition? How do you defend the spending time, money and effort on this?” Coun. Farkas asked.
He later said it was impossible to defend expending resources on this to constituents.
Thompson responded.
Jennifer Thompson, acting manager for arts and culture at the City of Calgary.
Calgary wants to be beautiful
Coun. Evan Woolley closed debate with an anecdote about he and Coun. Joe Magliocca having a conversation when they were first elected and conversations were surrounding the Giant Blue Ring along Deerfoot Trail and 96 Avenue.
Oil prices were high. Times were good, Coun. Woolley noted.
Woolley said at the time they were building the Rocky Ridge recreation facility, “which is just one of the cornerstone beautiful pieces of architecture in the north.”
“And I remember saying to Joe… ‘so should we reduce the architecture and the costs in building this beautiful building and just put up a box?,’” Woolley said.
“The answer, of course, and obviously was no we shouldn’t. We shouldn’t, because building a beautiful city is important to Calgarians.”
Earlier in the presentation, Thompson noted that creative industries in Calgary provided jobs for 24,000 people with $1.6 billion in labour income. It also contributed $2.1 billion directly to Calgary’s GDP.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
