When Claire Jones stepped into the apartment of her husband’s late uncle for the first time, she discovered what looked like the trappings of a carnival.
Art
OPINION: Calgary's inner-city public art an impressive success story – LiveWire Calgary
For a long time, Calgary’s City Center has been seen as a place devoid of charm and character. A sea of bland, tall buildings was a common description.
That’s not actually the case.
For the past 25+ years, the downtown core has gradually become an outdoor art gallery with sculptures on many corners. That’s thanks to the City’s bonus density program that allowed developers to build bigger buildings in return for amenities like public art.
Perhaps the best-known piece of public art from the bonus density program is Wonderland, which sits the entrance to the Bow building. It’s by Jaume Plensa one of the world’s best-known public artists. Some of you may know this piece as “The Big White Head.”
Some major pieces have been gifted to the city – including the popular Famous Five Monument on Olympic Plaza and Family of Man, the 21-foot tall sculptures on the old Calgary Board of Education block.
Today, there are 50+ sculptures and murals in the downtown core, including arguably the City’s most loved public artwork – Doug Driediger’s Giving Wings to the Dream on 7 Avenue SE at Centre Street.
Not just in Calgary’s core
But it isn’t only Calgary’s downtown that’s an outdoor art gallery. Over the past three years, BUMP (Beltline Urban Mural Project) has installed 40+ huge murals on the sides of buildings scattered around the neighbourhood. Created by Calgary, Canadian and International artists, the subject matter ranges from fantasy to decorative. You can hardly walk more than a few blocks without encountering a mural.
Not to be outdone, Downtown West has also initiated a mural program in partnership with the city that today has several huge murals on the sides of buildings. One of the most inspiring murals is Chalk Drawing by Jason Botkin.
The image is of a young girl sitting while drawing on the side of the Attainable Homes building. (Attainable Homes is an organization that helps low income families buy a home. FYI: The child depicted in the mural is the daughter of one of the homeowner’s homes.)
“The murals in Downtown West have not only brightened our neighbourhood, but sparked some great conversations,” said Farnaz Sadeghpour, Downtown West Community Association president.
“The murals are community builders for us. I’m biased, but I think they often improve the buildings and create unique ways for people to identify locations when finding their way around.”
Key institutions also embracing public art
As well, Calgary Municipal Land Corporation has made public art a key component of its transformation of East Village into a funky place to “live, work and play.” In addition to several murals along the Jack & Jean Leslie RiverWalk that change every few years, major permanent public art works include:
- The SameWayBetter/Reader by Calgary artist Ron Moppett is a 34-meter long mural made up of 950,000 mosaic tiles.
- Bloom by Canadian artist Michel de Broin consists of various types of streetlights that together form look a giant flower.
- Promenade by British artist Julian Opie is a four-sided tower with 20 LED panels that display an animation of people walking.
- Trio by American artist Christian Moeller is a three-piece sculpture at the front and back entrance to the new Central Library that looks like a drinking bird.
- Device to Root Out Evil by American artist Dennis Oppenheim is an upside down church currently on a five-year loan.
Not to be outdone, Kensington Village has numerous murals on the sides of its buildings. Also, the alley on the east side of 10 Street NW is a colourful street art/graffiti gallery. Sunnyside has a growing laneway art program on garage doors. And don’t forget Chinatown’s public art that includes the Sien Lok Park sculptures.
Wander over to Stampede Park to discover several significant public artworks (murals and sculptures). By the Banks of the Bow sculpture features 15 horses and two cowboys – reputed to be one of the largest bronze sculptures in North America.
Back to downtown – where it all started
While the last 10 years has seen a flurry of new public art in the City Centre, the development of the outdoor art gallery in our City Centre began back in the 80s and 90s.
It started with the Uptown 17th Mural program along 17 Avenue SW. Then, the 4th Street Sculpture program in Mission and Calgary Downtown Association’s Benches as Art project and the sandstone sculptures in the planters along Barclay Mall (3Street SW).
Two new sculptures were recently installed at the entrance to the brand new Park Central (northwest corner of 4 Street and 12 Avenue SW) residential tower.
Both are Calgary artists – Alex Caldwell and Blake Senini. Downtown has a massive new mural celebrating Baron George Stephen the first President of Canadian Pacific Railway in the alley on the back of Stephen Avenue’s Hudson Block at Centre Street.
Last Word
You could easily spend a day wandering the streets and alleys of Calgary’s City Centre and not see all of the 100+ artworks on display.
But you would have a lot of fun trying!
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A giant concrete sculpture of a roaring lion’s head stood in the living room, enveloping the fireplace. Looming in the next room was a giant Minotaur head. Papier-mâché sculptures littered the hallways and colorful murals adorned every wall and ceiling, even in the bathroom.
Jones and her family had known Ron Gittins as an eccentric and solitary artist. But they hadn’t realized until shortly after he died in 2019 at age 79 that he had carved, sculpted and painted his passion onto the walls of his rented apartment in Birkenhead, a riverside town in northwestern England where he lived alone.
It couldn’t stay, Gittins’s landlord had said. But Jones knew she wanted to preserve the scene.
“I was just kind of like, ‘We can’t just let this go,’” she told The Washington Post.
For years, Gittins’s family worked to protect his whimsical life’s work, insisting that the apartment, “Ron’s Place,” was an irreplaceable art installation worthy of preservation. This month, the British government agreed. Historic England, a national body that designates historically significant sites in England, added Ron’s Place to its National Heritage List, the family announced in early April.
The designation, which forbids an owner from making changes to Ron’s Place without governmental consent, places Gittins’s apartment among the ranks of the medieval churches and Victorian villas that usually receive such recognition in the country, securing an unlikely legacy for Gittins’s creation. The apartment received a Grade II listing, which is given to “particularly important buildings of more than special interest,” according to Historic England.
“This was Ron, who led a very small, private life,” said Paul Kelly, a board member of the Wirral Arts and Culture Community Land Trust, an organization created to manage Ron’s Place. “Suddenly, he was being recognized as having done something of interest on that scale. … What an extraordinary thing.”
Gittins, a self-employed artist and theater performer, was an outcast of sorts among his family, his niece Jan Williams wrote to The Post. He showed up at reunions in flamboyant outfits and spoke in codes, joking that he was a secret agent. He was known in Birkenhead as the local eccentric who sometimes strutted around town dressed as a Roman centurion.
He was, Williams said, “colorful, larger than life, loud, opinionated, argumentative yet affectionate.”
Gittins kept his family at a distance. He let few people into his apartment, which his rental agreement had permitted him to decorate “to his own taste,” according to the Ron’s Place website.
Walking into Gittins’s home after his death felt like finally discovering the world he’d been inhabiting, Williams said. The lion’s head glistened with eyes made from shards of glass, and a frying pan sat in its mouth. Strewn around the apartment were smaller models, like an Egyptian sarcophagus that opened up to reveal a model mummy. While sorting through Gittins’s possessions, Williams found a postcard he had written addressed to her, saying that he couldn’t wait to show her his creations.
“Ron had created a fantasy world for his own pleasure,” Williams said. “A sort of stage set where he played the leading role.”
Williams, herself an artist and photographer, led the effort to save Gittins’s apartment. She first arranged to keep renting the apartment from his landlord, fundraising to cover the cost and forming a community organization to manage the space. Endorsements trickled in from singers, authors and sculptors who visited Ron’s Place at the family’s invitation. They landed a story in the Guardian and a video feature from the BBC.
In November 2022, the building that housed Ron’s Place was put up for auction. Buyers circled, and Williams scrambled to raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars they needed to win a bidding war. It ended in a “fairytale-style” miracle, Williams said: On March 1, 2023, the last day of the auction, a donor emailed with an offer to lend Williams’s organization most of the money it needed to purchase the building for about $400,000. The donor told Williams she had learned about Ron’s Place that morning, while reading the newspaper on her commute.
“It felt as if it was meant to be,” Williams said.
In a Hail Mary bid to delay the sale, Williams had also petitioned Historic England to list Ron’s Place as historically significant. It was a long shot — the designation is normally given to churches, inns and manors with centuries’ more history than Gittins’s apartment.
Historic England, however, heeded her request, even after Williams and the land trust secured ownership of Ron’s Place. When Sarah Charlesworth, an evaluator with Historic England, visited the apartment later that year, she immediately noticed the same floor-to-ceiling lion statue that had greeted Williams and Jones years earlier.
“I was actually thinking ‘This is a slam dunk’ as soon as I came in,” Charlesworth said.
Ron’s Place seemed to her like a striking example of “outsider art” — artwork created by people with no formal artistic training and without the intention of being exhibited or sold. It was, Charlesworth said, a facet of Britain’s history just as worthy of preservation as its churches and castles.
“Listing is not just about stately homes and chocolate box cottages,” she said. “It is about being representative and inclusive and making sure that we do represent all aspects of the nation’s history.”
The apartment is closed to visitors as it undergoes repairs. Williams and Kelly, the Wirral Arts and Culture Community Land Trust board member, said the organization has plans after acquiring the entire building that houses Ron’s Place, which also includes a garden and three upstairs apartments. They hope to preserve Gittins’s artwork on the ground floor as a museum and art space and renovate the other apartments into low-cost housing units for artists.
It’s an unlikely legacy for Gittins after devoting much of his life to the secret world in his apartment, Kelly said. But he thinks Gittins would be pleased to see others taking notice.
“Ron was a real outsider,” Kelly said. “But … this has been recognition for his work. He would be loving it.”
Art
PARIS RESTAURANT PLÉNITUDE IS REVEALED AS THE RECIPIENT OF THE ART OF HOSPITALITY AWARD 2024 … – Yahoo Canada Finance
Announced in advance of the awards ceremony for the first time ever, this accolade seeks to help raise the profile of the art of hospitality
LONDON, April 18, 2024 /CNW/ — Paris restaurant Plénitude is revealed as the recipient of the Art of Hospitality Award 2024 from The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, ahead of the official ceremony taking place in Las Vegas in June.
Located on the first floor of the French capital’s Cheval Blanc Paris, Chef Arnaud Donckele and Director Alexandre Larvoir have created in Plénitude an ode to the tradition of French fine dining, spending two years choosing the crockery, artisans, ceramicist and fabrics that help to create the restaurant’s intimate ambiance. With just 30 covers, every detail delivers an intimate experience for its diners, complete with the restaurant’s signature French elegance.
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Normandy-born Chef Donckele, who also runs Cheval Blanc Saint-Tropez fine dining restaurant La Vague d’Or, has taken on the role of master perfumer in his creations to make sauces, known as the essence of French cuisine. In his hands, each is treated like a perfume or liquid painting, created such that the sauces are the main event, with meat and fish as their complements. Under the leadership of Larvoir, the restaurant’s impeccable service team knows Donckele’s creations intimately and conveys their essence to guests stepping through the door of Cheval Blanc Paris, which was placed at No.34 on The World’s 50 Best Hotels 2023.
William Drew, Director of Content for The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, says: “We are thrilled to announce Plénitude as the winner of this year’s Art of Hospitality Award. Despite its relative youth, this Paris restaurant has been making waves on the global gastronomy scene for its flawless and inventive approach, celebrating the art of service and showing the world that French hospitality remains at the top of its game.”
Chef Donckele says: “Give yourself the pleasure of giving pleasure.” Larvoir adds: “At Plénitude, service is a wonderful encounter at every table. We seek to welcome our guests as if they were at home, to discover and understand them, to captivate and move them thanks to Arnaud’s fabulous sauces, to make them laugh too, before leaving them with the sincere wish to see them again soon.”
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Art
Canada's art installation at Venice Biennale rooted in research, history, beauty – Hamilton Spectator
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Hundreds of thousands of tiny glass beads will soon be twinkling in the sun across the entire Canadian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Canada’s newly revealed entry in one of the world’s most prestigious art fairs.
But Kapwani Kiwanga, the Hamilton-born, Paris-based creator of the work, wants you to get past the cobalt blue glass glinting in the Venetian light. She wants you to think of each bead as a character.
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