ARTISTS DRAWING ATTENTION
Diverse group receive recognition
Performers from the Mile Zero Dance Society interpret a show called RV There Yet? in front of city hall Monday night before the Mayor’s Celebration of the Arts honoured the diverse arts and culture scene in Edmonton. See story and a list of winners
With its annual snapshot of what was and what will be in Edmonton’s swinging, multi-limbed arts scene, the Mayor’s Celebration of the Arts pushed agendas of sparkling creativity, enduring innovation and diverse empowerment Monday night at City Hall.
Presented by the Professional Arts Coalition of Edmonton, the 30th annual love-in of art, government and private patronage awarded big backpats to focused workhorses such as the dance community’s Tamara Bliss — who took the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award — and CKUA’s former CEO Ken Regan, awarded the Excellence in Arts Management.
Regan recently retired after 18 years of steering the non-profit radio station through the icebergs, first taking the wheel after the station had nearly perished and was off the air. His tenure ushered in the station’s age of digital, global accessibility.
Bliss is a dancer, educator and touring performer with an extensive profile in the U.S., including teaching at Marymount Manhattan College, the 92 Street YM/ YWHA in New York City and the School of Pennsylvania Ballet — as well as being an academic lecturer at U of A. She is also director of the university’s non-credit Orchesis Dance Program.
Past lifetime achievement winners include artist Lyndal Osbourne, musician Tommy Banks, poet Alice Major, former Edmonton Arts Council director John Mahon and dancer Brian Webb.
The congratulatory slide show and photo op under the civic pyramid also awarded newer voices, including that of Youth Poet Laureate Nasra Adem, who won the city’s Emerging Artist Award, and Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize winner Lauralyn Chow for her interconnected short-story collection, Paper Teeth.
Set through the ’60s and ’70s in Edmonton to contemporary Calgary, the innovative book follows the lives of the Chinese-Canadian Lee family and is a finalist for the $10,000 Alberta Readers’ Choice Awards, which will be awarded in September.
Adem, the city’s second Youth Poet Laureate, took musical theatre at Grant MacEwan University and founded Sister 2 Sister, an ongoing showcase aiming to diversify the arts ecosystem. She recently took the idea to Brooklyn.
Meanwhile, the Artistic Leadership Award went to U of A saxophone instructor Allison Balcetis while the Ambassador of the Arts
Award was won by Lotus Gallery’s curator and organizer Marian Qureshi. The Executive of Toy Guns Dance Theatre — Jake W. Hastley and Justin Kautz — won the Courage to Innovate Award. And Jenna Marynowski of theatre blog After the House Lights took the John Poole Award for Promotion of the Arts.
On the corporate side, the Mayor’s Award for Sustained Support for the Arts went to Landmark Homes and Innovative Support by a Business for the Arts was claimed by Steel Craft Door Products Ltd.
Since 1997, through numerous mayors and locations including the Winspear Centre, the Mayor’s Celebration of the Arts has been both a night of acknowledgment and live performance.
It serves as an institutional focal point for the city’s ever-broadening definition of who we are and what we say as seen through the lens of artistic expression and cultural industries.