Nuit Blanche receives $50,000 boost from ATB
Art festival hopes to stage mini version ahead of next year’s main event
Nuit Blanche has received a $50,000 boost from ATB Financial for its 2018 edition as the contemporary art festival hopes to stage another mini edition — akin to last year’s Petite Nuit — for 10 days in September.
The new partnership with ATB was announced Wednesday and also includes an extra $50,000 of in-kind services and community outreach from the province-owned financial institution.
“I think it’s incredible that ATB Financial has continued to support Nuit Blanche initiatives and stepped up to five times the level they’ve supported before,” said Todd Janes, the non-profit festival society’s president. “It shows great leadership from them as a financial innovator, and I just think it’s a really good match.”
The free, one-night festival debuted in Edmonton in 2015 and, like its forebears across the globe, is meant to be biennial. It saw dozens of large-scale temporary artworks spread across the downtown core.
For the festival’s initial outing, city council kicked in $225,000, just over one-third of the budget, which also relied on grants and corporate sponsorship.
To stay fresh in people’s minds, the festival staged a two-night, smaller-scale Petite Nuit in Beaver Hills House Park last year, which featured mostly Alberta artists. For this, no money was requested from council.
For the next biennial main event, which was to happen this year, Nuit Blanche couldn’t secure reliable funding from council on time. After a 7-6 vote last fall, the festival was asked by the city to wait until spring to hear how the snow-removal budget played out.
“To do an event of this size you need to engage curators, pay a lot of the money up front,” Janes said. “During that time, we made a decision there was no way we could realize that event for 2017, about 10 months away at that point.”
Nonetheless, the organization hopes to attract 75,000 people on Sept. 29, 2018.
Meanwhile, Nuit Blanche is attempting another satellite event along the lines of Petite Nuit this September.
“We’re really focused on making sure 2018 is the cat’s meow,” said Janes. “(But) we are looking at collaborating on a project with Edmonton Design Week, Sept. 20 to 30 — extending it a little bit further to wrap into Alberta Culture Days.”