Councillors to join artists, citizens on board
City council has voted to increase oversight of Calgary ’s beleaguered public art program on the heels of news that further work on the controversial Bowfort Towers art installation has been cancelled.
Council elected Monday to appoint two city councillors to the public art board that oversees the program. Councillors Shane Keating and Evan Woolley will join the board of citizens and artists tasked with providing input on public art to the City of Calgary.
Previously the board has not included any elected officials.
“We realized that council was really operating from a place of lack of knowledge; (we) would see these things when they hit the front page of the newspaper,” said Mayor Naheed Nenshi Monday.
“It was felt that it would be helpful for council to have a little more oversight, but also a little more opportunity to understand the public art program by having a couple of members there.”
The news comes after the city confirmed last week that work will be halted on the Bowfort Towers installation at the intersection of Bowfort Road N.W. and the TransCanada Highway.
An elaborate landscaping scheme intended to accompany the much-maligned steel towers won’t be completed as originally planned, the city said. Remaining funds from the original $500,000 budget will be put toward another project — one more accessible to the public, the mayor said.
Nenshi said the proposed landscaping — which involved a number of earthen “drumlins” or mounds along the north side of the road — would have put the project over budget anyway.
“(It) wasn’t adding a lot to that particular art project so it was felt that it would be better to spend the leftover funds on that project elsewhere where the art could be a little more publicly accessible,” he said.
Coun. Ward Sutherland, whose ward encompasses the Bowfort Towers site, said he’s relieved work has been halted, especially since drivers speeding past would be unlikely to even notice the additional landscaping.
“What are you going to see at 80 (kilometres an hour)? You’re going to see some bumps. It’s a total waste of money,” he said.
Calgary’s public art program is currently suspended while the city reviews its process for selecting new projects.
Sutherland said it’s important that more input is gathered from citizens who actually live in the community where the project will be located.
This could involve more local representatives on the individual panels that are struck to choose artists and evaluate conceptual plans for each project, he said.
“To me, that’s everything,” Sutherland said. “If you have more regular citizens (and artists) go out in the community and consult, you’re going to get something that generally there’s no controversy because (people) understand what’s going on.”
A detailed review of Calgary’s public art program will be presented to council in Q1 of 2019.