Contemporary Calgary’s new gallery begins its journey
Pierre Arpin’s flight from Australia landed in Calgary on April 4. He began his new job, as the first director and CEO of Contemporary Calgary, on April 5. On April 6, he went before a committee that would go on to recommend to city council that Calgary put $24.5-million toward modernizing the Centennial Planetarium, the future home of the arts organization he was now overseeing.
During his fourth week on the job, council approved the spending.
“Typically, a fellow like me would work three to five years just to get a project like this over the line,” says Arpin, sitting downtown at Contemporary Gallery’s current gallery space.
“Here I am walking in and ... it’s there.”
“That’s not to say there’s not a lot of work about to be done,” he quickly adds.
There is no timeline yet as to when the project to transform the old planetarium and longtime science centre into a state-of-the-art gallery will be finished, although it is likely to take a few years.
The city’s $24.5-million in funding, taken from the Municipal Sustainability Initiative, will be spread over three years. But the project has already come a long way. Back in 2014, the city chose Contemporary Calgary from a group of applicants to repurpose the old planetarium on the west end of downtown and turn it into a public art gallery.
The new organization was a amalgamation of the Art Gallery of Calgary, Museum of Contemporary Art and the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Art and had put forward an ambitious proposal to turn the Calgary Centennial Planetarium, built in 1967 to celebrate Canada’s 100th Birthday, into the city’s first space dedicated to contemporary art. Calgary is one of few, if not the only, major North American city without a contemporary art gallery.
“It was a massive investment in 1967 — $1.2-million I think they spent on it, which in 1967 was a chunk of change — to build a planetarium for Calgary,” Arpin says. “It’s been defunct and not used at all for five years and we have a perfect way to re-energize and re- occupy a public space. People will say ‘But you’re renovating a brutalist architecture.’ Yes, but it’s a signature piece of architecture in this city that a whole lot of people have affection for.”
Upgrading the building is estimated to cost $55.3 million and an aggressive fundraising campaign has been underway for a few years. That includes this year’s Look 2016 event, which will feature comedian, actor and art enthusiast Steve Martin in conversation with The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik at the planetarium on Oct. 22. In 2015, a similar fundraiser, featuring Dan Levy of MTV’s The Hills After Show as emcee and Gopnik as a keynote speaker, raised $1 million.
At the current space on Stephen Avenue, exhibitions are planned until February 2017. In mid-2017, the cleverly titled 7,000 squarefoot Temporary Contemporary is scheduled to open to showcase exhibits at the planetarium while work is being done at the rest of the space.
But the ultimate vision for Contemporary Calgary is to turn it into another cultural gem in the city to rival the recently opened Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre, or the beautiful DJD Dance Centre.
The facility will include, among other things, a climate-controlled gallery in the dome area and an auditorium for public lectures or film screenings. There will be room for retail stores and coffee shops and no shortage of space to launch exhibitions that will cover the everwidening world of contemporary art.
Arpin was born in Ontario but spent the past seven years heading the Museum and Art Gallery of Northern Territory in Australia after working at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and the Art Gallery of Ottawa.
He says he foresees the dome space as becoming a particular draw for contemporary artists — be they local, national or international. Artists could be commissioned to work with the unique space, creating everything from digital projections, to site-specific sculptures and installations to more traditional art hanging in the space, he said.
“Even though there’s a number of institutions in Canada, there’s only so many floor plates of exhibition space you can use across the country,” Arpin says. “There’s hungry artists who should be displaying their work but can’t because there simply isn’t enough of, what we call in the business, running feet exhibition space to feature their work.”
Arpin says he sees the development of new cultural institutions such as Contemporary Calgary as a sign of a relatively young city’s maturation. While there will always be naysayers when it comes to spending public money on culture, he said tough economic times should have municipalities such as Calgary rethinking how to attract tourism and viewing cultural development as a long-term sustainable economy.
“We have a society that values a number of things in our communities,” Arpin says. “We have publicly built hospitals, we have publicly built sports stadiums, we have publicly built schools and we also have publicly built and supported cultural institutions. There’s a mix of architecture and institutions that support our community. We are part of a healthy, living, breathing community that allows people to sometimes think differently, envisage the world differently and maybe think more creatively.”