Creating the Memorial Parkway Public Art Project
Calgary is an old place and a young city, the rivers of this land have been important to Indigenous people since time immemorial, their surrounding landscape the site of important gathering places for millennia.
In the late spring of 1922, Calgary Mayor Samuel Hunter Adams planted the first poplar in a line of trees along the newly renamed Memorial Drive. The City aimed to plant a tree for every Calgarian soldier who died during the First World War. Nine hundred trees were planted that first year, and nearly 3,300 trees were planted by 1928.
Somewhat poetically, the life cycle of these memorial trees paralleled that of the war veterans themselves. By the early 2000s, just as the last surviving WWI soldiers were passing away, so too were the trees planted in honour of their fallen brothers. The City planted new trees in their place to create a “landscape of memory.”
Soldiers of the Great War aren’t the only souls memorialized along this beloved stretch of road and riverside. Trees have been planted for soldiers of WWII and the Korean War, too, and Poppy Plaza honours the strength and sacrifice of Canadian troops in weathering steel. Each November, in a park near the Centre Street Bridge, thousands of white crosses are erected in The Field of Crosses in memory of all of southern Alberta’s fallen soldiers — those lost in the First World War and those we’ve lost since. Some of the souls remembered along Memorial Drive aren’t soldiers at all. Calgarians honour the lives of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls every May by adorning trees along the drive with red ribbons and dresses.
No Calgarians have a more intimate relationship to Memorial Drive than the locals. For the residents of Sunnyside, for whom the road was named until the 1920s, this is the place where the Bow River overwhelmed its banks, the road and the community itself. The memory of the 2013 flood spurred The City to create a permanent barrier to protect against future river flooding. This City of Calgary initiative shares the belief that the inclusion of public art improves the built environment and invigorates place-making in public spaces.
Following a call for artists and a selection process led by Calgary Arts Development, the artist collective Sans façon — Tristan Surtees and Charles Blanc — was selected as the lead artist for the Memorial Parkway Public Art Project. They are responsible for driving the project’s public art implementation and leading the delivery of its creative vision.
Sans façon’s challenge will be to respond and engage with the layered complexities of the space.
Those first poplars thrived in memory of the thousands who could not. When those trees died, in some places monuments of concrete and steel replaced them – an approach that seems counter to the living memorials the original trees represented. Now, a century later, how do artists approach the important assignment of memory? How does one memorialize soldiers without glorifying war? And what of the non-combatants who died in those same wars? Worldwide, 8.5 million soldiers died in the First World War, but it is estimated 13 million civilians died. Certainly they deserve to be remembered, too.
And what of the living? For a place charged with memorializing the dead, this three-kilometre stretch of roadway might be Calgary’s most living place. The parkway isn’t just a landscape of memory, but one of motion. Thousands of commuters traverse the parkway every day — by car, by pedal and by foot. This is a place of leisure, too. A diverse ecosystem of runners and dog walkers. Of rock-skippers and latte-sippers. Of prom-dressed teens posing for Peace Bridge grad photos, and of the Calgarians who sleep rough.
The Memorial Parkway Public Art Project must accommodate all these relationships at once. San façon aims to acknowledge and amplify what the space already means to the different people who will experience it — while also contributing something completely new.
You can learn more about the Memorial Parkway Public Art Project here.
