The Program
The Northeast Mini Galleries include a series of 10 mini galleries located at community associations across Calgary’s northeast. The mini galleries feature 30 artists throughout the year — each exhibition showcases 10 local artists, selected by a local curator, for a four-month period.
The current Northeast Mini Galleries exhibition, Unbreakable, was curated by AJ Kluck and explores themes of connection, care and the strength found in everyday relationships. The artworks are on display from July through October 2025.
Curatorial Statement
Unbreakable is an exhibition curated by AJ Kluck for the Northeast Mini Galleries, located in communities throughout Calgary’s northeast quadrant. Calgary or Moh’kinstsis or Wicispa Oyade or Guts’ists’i has a complicated history. A history that has seen colonization and broken treaties, a history that has seen love and joy, floods and droughts, creation and destruction. We are all Treaty people here in Treaty 7. We all have a responsibility, and the ability to create a relationship with the land. We have a responsibility to make this world a little bit of a better place. We have the responsibility to ask ourselves: How do we show up in reciprocity? How do we show up in caring and thoughtful ways? How do we take care of each other, ourselves, the water, the rocks, the plants and animals? The answer lies in the relationships we build.
We develop deep and long-standing relationships through small daily efforts — we must ground ourselves and find our strength in these. The artists chosen in this exhibition are living these truths in clear and actionable ways. Leading in their own style. The artists’ identities and experiences encompass a wide and vibrant range of realities. In this collection of artworks there are artists who are Black, Indigenous and People of Colour, people who are guides in childbirth, people who are disabled, people who are immigrants, people who are teaching art classes to their communities, people who grew up loving and memorizing their streets, people who rescue and foster animals, queer people, people who are celebrating their culture with vulnerability and care — everyone shares a beautiful history of having a meaningful relationship to the northeast.
Artists have the job of explaining the world around them. Their job is to communicate their experience, to show their experience of life through art. This exhibition is a glimpse into the deep, and diverse reality of people living in community, as neighbours, as Treaty people. It is about connection and support and care. It is a celebration. It is a small representation of the lives of those who are bound to a place, the northeast and, ultimately, bound to each other.
lim̓lm̓t
— AJ Kluck
Artists
The participating artists, artworks and community locations are:
Blue Jay
2023
Acrylic
Location: Martindale Community Association
Alicia King is a versatile Indigenous artist from the Blood Tribe (Kainai Nation).
Her love for colour, line and abstraction all come together in her work, allowing her to express herself in a deeply personal way. Alicia strives to tell stories through her art or to share meaningful messages, with each piece carrying a unique significance depending on what she’s aiming to bring to life. A recurring theme in her work is emotion — whether it’s love, pain or appreciation for often-overlooked aspects of life like nature, land and animals.
The Lineage Embrace
2025
Acrylic on canvas
Location: Thorncliffe/Greenview Community Association
My work explores the deep connections between people and their environments, shaped by a lifelong experience of living within diverse cultural contexts. I’m interested in how identity forms through place, and how shared values like trust, care and belonging are passed through generations and communities. These themes are central to my creative process, which fuses human expression, natural forms and urban textures into layered visual narratives.
The Lineage Embrace
I reflect on ancestral memory, collective identity and the ways we are held by those who came before us. I create rhythmic compositions that evoke the warmth, strength and quiet resilience of generational bonds. Stylized figures, often echoing the aesthetic of African masks, embody both presence and protection, forming an unbroken chain of support.
My practice spans painting, graphic design and mixed media, often incorporating wood, fabric, glass and concrete. Influenced by music, literature and design, my art is an invitation to pause, reflect and reconnect with oneself, with others and with the stories embedded in our environments.
Through bold colour, layered form and symbolic detail, I aim to celebrate the richness of cultural heritage while offering space for introspection and belonging.
Instagram: @amegah_
Bayanihan
2025
Digital print of an original painting
Location: The Livingston Community Association
Bayanihan is a tribute to co-operation and unity. The image of people carrying a house — a practice rooted in rural Filipino tradition — symbolizes the power of community in times of transition. It speaks to both literal and metaphorical movement: migration, displacement and home rebuilding across geographies.
The colour palette — teal, pink, yellow, orange, purple and green — draws from both traditional Southeast Asian fabrics and contemporary street aesthetics. These bright, layered tones reflect the vibrancy and resilience of Filipino culture while also representing a contemporary shift: a new generation of Filipinos and Asian Canadians who are reinterpreting heritage through modern lenses. Yellow symbolizes warmth and community; teal represents the vast waters we cross; pink speaks to tenderness and memory; orange invokes energy and transformation; purple signifies spiritual strength; and green connects us to the land we come from and the land we live on now. As someone who has experienced displacement and migration firsthand — from my childhood home in the Philippines to navigating youth homelessness in Calgary — this piece is deeply personal. It is an offering to those who carry each other, who make and remake home with whatever they have. Through this work, I aim to honour the invisible labour of the community and the endurance of the diasporic spirit.
Sanctuary
2025
Mixed media cut paper
Location: Temple Community Association
Sanctuary is a nostalgic look back to when monarch butterflies were in abundance, thriving on local plants, fluttering through the air. The floor of the work is covered in the empty outlines of the monarchs as a reminder of how much we’ve lost, and that there’s still work we must do to help bring them back. Grow milkweed and nectar flowers native to Alberta, get your plants from local growers who don’t spray insecticides, and lead by example. The road back for the monarchs is beautiful!
Hollis Parrott is a queer Red River Métis illustrator, animator and storyteller. A multidisciplinary, if you will. Their practice includes cut paper mixed media, comics, digital illustration and 2D animation. Underlying all those mediums is a fascination with bold shapes and strong silhouettes, which is highlighted in their favoured medium of mixed media cut paper. They love the textural, playful and meditative nature of working with paper and pulling in other materials to support the message of the artwork, as well as sliding in a piece of their identity. Their specialty is humour and whimsy, but they also love to utilize romance and horror. Hollis graduated from the Alberta University of the Arts with an Illustration Major and Animation Minor.
HollisParrott.net
Instagram: @papercutparrott
War War War III
2023
Oil on canvas
Location: Beddington Heights (Park) Community Association
This painting will not make you hungry. It isn’t meant to. The spoils of war are laced with slow poison, every coin glinting with blood, every loaf of bread heavy with memory. In Julian’s world, some Jinns feed off this venom, growing monstrous with each conflict. Others vanish the moment it touches their tongues.
War War War III serves as a personal warning: a talisman against the hunger for power that once overtook Julian in his youth, when he first awakened to his gifts. Having learned the cost of ambition, he’s etched into this work a small spell, quiet, invisible, set to activate only in moments of absolute desperation.
_________
War War War III is a part of Jae Sterling’s multidisciplinary exhibition Julian’s Dread, which debuted January 2024 at the prestigious Esplanade Arts and Heritage Centre, Medicine Hat. Expanding from a series of essays found in his 2020 exhibition Riding Horses With White Men, in 2023, Sterling’s short film Jinn Julian premiered in the Calgary International Film Festival. Displaying paintings, artefacts and belongings of the fictional Julian, Sterling asks us to explore the tangible world of his protagonist in Julian’s Dread. Symbols of Jamaican youth, Christian fanaticism, magical realism and theosophy can be found in Julian’s world — walking into the cloistered, reclusive and paranoid dwellings of a painter who appears to live without a sense of time or place. What powers does Julian have that we will notice in his room? What old spirits live in his paintings and books? What ghosts lie in Julian’s sheets?
Rooted and Rescued
2023
Ceramics
Location: Crossroads Community Association
This installation brings together two of my deepest passions: creative expression and animal rescue. Rooted in community and care, the work celebrates the bond between people, animals, and the spaces we share. I wanted to create a playful yet functional tribute to the beauty of rescue stories and the gardens that grow around them.
My practice spans fibre arts and ceramics, with a focus on blending aesthetics and everyday utility. After several years working in both mediums, I transitioned from a corporate career in 2023 to fully pursue my creative path. That shift led to the founding of Indoor Cat Studios, where I explore how art can connect us, tell stories and serve a purpose.
Based in Calgary and working out of Workshop Studios, I continue to volunteer in local animal rescue. This experience deeply informs my creative work. Whether fostering dogs or shaping clay, I am always drawn to the small, meaningful ways we care for each other and the world around us.
indoorcatstudios.ca
Instagram: @indoorcatstudios
Threads of Resilience
2021
Digital Illustration
Location: Winston Heights-Mountview Community
Threads of Resilience weaves my Punjabi-Canadian heritage directly into the landscape. The central braided figure becomes Mother Nature — each strand cascading into a waterfall that reminds us we spring from and return to the earth. Silhouettes of Calgary’s northern mountains anchor the scene, while stylized wind currents and small birds trace paths of freedom and interconnectedness. White peace poppies bloom across the composition, symbolizing remembrance, hope and quiet strength.
In my practice, I explore themes of cultural identity, resilience and the bond between humanity and environment. Working in acrylic, printmaking and digital design, I blend bold forms and organic motifs to create visually impactful narratives. Inspired by my background in architecture and fine arts, I experiment with texture, colour and form to craft immersive artworks that invite reflection on our connection to place and heritage.
Threads of Resilience invites you to pause and consider your own roots — celebrating our shared capacity to endure, adapt and find beauty in transformation.
It Takes a Village
2025
Clay, acrylic and yarn
Location: Rundle Community Association
Krista Kirkpatrick-Hatch is a self-taught Calgary-based mixed-media artist who specializes in acrylic, watercolour and alcohol ink creations. Krista uses art as a self-care method and way to express her emotions and experiences as a mother, Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders (PMAD)survivor, bereaved daughter and recovering perfectionist.
Despite a degree in psychology and over a decade of experience working with individuals with disabilities and mental health diagnoses, Krista was not prepared for her own mental health struggles postpartum. Mental health does not discriminate. It touches us all.
When not creating, Krista loves to spend time with her three children, two fur babies and supportive husband, exploring their own backyard in and around Calgary.
kkhart.ca
Instagram: @kkhart.ca
Flying Up
2024
Acrylic on canvas
Location: Marlborough Park Community Association
As an artist with a disability, I’ve learned that what seems like a limit can open up new ways to explore and create. Art isn’t just something I do — it’s how I talk to the world and understand myself. Every brushstroke and colour helps me process my emotions and pay attention to things I might not notice otherwise.
Living with a disability has taught me to look at things differently and more deeply. I like to try out new materials or use familiar ones in fresh ways. Making art gives me a sense of freedom in a world that can sometimes feel too strict or structured. That freedom helps me heal and feel strong.
Through my art, I invite others to see the world in a new way, feel more deeply and connect on a real level.
Harmony with Nature
2024
Embroidery on fabric
Location: Falconridge/Castleridge Community Association
My name is Nazmeen Alam, and I am an embroidery artist and educator based in northeast Calgary. My work is rooted in storytelling, cultural memory and community connection. Using thread painting, beadwork and traditional embroidery techniques, I create intricate textile pieces that reflect themes of resilience, care and belonging.
Each artwork I create is inspired by the people and places around me, especially the vibrant communities in northeast Calgary. As a teacher, I offer embroidery classes to newcomers, women and youth — using art as a way to build trust, share knowledge and celebrate diverse identities. My practice is deeply influenced by these interactions and by the belief that handwork has the power to connect us across cultures and generations.
Through needle and thread, I aim to preserve traditions while also pushing the boundaries of what textile art can say about our shared lives. I hope viewers feel the warmth, labour and love that go into every stitch and see how community is built one thread at a time.
Instagram: @needlenest
History
The Northeast Mini Galleries program started in 2023 as part of the City of Calgary’s Northeast Public Art Initiative and successfully transitioned to Calgary Arts Development. This initiative brings several public art projects to Calgary’s northeast communities, supports local artists, enhances northeast neighbourhoods and reflects the people who live in the communities where the art will be located.
Are you interested in participating in our public art program? Learn more about current opportunities here.