Public Art Project for East Calgary International Avenue: Information Session

Wednesday Lupypciw: Welcome and thank you for your interest in the East Calgary International Avenue Community-Informed Public Art Project. Today we’re going to talk about the Call to Artists, which is currently on the Calgary Arts Development website, and how you can make a great application.

My name is Wednesday Lupypciw and my pronouns are she/her or they/them. I am the main contact for this project. For those of us who are visually impaired, I am a white person with long brown hair and glasses. If you have any questions about the program, or if you want feedback about your application in progress, you can contact me by email or my work phone number: 825.407.8415. My primary email address is displayed on the current slide. It contains my full name, which can be tricky to spell, so if it’s easier, you can also reach me at the email address eciateam@calgaryartsdevelopment.com.

The slides in this presentation are text only, except for a map of the project area displayed at the end of the presentation which I will notify you about.

Now I will do land acknowledgment. Welcome to Blackfoot territory. We are recording this presentation in the areas surrounding Mohkinsstsis, which is the traditional Blackfoot name for where the Elbow River meets the Bow River. Three Nations of the Siksikaitsitapi, or Blackfoot people, signed Treaty 7 in 1877 and the Mohkinsstsis rivers can help us find them all.

If we follow the Bow River all the way east from the Mohkinsstsis confluence, we’ll end up on the Siksika Reserve. The Bow River then folds and becomes the Old Man River, which heads southwest passing through or near the Kainai and Piikani Blackfoot Nations in southern Alberta. We can find another Treaty 7 signing nation, the Tsuut’ina Nation, by following the Elbow River south of Mohkinsstsis to Weaselhead Flats, which feed into Calgary’s Glenmore reservoir. The final Treaty 7 signatory, the Îyârhe Nakoda Nation, which consists of the Chiniki, Bearspaw and Goodstoney First Nations can be found if we follow the Bow River west of Mohkinsstsis, basically, if we drive to Banff.

This place where we live and work and love is also home to Indigenous people who did not sign Treaty 7. Otipemisiwak Métis Government of Alberta Districts 5 and 6 overlap with our city. Additionally, many First Nations and Inuit folks from across Turtle Island who have nothing to do with the signing of Treaty 7 call Mohkinsstsis or Calgary home. And on a personal note for this land acknowledgment, I am so grateful that we are all welcome and have a place to thrive here.

I am grateful for my local magpie friends, and I am so pleased and thankful that we have the opportunity to create contemporary cultural output alongside each other.

Okay, let’s dive right into the ECIA Public Art Project. We’ll start by defining Public Art. We can say that public art is art designed to be in a public space. A public space is anywhere that is freely accessible to all. It doesn’t necessarily have to be open 24/7, but people should be able to go there during regular open or seasonal hours.

Public art responds to the place where it is situated. In this case, public art responds to East Calgary International Avenue. The artists for this project will consider East Calgary’s history, residents and social communities, its landscape and natural environment when creating their public artwork.

What is artist-led community engagement? It is the very heart of this project and it’s basically a fancy way of saying group activities planned by an artist. Community engagement can be workshops, community meals, video screenings or even dance parties, but the point of engagement is for the artists to meet people from the community, to form relationships and establish trust, and to get a sense of what people in the community want and what they are feeling.

Usually, there is some kind of incentive for community members to come to these engagement events, whether that’s free food, entertainment, cash honoraria or educational opportunities, like, everybody could make something and then take home their example of the project that everybody built together at the end of the session. Community engagement sessions can be advertised broadly, or the artists can choose to invite a smaller subgroup or specific community and keep the event closed and very targeted.

Now I’m going to go over the Vision and Mission of Calgary Arts Development who is implementing this project on behalf of the City of Calgary. The Vision of Calgary Arts Development is: a creative, connected Calgary through the arts where everyone is empowered to live a creative life. The Mission of Calgary Arts Development is: the arts have the power to create vibrant communities and bring together diverse voices and perspectives.

We support artists in the development of their skills and the expression of their creativity. Calgary Arts Development supports and strengthens the arts to benefit all Calgarians. So, as the city’s only and designated arts development authority, CADA invests and allocates municipal funding for the arts and leverages these funds to provide additional resources to the arts sector. Our programs support hundreds of arts organizations, individual artists and artist collectives in Calgary and the Treaty 7 region.

I talked about Calgary Arts Development, but now I’d like to talk about the three organizations involved in this public art project. The first is Calgary Arts Development, or CADA, who I work for and just mentioned. So CADA implements the public art program on behalf of the City of Calgary since 2021. CADA’s role in the ECIA project is to put out the call to artists to assemble an assessment committee who goes through the applications and selects a suitable artist ,and then key to staff, myself included, will assist the artist every step of the way while they realize the project.

The second organization involved is the City of Calgary, who is in charge of the Civic Art Collection. Artworks made for this project will be entered into the Civic Art Collection and maintained by City of Calgary staff for the foreseeable future.

Finally, Local Area Planning is a department within the City of Calgary that is funding this project. Local Area Planning is where documents called Local Area Plans or LAPs are made during the process of writing the latest ECIA LAP, Planning staff realized that there is a gap in documentation. The area is known as International Avenue, but we don’t have much information about, for example, the urban, Indigenous and BIPOC people who have lived and hung out in ECIA for generations.

Now, let’s talk about CADA’s Commitment to Equity, and how it applies to this project. Calgary Arts Development is committed to working with communities that have historically been underserved. We are committed to the process of eliminating institutional racism, ableism and barriers in our programs, policies and practices. We do this by centring the creativity and leadership of those communities most impacted by structural inequities.

The four pillars of this vision of equity are:

1. Equity. We create equitable access for Calgarians who have had less opportunity for financial and governmental support due to systemic barriers that exist in our community.
2. Diversity. We support artistic endeavors that reflect our diverse community and in supporting the work of artists of diverse backgrounds.
3. Inclusion. We engage a wide variety of voices and perspectives in shaping and furthering the work that we do. We believe that there is a place for everyone to belong in the arts.
4. Accessibility. We eliminate systemic barriers that prevent people who encounter physical, mental or cultural barriers to spaces, programs and services from participating in the arts.

To honour lived experience and the intersectional and unique experiences of different people and communities, we follow a Nothing About Us Without Us policy. This is very important to the East Calgary project. If you are creating work about a specific community, then that community needs to be actively engaged and consulted, and there needs to be a clear, intentional and reciprocal relationship between the artist and that community.

Aligning with our commitment to EDIA and Nothing About Us Without Us, we will strive to work with applicants in a one-size-fits-one way. If you have any concerns about how your practice or concept fits into our application process, please reach out.

So we’ve discussed the broad umbrella of all of the things that we welcome at Calgary Arts Development, and I’ll just briefly note that there are some things we will not tolerate, such as hate speech, cultural appropriation and active exclusionary behaviours. So please be aware that applications that contain this kind of stuff will not be accepted.

Now let’s talk about Accommodation and Accessibility. Here at CADA, we are committed to open, fair and transparent processes. On this note, the Accommodation and Accessibility Policy and the Application Assistance policy were created to make sure everyone can apply for opportunities they are interested in with tailored assistance [these policies have been combined into one, which you can find here: calgaryartsdevelopment.com/policies/applicant-support-accessibility-policy.] We will work one on one with applicants who experience barriers to access to develop accommodations that suit their unique abilities and situations.

We can provide up to $600 per applicant to support application assistance. For example, we can help cover the costs of translating written materials into other languages, including American Sign Language. We can provide transcription of verbal meetings, or we can convert audio and video recordings into written documents. We can provide language interpretation for real time meetings, and very popularly, we can provide application writing assistance funds.

So if you are looking for assistance or if you have questions about eligibility, please reach out to us before applying. You can email either the public art team at publicart@calgaryartsdevelopment.com, or ideally, you can reach out to me directly using the emails and phone number at the beginning of this presentation. Please reach out to us as early as you can so we can provide appropriate support. Booking translators, for example, can take two weeks or more.

The Application Assistance program requires just one-time approval, so if you get financial assistance for this application, you will be pre-approved for this kind of help for any future applications you submit to Calgary Arts Development. If you are facing any barriers to complete or submit an application, reach out to us and we can help. You don’t need to share specific details about the barriers you are experiencing, only that you are looking for an accommodation such as a short deadline extension.

We have standardized other kinds of accommodations, including the ability for all artist applicants to submit audio or video curriculum vitae instead of a written document, but we are always open to learning about ways we could make room for you in the application process.

Now let’s go over the timeline for the ECIA Project. The call for submissions is currently open on the website, and it will stay open until 4:30 pm on Friday, April 10. Again, if you need help or want feedback on your application in progress, please contact me no later than March 27 so I can help you in a meaningful capacity.

Applications after April 12 or April 10, sorry, will then be evaluated by the assessment committee who will shortlist a few candidates for interviews. The selected artists for the project will be announced in late May or June of 2026. After that, selected artists will begin work on their projects, planning and doing community engagement events and developing their artwork based on what they are learning in East Calgary.

Starting late summer, once designs are finalized and have community support, the artist can begin making their work and installing it in East Calgary. If the artwork takes a long time to make, or if it requires non frozen ground to be installed, we’ve built in a winter leg period where not much might be happening in ECIA. Completed artworks, however, must be installed in East Calgary by early spring 2027 because we will have a public celebration and launch event in April of 2027. After that, the two public artworks will be assumed into the City of Calgary’s Civic Public Art Collection, which is a great thing for an artist’s CV. It basically means the City assumes responsibility for the artwork and will maintain it, for example, they will clean it, they will clear the snow around it, they will replace light bulbs, they will remove graffiti on it for the foreseeable future. Money has been set aside, separate from the project budgets, so the City can do this work for some years.

Now let’s go over the main details of the program. What is ECIA? ECIA stands for East Calgary International Avenue, it is an area in Calgary which was known until recently as Greater Forest Lawn. Communities in ECIA are: Applewood Park, Red Carpet, 09Q, which is a weird industrial name for the East Calgary landfill and Elliston Park, where the firework Festival takes place, Erin Woods, Dover, Southview, Albert Park/Radisson Heights, Penbrooke Meadows, Forest Lawn, Forest Heights and the Forest Lawn Industrial Zone.

As per the Census of the Population of Canada 2021, there is the highest concentration of urban Indigenous people in the City of Calgary in ECIA. There is also statistically the greatest variety and highest concentration of racialized people in the city in this area.

Artists are invited to apply to one of the two projects available: the $30,000 project, or the $90,000 project. I’ll talk more about which artists are ideal for each budget in a moment.

Selected artists will be working in ECIA communities to collect unheard stories. This information, which no one has yet, will form the basis of the artwork. So in the application stage, we don’t need to know your ideas about what art you might make, because those ideas will have to change anyway based on what you learn. Artists at any stage of their career can apply.

We have also designed this project at a specific scale, so we aren’t obligated to post the call nationally or internationally. This is kind of a locals-only deal.

The main goals of the ECIA Community-Informed Public Art Project are, first, to find out and share unheard stories from ECIA community members that don’t exist in current histories and documentation, like the local area plan I was talking about before. To find out these unheard stories, selected artists will hang out in ECIA, they will get down with ECIA, they will make friends in ECIA and form relationships and trust with the underrepresented communities of ECIA. In this project, we want artists to approach public art in a different way than it has been approached in the area in the past.

The final main goal of the project is to create as permanent as possible artworks that can be enjoyed by Calgarians for some years to come. Again, the City will maintain the artworks after they are installed in the communities.

Now let’s talk about general eligibility.

1. To apply for this project, you must live in the Treaty 7 geographic area so you can spend time in East Calgary International Avenue. We’re not opening up this opportunity to people outside the region because the project budgets don’t have room for travel and away-from-home accommodation expenses, and we wouldn’t want our selected artists taking those out of their artist fee.
2. To apply for this project, you must be 18 years of age or older, which incidentally is true for all CADA funding.
3. You do not need to live in East Calgary International Avenue, but there are two bonus questions in the application which will reward folks who already have meaningful connections to the areas. This is our way of encouraging ECIA residents, volunteers, service users and frequenters to apply. And as always, we welcome and support applications from underrepresented artists.

We look forward to reading applications from all kinds of artists with all kinds of lived experiences.

Now let’s talk about eligibility in terms of the portfolio component of the applications. So you can be any kind of artist to submit an application. You can be a visual artist, a sound artist, a performance artist, a video artist, etc., etc., etc. Please notify me ASAP if there is a type of file you want to upload to your portfolio that’s not included in the online application portal.

Right now we have formatted our back end to accept various types of image files, video files and audio files, so please let me know if you want to submit something that is not encompassed in these codecs. Please edit any video files down to their best and most juicy content, because assessors will have a lot of material to get through.

And this is very important eligibility about your portfolio materials, if you collaborated with another artist, you must credit them by name and describe your role in the collaboration in the description section attached to the upload. The description section is 100 words max. I encourage all applicants to use those 100 words and take a movie credits approach and include the names of as many people as possible who helped you and in what capacity they helped you.

For example, maybe in addition to your direct collaborators, this portfolio example was informed by an interview you did with somebody. Maybe your mom sewed some costumes that we are looking at in the example, or maybe somebody did some translation or video editing work.

In the portfolio, the assessors definitely want to see examples of your art, but you are also invited to include examples of non-artwork like community group work sessions you have led. For example, maybe you teach workshops or do other interactive sessions in the community. This will speak to your ability to work in groups, which is very important to this project.

Now let’s talk about which kind of artist is ideal for each budget level. From this single call to artists, CADA will award two artist projects with different budgets. We designed the project with ECIA organizations and locals in mind. On that note, the $30,000 project is a good fit for artists who are just starting out, or artists who have maybe been around for a while, but who have never made public art, and folks who are interested in learning as they go about public art and how it’s made.

The $90,000 project was designed for artists who have already done some public artwork and have a general sense of details like permitting, materials, where to buy good things to make public art of, and how to make sure their art lasts a long time. Interestingly, $90,000 is also about twice the budget of the average public artwork in ECIA. We wanted to go big and create something totally new for the residents and Calgarians.

Regardless of the project budget you are applying for, you should be intrigued or even thrilled by the concept of community engagement and know the unique skills you can bring to group environments. In other words, both opportunities are suited to an artist with a strong community engagement practice or an artist who has a desire to expand their community engagement in their art practice.

This is an example breakdown of the project budgets based on industry standard percentage rates. So we see here in the $30,000 project, we allot 25 per cent of the budget to the artist for their time and intellectual labour, in this case $7,500. 50 per cent of the budget is for materials. This works great for, you know, typical “public artworks” like sculptures, light works, murals, etc.  In the case of $30,000, 50 per cent is $50,000. This project emphasizes community engagement, so we are recommending a minimum of 10 per cent be put toward engagement expenses, in this case, that’s $3,000. Industry standards also dictate that installation costs be around 10 per cent, again, $3,000. The final 5 per cent of the project budget is devoted to uh-oh, contingency funding, in this case, $1,500.

It is important to note that these percentages can shift depending on what the selected artist ends up doing, For example, if the artist is making a sound piece, they might not require 50 per cent of the budget for materials and construction, they could then put more funds toward engagement and research activities instead. One thing, however, should remain constant, the artist fee should always be 25 per cent, and this should not decrease.

Here is a breakdown of the $90,000 project budget using the same industry standard percentages. In this case, a 25 per cent artist fee amounts to $22,500. 50 per cent for materials and fabrication is $45,000. 10 per cent each devoted to community and community engagement and installation costs $9000, $9000, with the remaining 5 per cent, or $4,500 going toward contingency. And again, the amount in each category can kind of be adjusted and take from this, put in that based on who the artist is and what they want to do in East Calgary.

Now let’s talk briefly about what selected project artists are expected to do. First off, and this is the most important, artists are expected to work with ECIA community members to ensure their public art piece represents communities in an authentic way. Artists are expected to plan and lead accessible, meaningful engagement sessions with underrepresented communities in the area.

Artists also meet with the Calgary Arts Development project lead, a.k.a. me, regularly over the duration of the project to discuss updates, issues and troubleshoot. Selected artists will also travel through the ECIA communities looking for and documenting appropriate sites and backup sites for their final artwork. The City of Calgary has not set aside a specific home for these public art projects to be, so that will be a fun aspect of the project, but also a responsibility for artists to work with community members, business owners, landowners to find a great home for their project.

Continuing on with expectations for selected artists, artists will design and create an artwork with permanent components that are installed somewhere in the east corridor. Artists can also participate in learning sessions and consult with cultural liaisons to support the goals of their project as needed. For example, CADA provides mandatory Indigenous cultural awareness training for all non-Indigenous funded artists. Indigenous artists are welcome to take this training, but it is not necessary for them. CADA can also connect artists with fabricators, mentors and other folks who are relevant to their work and processes. Selected artists will schedule materials shipments, fabrication, make an installation plan for their final work and oversee the installation of their artwork. Oftentimes, the artist isn’t the person, physically, like, taking something to the ground or putting it high up on a wall, but they sort of are the boss and design the process of how that work gets installed.

Artists will also create a maintenance manual for the final art piece. Basically, this is a document that the City of Calgary has that tells them what materials to use when they are maintaining it, how to maintain it, maybe materials that are very, must be kept away from the artwork in order to make it last long. All of those little details about how to keep the art in pristine condition for as long as possible.

And finally, the fun stuff. Selected artists will definitely be celebrating the unveiling of their art in April 2027, and during the time leading to this launch event there is the potential to participate in media interviews.

And if all of these expectations seem a little overwhelming, remember that Calgary Arts Development staff are available to assist artists every step along the way, and we’re checking in all of the time to make sure everybody is comfortable, safe and performing to maximum ability.

Now let’s talk about some personal qualities that will come in handy for this project. It would be a good idea if it were, not a good idea, it would be desirable if you, as an applicant, have a desire to connect with new people from underrepresented communities.

Patience is a great quality for applicants to have. We are seeking good listeners who are willing to change their approach based on feedback from the community and what they learn. This is not necessarily a personal quality, but ideally the selected artist will have some experience with creative projects, the larger scale, the better. Ideally, selected artists will enjoy public speaking because there will be a lot of that in the community engagement phase, and selected artists, it would be good if they enjoyed research activities and local history. This is also not a personal quality, but it would be handy if the artist recognized that there are both positive and negative aspects of living in the target area, East Calgary.

A great personal quality for artists to have is self-awareness or, you know, the ability to recognize that you may have some privileges that follow you around into spaces you enter in ECIA. It’s great to be curious, to have that quality and to ask questions with openness and respect when you don’t have the answers.

Now let’s talk about how the applications submitted to this project are processed and how the artists are selected. So first of all, who are the people who read over the applications and decide who gets the opportunity? Who gets the cash? Well, that is not CADA. We assemble an independent committee which is made up of artists, East Calgary community members and subject matter experts. The assessment committee members are chosen through public nomination and staff expertise. The assessment committee represents the broad diversity of Calgary and our artistic communities, and they are committed to open, generous and respectful evaluations. Interesting side note, anyone can apply to participate in an assessment committee. You can email publicart@calgaryartsdevelopment.com to self-nominate. Include in your subject line something about potential assessor member, and then just write a brief paragraph about who you are, your artistic history and what you think you could bring to the project, and then we might contact you for future assessment opportunities.

Moving along. How are the applications evaluated? The application process is competitive, which means that you’re not guaranteed a commission just because you applied unfortunately. Assessment committee reviews all eligible and complete applications. This implies that sometimes applications are ineligible or incomplete. So the assessment committee actually won’t even see those applications, they will be weeded out before that phase.

Decisions of the assessment committee are final, and the committee reserves the right to select no applications if they’re just not feeling it for any one of the applications, even though there are these two opportunities available. I do not think that will happen.

When they are evaluating each application, assessors rate the level to which they agree or disagree with the applicants’ response to the questions using the following scale: Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree or Strongly Disagree. So as an example, if in the application we ask you ‘what are some things you would put in place to ensure that a variety of community members are heard from’, assessors would be reading your answer to that question while considering a corresponding statement like this applicant has listed a variety of methods to encourage diverse participation in their project. So they read your answer and they consider, yes, I agree, the applicant listed a variety of methods that encourage diverse participation. I strongly agree that they did this, or maybe, meh, I’m neutral on that. Everything is rated with that scale, which corresponds to numerical values based on how many points the question is worth.

Speaking of points, let’s talk about scoring of applications. Your application materials are worth a possible total of 100 points. Assessors rate your applications, how strongly they meet the eligibility criteria, they rate them based on how thoroughly applicants respond to the questions, and they rate them based on whether applicants demonstrate that they have the skills required to be successful when creating a long-lasting public artwork.

In this case, the first four text answer questions are scored out of 70 points in this application. The artist curriculum vitae is scored out of 15 points. Please note that this is half of the points usually allotted to artist curricula vitae in CADA’s public art calls. The portfolio section is also scored out of 15 points, which is also half of the points usually allotted to the portfolio section in typical public art calls.

In addition to the written response questions, curriculum vitae and portfolio, there are two bonus questions worth up to 20 points. So if you’re thinking that the math isn’t really mathing, you are correct in a way. If an applicant scores full points for their written responses, curriculum vitae and portfolio, and bonus questions, their application will be rated 120 points out of 100 points.

All this to say that the bonus questions really do matter in this particular program.

Now let’s talk about shortlisted artists. Artists shortlisted by the assessment committee will be asked to participate in a 45-minute online interview in early May 2026. The interview questions will be written by the assessment committee and sent to shortlisted candidates in advance. The interview will be conducted by CADA staff, who ask the same questions to all shortlisted candidates. The assessment committee will then watch recordings of the interviews afterward, which helps to maintain their anonymity and impartiality throughout the assessment process.

Now on to selected artists. In mid-May 2026, two artists selected by the assessment committee will be notified of their status. In late-May 2026, unsuccessful applications or applicants, rather, will be notified, and in June 2026 or late-May 2026 selected artists who have agreed to move forward will then be contracted, attend an orientation session and begin working in June 2026. After unsuccessful applicants are notified, selected public art project artists will be announced by Calgary Arts Development.

And now I will gently mother hen everybody and talk about some general things you can do to make sure your application is a good one. First of all, make sure your Smart Simple artist profile is complete and up to date. Helen Hu, my colleague, will be talking about this in a moment.

Please read the entire guidelines text before entering your responses. Answer each question fully and note the total points allotted to each section. The more points a question is worth, the longer and more detailed your answer to the question should be. Please don’t worry about sounding fancy. In fact, directness will likely work in your favour. I will attend two bingo nights at the local senior centre means the same thing as I will frequently engage in popular community activities, but the first sentence about bingo at the senior centre is more comprehensive and just easier to understand.

Make sure your CV is up to date. Provide clear examples in your portfolio that demonstrate your unique style, your approach and artistic skills, and in the portfolio, you may want to include not exactly artwork demonstrations of you doing something in a leadership capacity in community settings.

Please start your application early. Reach out to me with questions or to review your application for completeness up to ten days before the deadline. In this case, please contact me by March 27 at the latest with your requests for help or review.

Now, I’d like to introduce you to Helen Hu, the public art coordinator at Calgary Arts Development. Helen will be demonstrating the online system that artists use to apply to
CADA programs, It’s called Smart Simple, and Helen will show us how to create an artist profile and apply to the ECIA opportunity.

Helen Hu: Thank you, Wednesday. Okay. So I’m going to share my screen here.

Okay. So this is Smart Simple. This is our online platform for applying to applications. You can find the link to access Smart Simple from the CADA website, it should be at the top of the home page here. If you click log in, it should take you to the login page of Smart Simple.

So if you haven’t already created an account on Smart Simple, you’ll need to create one by clicking on Register, For this Application, it’s available for individual artists and artist collectives to apply. If you already have an account, you will just need to log in to begin your application.

So once you log in, you can update your profile or complete your profile by clicking on My Profile here.

You’ll be able to see a button on the bottom of the page that says Update Profile, and you will be able to update all of the information within your profile by doing so. To begin an application, you will have to navigate to Open Opportunities. This will show you all of the applications that are open and that you can apply for.

So here you can see there’s the Community Informed Public Art Project in East Calgary International Avenue. You’ll see a brief description of the program. You can download a copy of the guidelines for the program by clicking View, and when you’re ready to apply, you can click on Apply here.

You will be asked to begin your application, and that will bring you to your application. So within the first tab you’ll notice there’s Contact Information. This is information that is ported over automatically from your profile.

If you are an artist collective on Smart Simple, you will have this additional tab for collective members where you can enter the additional members of your artist collective by clicking on this button, Enter Collective Members. The majority of the application is in submission requirements, and so this first question has no points, it’s just feedback for us to know how you heard about this artist call.

You’ll be asked to select which funding amount you are applying for, and the four questions that Wednesday had mentioned will begin the application here.

For your portfolio, we’re asking applicants to upload any media files, and they can include MP3, MP4 and MOV, Jpeg, jpg, GIF, PNG and BMP. To upload these files, you can either drop them into this link here or click on Browse Files if you want to select from your finder. As an example, I will upload a photo just to demonstrate.

So once you’ve uploaded the photo, you can add metadata and add descriptions to your image or video or any file. You’ll have to click on the pencil icon here that says Properties when you hover over it, and when you click on that, you will be able to see a splash page that comes up, and you can change the file name to the title of your artwork. In this case, I will type in lichen. And then you can enter a date that the artwork was completed.

You can include a size, and if it’s not applicable, you can just type not applicable, a medium, i.e. photograph, and here’s where you can enter a brief description to provide more context or provide credentials, as Wednesday had mentioned earlier, and you can include a location. When you’re finished, including all of those details, you will need to click Save. I’ll put in an example there and an example there, then we’ll save that. That way, when your application is being reviewed by assessors, they will have more context for the examples that you’ve shown.

After your portfolio, there will be a section for you to upload your curriculum vitae. You can upload this in a PDF format preferably, but this does include permissions to accept other files as well.

And then at the very end of the application there are two bonus questions that are here, and if they apply, you can certainly complete that.

When you are finished your application, you can click Save and Validate. This button will ask the system to check your application for completeness. All mandatory fields, it will let you know which fields still need to be completed. And if you would like to work on your application and return to it later, you can click on Save, Draft and work as you go.

When you’re ready to submit, you would click on Submit. If you need to return to your application, if you’re, for example, if you’re working on your application over the course of some time, you can access your draft that you’ve opened by going to the home page and scrolling to the bottom of the home page. There is a tab that says Draft, and you would just have to locate the application that is in draft and click on Open, and that should take you to the draft that you have there.

And that’s all I have.

Wednesday: Thank you, Helen. I’m going to share my screen again for the final few slides of our presentation.

Just give me a minute.

Okay. It’s Wednesday Lupypciw, and now we’re going to discuss some common questions. This is the only image-based slide in the presentation. Right now, I’m showing a map of the East Calgary International Avenue communities. So one of our most common questions is what and where is East Calgary International Avenue? As we see in the map, this is the area formerly or still commonly known to this day as Greater Forest Lawn.

East Calgary International Avenue encompasses communities that you can see in the map on the slide that I’ve mentioned before. Applewood Park, Red Carpet, Erin Woods, Dover, Southview, Albert Park/Radisson Heights, Forest Heights, Forest Lawn, Pembrooke Meadows, the East Calgary landfill and Elliston Park.

Another common question we get is what kind of artists can apply to this program? As mentioned earlier in the eligibility slide, artists in any phase of their career are welcome to apply as long as they reside in the Treaty 7 geographic area. Anyone who is at least 18 years old can apply.

Another question that we get for this project is something along the lines of I’m not an artist, but I’m interested in researching or contributing to this project, what can I do? Well, you can reach out to interested artists and see if they want to collaborate with you and make an application with them, or you can send me an email and I will keep you updated about all the opportunities you can participate in the engagement events.

And our most probably common ask question is do I have to live in the East Calgary area to apply to this project? The answer to that question is no, you do not have to live in East Calgary, but there are bonus questions in the application that will reward you with some points if you already have a connection to the area even if you don’t live there.

If you have any questions that we did not go over in this presentation, please reach out to me using the contact information on this screen. The Frequently Asked Questions of the ECIA Project page [found in a toggle below] will be updated regularly as your questions come in. If in doubt, please ask us because you probably aren’t the only one who has that question.

And yes, we will update the Frequently Asked Questions section on the page, unless your question is private, then please just mention that when you write or call in that this is a private question, that the answer is just for you.

If you’ve made it to the end of this presentation, thank you very much. Thank you for your interest in the East Calgary Community-Informed public Art project. Good luck with your application. I look forward to hearing from you either when reading your application or when answering your questions during the open call phase. Bye for now.

1. What, and where is “East Calgary/International Avenue?” Formerly known as “Greater Forest Lawn,” East Calgary International Avenue encompasses the communities of Applewood Park, Red Carpet, Erin Woods, Dover, Southview, Albert Park/Radisson Heights, Forest Heights, Forest Lawn, Forest Lawn Industrial Area, Penbrooke Meadows, the East Calgary Landfill and Elliston Park.
2. What kind of artists can apply to this program? Artists in any phase of their career residing in the Treaty 7 area can apply. Applicants must be at least 18 years old.
3. I’m not an artist, but I’m interested in researching or contributing to the project. What can I do? You can reach out to interested artists and see if they want to collaborate with you and make an application with them, or you can send an email about your specific interests to ECIAteam@calgaryartsdevelopment.com, and we will keep you updated about opportunities to participate in artist-led engagement events.
4. Do I have to live in East Calgary to apply for this project? No. But there are Bonus Questions in the application that reward folks who already have connections to the area.