Muralists adding to Calgary’s vibrant public art scene during BUMP festival

Calgary will get more colourful over the next couple of weeks, as the BUMP Festival sees close to a dozen artists working on a massive scale.

More than a dozen muralists are painting on a massive scale with Calgary buildings as their canvas for the nineth annual Beltline Urban Murals Project (BUMP) Festival.

Their goal is to create accessible public art that uplifts communities in the city.

“It’s basically an urban art festival,” explained Priya Ramesh, festival creative director. “We have muralists who are coming here painting on different walls across the Beltline and beyond. Our murals have now been up for nine years. Every year, a new set of murals come in. We’re sitting at 152 murals now. At the end of the summer, it’ll be 162.”

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Ramesh says the murals will last for as long as the building owners want to keep them.

“I think what BUMP actually does to the city is it gives it an alternative – sort of a different noise compared to generally the corporate backdrop of Calgary,” she said. “You have art that’s booming everywhere, you have activations happening in the city, makes the city feel alive with a different energy.”

This year, Bow Valley College offered up one of its buildings for the festival.

Brett Bergie, director of government and community relations, says her only ask was that it had an Indigenous theme.

“We’re a downtown institution, so the opportunity to create something fun, give people who are walking by and driving by an opportunity to see and have a sense of discovery right downtown helps,” she said. “We’re a part of downtown that needs some revitalization and some something exciting.”

BUMP connected the college with several potential artists for a project on the south-facing wall of its West Campus building along 6 Avenue S.E.

“We were able to review proposals from different artists,” Bergie said. “We chose somebody from the Tsuut’ina Nation here as part of Treaty Seven, so that was about as much influence as we wanted to put into the process.”

The college connected with artist Nathan Meguinis, who came up with the concept of a mural that tells a story of ‘letting them go,’ where the college is represented by a mother bear who’s taught her two cubs the ways of the world and is now letting them fend for themselves.

“One of the hardest parts as a parent for me is letting your kids go to experience and grow,” said Meguinis. “They fall and get back up, you know? Get back on that horse and grind away. That’s one of the hardest things is just letting your children grow and letting them go.”

Meguinis says the idea behind his mural came from the name of the building: West Campus.

“My dad, when he prays, it’s to the west direction, and he’s praying for the grandfather winds and the mountains, and then he’s praying to grandfather bear,” he said. “So, for me, that was that connection to why I should add the bear.”

The surface of the building posed some challenges for Meguinis, because it isn’t smooth like a canvas but rather bumpy like a gravel road.

That forced him to use spray paint rather than a brush. However, the process was quick, and he finished in just over four days.

Ramesh says over the years of the festival, Calgary is turning into one of the leading public art cities in Cananda.

“Three years ago, we bought the tallest mural in the world to Calgary,” she said. “So, we have these profound heavyweight muralists from around the world coming to give us their masterworks, so we’re quickly becoming a public art city; nine years ago, not so much, but the dream is ten years from now, we can talk about Calgary, like Berlin, like New York, like an art city.”