Nuit Blanche takes over the night in downtown Regina

Raegan Moynes sits inside her fort at Nuit Blanche in Victoria Park while a festival participant pins fabric onto the outside of the structure. (Wayne Mantyka/CTV News)

The night was truly alive in downtown Regina Saturday night, as Nuit Blanche made its annual return to the Queen City. The nighttime arts and culture festival featured installations and demonstrations from various local artists and organizations.

Nuit Blanche is part of a worldwide movement of after-dark arts festivals in major cities like Paris and Toronto – along with prairie centres like Saskatoon, Winnipeg and Regina.

This year’s iteration of Nuit Blanche in Regina focused on the theme “What We Call Home,” through visual and conceptual storytelling.

Raegan Moynes is a local textile artist who created a play fort from bedsheets and who invited festival participants to cut and tear colourful fabrics to pin onto the structure.

Her work was titled: “A safe place to hide from the rest of the world.”

“For me it’s kind of a way of thinking about the collective gestures that we make as a community together to build safety and to build nostalgia and to just create those spaces and how we’re all kind of like in this collective community,” Moynes told CTV News.

The artist explained that her installation was inspired by her two-year-old son.

“He has inspired this new direction in my work where I’m interested in how to have kids involved in artwork as well as adults and hope those two ways of being can coexist in the world together through play and creativity and making together,” she added.

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Nuit Blanche has been staged annually in Regina since 2018.

2025 marked the first year that an organization representing Saskatchewan printmakers participated.

SK Printmakers represents about 40 or 50 artists from Regina, Saskatoon and other communities.

They provided festival goers with an opportunity to try screen printing. Robert Truszkowski, a professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Regina, helped organize the hands-on exhibit.

“Screen printing a picture of the Earth, which is everyone’s home, is the theme of the festival, home,” he explained. “So, we are screen printing a picture of the earth onto stuff that people are bringing or you can get a tote bag for a toonie and we’ve got tote bags ready to go.”

A number of years ago, Truszkiwski did a solo display at Nuit Blanche.

“In 2018, the first Nuit Blanche in Regina, I did a letterpress thing in an alley over here. It was the end of September and whipping snow and about zero degrees and absolutely horrifying but we had a lot of fun,” he said. “But this is better.”

Staging the festival on the Labour Day weekend provided participants with an exceptionally warm summer evening.

Saskatoon’s Nuit Blanche will be held later this month on the evening of Sept. 20.