This summer we’ve been looking at how cultural nonprofit organizations are running arts festivals across the country. In June, we spoke with the organizers of Toronto’s Luminato festival about their strategic partnership with The New Yorker magazine. In July, the folks running the Great Northern Arts Festival, in Inuvik, told us about the challenges and opportunities faced in running the far-north’s largest annual gathering of artists.

This month, we venture to Charlottetown, PEI, to explore the emergence of a brand new festival called Art In the Open, taking place on Saturday, August 27, from 4 pm until midnight.

Cultural Capitals of Canada

“It seemed like magic to me,” says Becka Viau of the moment when the City of Charlottetown phoned her last January requesting a meeting. Viau is project coordinator for This Town Is Small, a grassroots, artist-run centre in Charlottetown that had incorporated just the previous fall. One the phone was Ann Carrière, the newly hired coordinator of the Cultural Capital designation for the city, calling to offer the tiny nonprofit a significant role in what was to be one of the largest celebrations of art and culture PEI had ever seen.

The Cultural Capitals of Canada program is run by the Ministry of Canadian Heritage. Initiated in 2002 to foster growth in the arts, the program designates three cities “Cultural Capitals” each year. Cities apply in one of three size categories (small, medium and large) and must demonstrate an excellent track record of commitment to art and culture, as well as a plan for new artistic activities for the application year.

Winning the designation means a significant boost to arts funding: between $500,000 and $2 million, depending on the category. The program stipulates that this funding can comprise only 75% of the city’s budget for its Cultural Capital plan, so additional monies also come from the municipality and province.

This year, Charlottetown, Lévis, QC and Vancouver, BC were chosen as the respective small, medium and large Cultural Capitals.

And Charlottetown has been rolling out its bold plan for 15 events, services and celebrations since shortly after the designation began. Most activities are being organized in collaboration with local nonprofits, which receive funds out of the Cultural Capital budget to execute their events.

For example, in April, a launch concert called Sound Celebration was staged in collaboration with East Coast Music Week, featuring compositions by local musicians. In July, an aboriginal garden was inaugurated in Confederation Landing Park, planted in partnership with the Native Council of PEI and the Mi’kmaq Confederacy of PEI. A Women and Song night to be held in September is part of a group of events celebrating Acadian and Francophone culture, coordinated by Carrefour de l’Isle Saint-Jean, a school and community centre, and by Les Francofolies de Charlottetown, an existing French arts festival. This fall will also see the emergence of a new literary festival in town called Pen & Inkling, coordinated by the Prince Edward Island Writers’ Guild.

In addition to these ambitious endeavours, one of the largest events will be a free, Nuit Blanche-style evening of art installations, exhibits and performances held across the city. The Nuit-Blanche concept of a nighttime festival of outdoor public art originated in France in the 1980s and has since spread worldwide — cities mounting Nuit Blanche events in Canada include Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax.

A big job for a small organization

Carrière had picked up the phone that day last winter to ask for Viau’s help in coordinating a Nuit Blanche for Charlottetown, because This Town Is Small had been generating a significant artistic buzz around the city. “This Town Is Small, by their mandate, energy and member base, were really a good partner because they are so grassroots and know so much about what’s happening locally with artists,” says Carrière. “It was a perfect group to go to, and Becka has the right skill set and personality — being an artist herself — to do this.”

Viau, who was born on PEI and is a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, had formed the artist collective in early 2010 to fill what she saw as a void in the arts community. “There was no artist-run centre here,” she says. “There was this real gap between emerging artists and the senior professional level.”

This Town Is Small, which has a five-member board of directors and 45 members, has a mandate to help emerging artists develop their professional careers. For this purpose, they use the UNESCO definition of the artist, established in 1980 at the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, as “any person who creates or gives creative expression to, or re-creates works of art, who considers his artistic creation to be an essential part of his life, who contributes in this way to the development of art and culture and who is or asks to be recognized as an artist, whether or not he is bound by any relations of employment or association.”

In early 2010, This Town Is Small established a blog, where they posted art works and wrote about art as well as their activities in the community. These ranged from small guerrilla-type art interventions, such as decorating a disused children’s swing set with ribbons and bells, to a 16-artist collaborative performance evening, called “Iris Mercurial: The Passage of Night,” which was held at a local bar and attracted 250 people.

Such activities also drew the attention of Cultural Capital organizers, and when it came time to set up Charlottetown’s “Nuit Blanche”, This Town Is Small was asked to step up.

Viau was named co-coordinator of the new festival along with Pan Wendt, curator of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown’s largest public art institution. The festival was named Art in the Open by a steering committee composed of Carrière, Viau and Wendt, as well as Robbie Ashley, policy advisor for the Native Council of PEI, Louis-Christian Drouin, community development officer for Carrefour de l’Isle- Saint-Jean, and artists Gerald Beaulieu and Gail Hodder.

Bringing it all together

Art in the Open will feature 34 exhibits, installations and performances across a 40-square-block area in downtown Charlottetown and in the city’s largest green space, the 37-acre Victoria Park, immediately southwest of downtown. There is naturally a lot of crossover between their activities, but Viau is mainly overseeing events in the downtown area, while Wendt is curating the Victoria Park component. Confederation Centre is contributing considerable labour, expertise and equipment across the entire festival. In addition to the festival proper, many local art galleries and museums will remain open until midnight.

Typically a Nuit Blanche program is established through a call for submissions, but because of the tight timeframe for organizing Art In the Open, only 13 projects in the downtown area were generated in that manner. Two others in downtown are part of an existing artist residency program run by This Town Is Small. The remaining 18 will be in Victoria Park, with two of those being organized in collaboration with the Island Media Arts Co-op and the Native Council of PEI, respectively.

The Victoria Park portion of the festival dovetails with an exhibit currently showing at the Confederation Centre, called Free Parking, which explores contemporary artists’ engagement with the aesthetic of the urban park. “We think of Victoria Park as an extension of our own activities as well as part of the city event,” says Wendt. Confederation Centre also contributed about a fifth of the budget for this component of the festival.

To curate Victoria Park, Wendt contacted numerous local artists as well as artists from off island who he thought would be able to contribute suitable works. “There are eight or nine projects from PEI artists,” he states, “most created specifically for this event.” Nine projects come from outside the province.

Looking ahead to future success

Organizers hope that the festival can repeat in coming years, but without the Cultural Capital designation, it could be a challenge. Carrière says Art In the Open is costing about 10-15% of the overall Cultural Capital budget. Given that all the artists in the festival are being paid, if organizers want to stage it again next year on the same scale, they will have to tap into other funding sources, such as corporate sponsorship and grants from The Canada Council for the Arts.

“When we look back on our year of Cultural Capital designation, Art In the Open will certainly be one of the signature events,” says Carrière. “Hopefully it will have a nice future.”

Shaun Smith is a journalist and novelist in Toronto. He was co-founder of the literary event series This Is Not A Reading Series, and he has written extensively about books and the publishing industry for such publications as The Toronto Star, Quill & Quire, The Globe & Mail and CBC.ca. His YA novel Snakes & Ladders was published by the Dundurn Group in 2009.

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