Artist Calls

The City of Red Deer is seeking skilled Canadian mural artists to complete nine new murals in downtown Red Deer as a continuation of the Meet the Street arts and culture initiative. In addition, the City is seeking property owners that wish to contribute to the project by providing spaces for the murals in historic downtown.

Meet the Street 2022 will include nine new murals in underutilized spaces in historic downtown. The spaces selected for murals will have place-making methodology applied to assist in transforming these areas into welcoming community spaces. Organizers are seeking building owners (or tenants with permission from building owners) to partner on the transformation of several sites over the summer of 2022.

Five locations will be selected for the Meet the Street 2.0 Transformation Challenge, a placemaking challenge that invites building owners to participate with community groups and volunteers to transform a space. Participants will attend placemaking sessions with Community Development facilitators to create a plan to beautify and improve the selected sites. Plans will incorporate a new mural and other placemaking initiatives such as clean-up, urban gardening, creation of social space, or other creative ideas.

The project team will match building owners with a professional mural artist, oversee the mural production, and support building owners in the implementation of the placemaking project.

In addition to the five Transformation Challenge sites, Meet the Street is expanding its scope to include two community-based murals (mural design and production led by a professional artist and painted by volunteers) and two mentor/mentee murals (mural design and production led by an experienced artist supported by an emerging artist). The project team is seeking four professional artists to lead these projects, two emerging artists, and two community groups to assist and collaborate, as well as four property owners to provide wall space.

Artist submissions and expressions of interest from business owners may be submitted online prior to the deadline of Thursday, March 24, 2022, at 4 p.m. Mountain Standard Time. Successful applicants will be contacted by April 30, and projects will be completed between July and September 2022.

Meet the Street Arts & Culture Festival will be held during the 2022 September long weekend. Festival updates will be shared in the coming months.