Shop

“RING-A-DING-DONG DANDY” A Map of Stampede Wrestling

Launched by Edmonton-raised pro wrestler Stu Hart in 1951, world renowned, Calgary-based Stampede Wrestling (originally called Big Time Wrestling), was much more than a wrestling promotion in Alberta. Rather, for four decades it was a part of the province’s very cultural fabric. Several generations of fans followed the testosterone-fueled soap opera religiously and attended weekly matches on the Calgary Stampede grounds. Children bonded with their parents and grandparents, who had been watching the show for years. Kids roughhoused at recess, pretending to be their favorite grapplers. Certain mayors and provincial premiers counted themselves as fans and the show was a staple attraction each year at the famed Calgary Stampede.

This map documents the very real impact Stampede Wrestling had on Calgary from the 1950s to the ‘80s, focusing on key locations that tell the tale of the promotion, the Hart family, and the motley cast of characters who passed through along the way.

Artist Bio

Kyle Beal holds a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design (2001) and an MFA from the University of Victoria (2004). His work has been exhibited across Canada and the USA in Montréal, Toronto, New York City, Calgary, Saskatoon, Seattle, Vancouver and most recently Kelowna. Notably, his work was presented in the 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton) and the Esker Foundation (Calgary) among others. Beal currently lives and works in Edmonton, and is represented by VivianeArt in Calgary.

Writer Bio

Heath McCoy is a Canadian journalist, author, and communications specialist. McCoy has written two non-fiction historical books about professional wrestling in Canada: Pain and Passion: The History of Stampede Wrestling (2005) on Calgary’s iconic Stampede Wrestling promotion and Benoit: Wrestling with the Horror that Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport (a 2007 co-written compilation of essays) about wrestler Chris Benoit and his double-murder and suicide. Both books were critically acclaimed with David Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter declaring of Pain Passion: “I would rank it with any wrestling book ever written.”

Calgary Goes To The Movies Map

Artist: Amanda Forbis & Wendy Tilby
Research: Tamara P. & Robert M. Seiler, Andrew Watts, Charles Tepperman
Editing: Jim Ellis & Charles Tepperman
Graphic Designer: Glenn Mielke

Calgary’s movie screens are sites of fantasy and struggle. This map traces the history of venues for motion picture exhibition in Calgary, and the way films mediate an encounter between the local and more far-flung influences from the USA, Britain, and further afield. Movie-going was the quintessential modern entertainment, projecting Hollywood glamour to a rapidly growing city in the Alberta foothills in the early 20th century.

The history of Calgary screens is both a cultural and business struggle, as Calgary entrepreneurs sought ways of making movies speak to local audiences and fought for control with encroaching theatre chains. But when commercial cinemas were controlled by distant corporate offices, new venues and organizations have sprung up to support local filmmakers and audiences in diverse and distinctive ways.

 

About the Calgary Atlas Project

The Calgary Atlas Project seeks to recover crucial stories about Calgary’s past and present, stories that illuminate in surprising ways the character and diversity of the city.  Forgotten or overlooked stories from Calgary’s history are mapped onto the city’s geography, highlighting significant sites, events, and people in Calgary’s past. Ultimately the project will produce eighteen to twenty maps, spanning the earliest moments of habitation and settlement to the latest re-developments in the East Village.

The first two maps produced showcased Calgary’s LGBTQ2S+ history and First Nations participation with the Calgary Stampede. Newly completed maps explore the history of alternative art movements, labour activism and Calgary’s lost cinemas. Upcoming maps will illustrate immigration waves (as reflected in ethnic groceries and restaurants), Calgary’s architectural heritage, our connections with animals and the notable faces and places of Stampede Wrestling.

Each map has text written by local historians and images specially commissioned from Calgary artists, in most cases artists who have a relation to the history they are interpreting. The Atlas aims to bring a new vision of Calgary to Calgary; to show us how we got to where we are, and who we came to be.

The Calgary Atlas Project is an initiative of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities at the University of Calgary, and is generously supported by the Calgary Foundation. Individual maps are available from Calgary’s fine independent bookstores including Shelf Life Books, The Next Page, Pages Kensington, Owl’s Nest Books, as well as Map Town and Lougheed House. The project is steered by a group of five professors at the University of Calgary: George Colpitts (History), Jim Ellis (English; CIH), Nancy Janovicek (History), Graham Livesey (School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape), and Charles Tepperman (Communications, Media and Film).

In Summer 2020, the Atlas Project was the recipient of a Calgary Foundation Grant. We are enormously grateful for this grant as it has allowed us to hire a project manager to oversee the production of the forthcoming maps and to work on effective distribution schemes for the maps, making sure that they are read by the communities that would benefit from them the most.

 

Calgary’s Architecture Map

Text and photography: Graham Livesey
Map design: SPECTACLE Bureau for Architecture and Urbanism (Philip Vandermey, Jessie Andjelic, Veronique Ulrich, Vanessa Wang)
Editor: Jim Ellis
Graphic design: Glenn Mielke

This map shows important examples of Calgary’s architecture with its evolving styles and architectural characters. Prior to the settlement of Calgary and surroundings there were, and still are, the longstanding traditional architectures of the Indigenous people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta. Early examples of settler architecture tended to be interpretations of colonial models, which is evident in most buildings before World War II. With the advent  of modernism after the War an increasingly sophisticated local architectural community came to the fore, resulting in the regionally responsive approaches of the 1960s. The economic boom of the 1970s created a dramatic expansion of the city both outwards and upwards, which also brought to the city large architectural firms from Toronto and the United States. Postmodernism came to the city in the late 1970s, followed by a reinvigorated modernism. Recent years have seen various “starchitects” contribute to the city’s fabric, adding to the rich diversity of Calgary’s architectural history.

 

About the Calgary Atlas Project

The Calgary Atlas Project seeks to recover crucial stories about Calgary’s past and present, stories that illuminate in surprising ways the character and diversity of the city.  Forgotten or overlooked stories from Calgary’s history are mapped onto the city’s geography, highlighting significant sites, events, and people in Calgary’s past. Ultimately the project will produce eighteen to twenty maps, spanning the earliest moments of habitation and settlement to the latest re-developments in the East Village.

The first two maps produced showcased Calgary’s LGBTQ2S+ history and First Nations participation with the Calgary Stampede. Newly completed maps explore the history of alternative art movements, labour activism and Calgary’s lost cinemas. Upcoming maps will illustrate immigration waves (as reflected in ethnic groceries and restaurants), Calgary’s architectural heritage, our connections with animals and the notable faces and places of Stampede Wrestling.

Each map has text written by local historians and images specially commissioned from Calgary artists, in most cases artists who have a relation to the history they are interpreting. The Atlas aims to bring a new vision of Calgary to Calgary; to show us how we got to where we are, and who we came to be.

The Calgary Atlas Project is an initiative of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities at the University of Calgary, and is generously supported by the Calgary Foundation. Individual maps are available from Calgary’s fine independent bookstores including Shelf Life Books, The Next Page, Pages Kensington, Owl’s Nest Books, as well as Map Town and Lougheed House. The project is steered by a group of five professors at the University of Calgary: George Colpitts (History), Jim Ellis (English; CIH), Nancy Janovicek (History), Graham Livesey (School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape), and Charles Tepperman (Communications, Media and Film).

In Summer 2020, the Atlas Project was the recipient of a Calgary Foundation Grant. We are enormously grateful for this grant as it has allowed us to hire a project manager to oversee the production of the forthcoming maps and to work on effective distribution schemes for the maps, making sure that they are read by the communities that would benefit from them the most.

 

Calgary’s Art Underground Guide

Artist: Drunken Paw ( Mark Dicey, Leslie Sweder, Janet Turner)
Writer: Diana Sherlock
Photographer: Dave Brown
Editor: Jim Ellis
Graphic Designer: Glenn Mielke

For thousands of years before colonization, the nations who signed Treaty 7 including the Blackfoot Confederacy (the Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai First Nations), the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and the Stoney Nakoda (the Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Wesley First Nations), as well as members of the Métis Nation of Alberta, integrated visual and material culture into their daily lives to share stories about this land, Moh’kinstsis, the place now known as Calgary.

Comparatively, Calgary’s contemporary visual art history is only a blip in time, and it remains enriched by Indigenous voices. It began with and continues because of a robust group of dedicated do-it-yourself artists, arts administrators, and arts supporters who believe art has the power to share and respond to people’s most deeply held beliefs and values. This map represents an incomplete survey of many of the visual and media art initiatives that have shaped and, in some cases, continue to shape Calgary’s vibrant and expansive art scene.

 

About the Calgary Atlas Project

The Calgary Atlas Project seeks to recover crucial stories about Calgary’s past and present, stories that illuminate in surprising ways the character and diversity of the city.  Forgotten or overlooked stories from Calgary’s history are mapped onto the city’s geography, highlighting significant sites, events, and people in Calgary’s past. Ultimately the project will produce eighteen to twenty maps, spanning the earliest moments of habitation and settlement to the latest re-developments in the East Village.

The first two maps produced showcased Calgary’s LGBTQ2S+ history and First Nations participation with the Calgary Stampede. Newly completed maps explore the history of alternative art movements, labour activism and Calgary’s lost cinemas. Upcoming maps will illustrate immigration waves (as reflected in ethnic groceries and restaurants), Calgary’s architectural heritage, our connections with animals and the notable faces and places of Stampede Wrestling.

Each map has text written by local historians and images specially commissioned from Calgary artists, in most cases artists who have a relation to the history they are interpreting. The Atlas aims to bring a new vision of Calgary to Calgary; to show us how we got to where we are, and who we came to be.

The Calgary Atlas Project is an initiative of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities at the University of Calgary, and is generously supported by the Calgary Foundation. Individual maps are available from Calgary’s fine independent bookstores including Shelf Life Books, The Next Page, Pages Kensington, Owl’s Nest Books, as well as Map Town and Lougheed House. The project is steered by a group of five professors at the University of Calgary: George Colpitts (History), Jim Ellis (English; CIH), Nancy Janovicek (History), Graham Livesey (School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape), and Charles Tepperman (Communications, Media and Film).

In Summer 2020, the Atlas Project was the recipient of a Calgary Foundation Grant. We are enormously grateful for this grant as it has allowed us to hire a project manager to oversee the production of the forthcoming maps and to work on effective distribution schemes for the maps, making sure that they are read by the communities that would benefit from them the most.

City of Romance: The Literary World of 1920s Calgary

A captivating and diverse cast of literary personalities called 1920s Calgary home, including a Chinese-Canadian novelist who made her name masquerading as Japanese, a mixed-race writer from North Carolina who fashioned a Blackfoot identity, and an Icelandic-Canadian bent on literary fame. Here lived a crusading feminist who wrote bestselling fiction, a car-crazy war correspondent, a policeman-novelist, and a posse of pioneering female journalists pursuing success. Many of these characters and other city writers were enjoying international acclaim.

In an era of city building after a world war and pandemic, the literary scene was booming. Writers and others saw Calgary as a “City of Romance”—a storied landscape rich with literary inspiration. Novelist Winnifred Reeve noted in 1923: “something more valuable than oil may spring from our wells.” In a small city of sixty-five thousand far from the country’s cultural centre, writers were making a literary world here. Their enterprise took effort, optimism and bravado. This map tells that forgotten story.

 

Contributors

Eveline Kolijn, Artist

Shaun Hunter, Writer

Jim Ellis, Editor

Glenn Mielke, Graphic Designer

Esker Bookshop Tote

A tote bag designed to celebrate Esker Foundation’s Bookshop. This bright yellow canvas bag with hot pink silkscreen printing features a repeating grid of the Esker Bookshop logo designed by GuyGuyGuy. Printed by Jane Trash.

Dimensions (W x H): 36 x 40 cm
Handles: 32 cm long
100% cotton

$10.00

First Nations Stampede Guide

Researcher: Erin Hryniuk
Artist: Adrian Stimson
Editor: Jim Ellis
Graphic Designer: Glenn Mielke
Photographer: Dave Brown

Calgary is the Stampede City. Since 1918, the annual celebration has brought together cowboys, fairgoers and First Nations to mark the high point of the summer.

The map describes in detail the First Nations participation in the Stampede and the ways that participation changed the nature of the event. It highlights stories from the Calgary Stampede that are not often heard—stories that focus on the sometimes-controversial histories of the Stampede that are an important part of its legacy.

The artist, Adrian Stimson, a member of the Siksika Nation, has mapped the events using Indigenous ways of knowing, using pictographs in spiral and linear arrangements painted on a buffalo robe. The map serves as much to inform and remember as it does to decolonize and reclaim.

 

About the Calgary Atlas Project

The Calgary Atlas Project seeks to recover crucial stories about Calgary’s past and present, stories that illuminate in surprising ways the character and diversity of the city.  Forgotten or overlooked stories from Calgary’s history are mapped onto the city’s geography, highlighting significant sites, events, and people in Calgary’s past. Ultimately the project will produce eighteen to twenty maps, spanning the earliest moments of habitation and settlement to the latest re-developments in the East Village.

The first two maps produced showcased Calgary’s LGBTQ2S+ history and First Nations participation with the Calgary Stampede. Newly completed maps explore the history of alternative art movements, labour activism and Calgary’s lost cinemas. Upcoming maps will illustrate immigration waves (as reflected in ethnic groceries and restaurants), Calgary’s architectural heritage, our connections with animals and the notable faces and places of Stampede Wrestling.

Each map has text written by local historians and images specially commissioned from Calgary artists, in most cases artists who have a relation to the history they are interpreting. The Atlas aims to bring a new vision of Calgary to Calgary; to show us how we got to where we are, and who we came to be.

The Calgary Atlas Project is an initiative of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities at the University of Calgary, and is generously supported by the Calgary Foundation. Individual maps are available from Calgary’s fine independent bookstores including Shelf Life Books, The Next Page, Pages Kensington, Owl’s Nest Books, as well as Map Town and Lougheed House. The project is steered by a group of five professors at the University of Calgary: George Colpitts (History), Jim Ellis (English; CIH), Nancy Janovicek (History), Graham Livesey (School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape), and Charles Tepperman (Communications, Media and Film).

In Summer 2020, the Atlas Project was the recipient of a Calgary Foundation Grant. We are enormously grateful for this grant as it has allowed us to hire a project manager to oversee the production of the forthcoming maps and to work on effective distribution schemes for the maps, making sure that they are read by the communities that would benefit from them the most.

Gay & Lesbian Calgary: A Queer Map

Researcher: Kevin Allen
Artist: Mark Clintberg
Design collaborator: Jeff Kulak
Graphic design: Glenn Mielke

The pilot map, A Queer Map: Gay and Lesbian Calgary, documents Calgary’s rich LGBTQ2S+ history, drawing on the historical research of the Calgary Gay History Project with research by Kevin Allen and artwork by Mark Clintberg. Its exploration of the places and faces of Calgary’s LGBTQ+ history beautifully documents the scenes and bars where these communities thrived as well as the people and organisations whose activism and initiatives raised much needed awareness and support. The map reveals the strong sense of resistance, collaboration and pride of these communities in the face of an often inhospitable city over the years.

A Queer Map is a retelling of an old story. Lovingly curated, the history of Calgary’s LGBTQ+ community is relayed on the footprint of our city. From Club Carousel through to modern ephemera, this tour through history covers a broad swath of Calgary’s under-documented LGBTQ+ community hubs and sources of resistance in a sometimes-inhospitable Sandstone city. Drawing on the historical research of the Calgary Gay History Project of Kevin Allen and Mark Clintberg, this map explores the places and faces of Calgary’s LGBTQ+ history, its scenes, bars, community, and organisations, and the efforts made by LGBTQ+ activists to raise awareness through initiatives like Blue Jeans Day. The histories told are uniquely Calgarian, but also paradigmatic of many similar cities across western Canada. The strong sense of community, resistance, collaboration and pride which emerges from this trip down memory lane, continues to characterize Calgary’s LGBTQ+ community to this day.

 

About the Calgary Atlas Project

The Calgary Atlas Project seeks to recover crucial stories about Calgary’s past and present, stories that illuminate in surprising ways the character and diversity of the city.  Forgotten or overlooked stories from Calgary’s history are mapped onto the city’s geography, highlighting significant sites, events, and people in Calgary’s past. Ultimately the project will produce eighteen to twenty maps, spanning the earliest moments of habitation and settlement to the latest re-developments in the East Village.

The first two maps produced showcased Calgary’s LGBTQ2S+ history and First Nations participation with the Calgary Stampede. Newly completed maps explore the history of alternative art movements, labour activism and Calgary’s lost cinemas. Upcoming maps will illustrate immigration waves (as reflected in ethnic groceries and restaurants), Calgary’s architectural heritage, our connections with animals and the notable faces and places of Stampede Wrestling.

Each map has text written by local historians and images specially commissioned from Calgary artists, in most cases artists who have a relation to the history they are interpreting. The Atlas aims to bring a new vision of Calgary to Calgary; to show us how we got to where we are, and who we came to be.

The Calgary Atlas Project is an initiative of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities at the University of Calgary, and is generously supported by the Calgary Foundation. Individual maps are available from Calgary’s fine independent bookstores including Shelf Life Books, The Next Page, Pages Kensington, Owl’s Nest Books, as well as Map Town and Lougheed House. The project is steered by a group of five professors at the University of Calgary: George Colpitts (History), Jim Ellis (English; CIH), Nancy Janovicek (History), Graham Livesey (School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape), and Charles Tepperman (Communications, Media and Film).

In Summer 2020, the Atlas Project was the recipient of a Calgary Foundation Grant. We are enormously grateful for this grant as it has allowed us to hire a project manager to oversee the production of the forthcoming maps and to work on effective distribution schemes for the maps, making sure that they are read by the communities that would benefit from them the most.

Jeremy Shaw: Quantification Trilogy Reader

Edited by Laura McLean-Ferris
Texts by Nora N. Khan, Maxwell Stephens, and Jeremy Shaw
Afterword by Naomi Potter, Bettina Steinbrügge, Julia Stoschek

This unique book of cinematic stills printed on crisp, black pages accompanies several of Jeremy Shaw’s exhibitions held between 2018–2021. Concerned with the shape of future societies, The Quantification Trilogy itself examines fringe culture, theories of evolution, virtual reality, neurotheology, esotericism, dance, the representation of the sublime, as well as the notion of transcendence itself. The trilogy comprises parafictional short films: Quickeners (2014), Liminals (2017), and I Can See Forever (2018). The works are set in the future and explore how marginalized societies confront life after a scientific discovery has mapped and determined all parameters of transcendental spiritual experience.

ISBN 9781988860046
288 pages, hardcover
120 colour and black & white images
17 x 24 cm
Language: English and German

$50.00

Margaux Williamson: Interiors

This publication accompanies the exhibition Interiors.

Introduction by Sarah Milroy; essays by exhibition curator Jessica Bradley and writers Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner.

“While women artists of the early twentieth century were known for depicting interior spaces as places of privacy and domestic quietude, Margaux Williamson’s interiors reveal spaces of creativity, ­­ subjectivity, and a kind of anarchic experimentation. One of Canada’s leading painters, Williamson renders the ‘great indoors’ with a lush touch, drawing us into her world.” – Sarah Milroy.

Softcover
84 pages
38 full-colour images
Includes documentation of Williamson’s studio by Toronto photographer Craig Boyko.

Published by McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2021.

RELATIONS: Diaspora and Painting

Edited by Cheryl Sim
Contributors: Rahel Aima, Mojeanne Behzadi, Eunice Bélidor, Hera Chan, Joséphine Denis, Tammer El-Sheik, Dominique Fontaine, Diane Gistal, Phoebe Greenberg, Joseph Henry, Emily Jan, Adrienne R. Johnson, Marissa Largo, Yaniya Lee, Joseph O. Legaspi, Sarah Nesbitt, James Oscar, Ara Osterweil, Janice Lobo Sapiago, Jonathan Shaughnessy, Cheryl Sim, Robin Simpson, Rachel Spence, Tracy Valcourt, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, and Paul Zits

This richly illustrated volume explores the multiple and evolving meanings of diaspora, its condition, and its experiences as expressed through painting. Relations brings together artists who address questions of diaspora from diverse perspectives, methodologies, and aesthetic languages. With its own deep and complex history, painting becomes a particularly provocative lens through which to explore the complications and diversities that are analogous to the richness and wide range of diasporic experiences. RELATIONS is produced alongside a group show organized at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art in Montreal. The volume includes full-color reproductions of these artists’ works and is enriched by installation views of the exhibition, as well as texts by the curator and an interdisciplinary collection of writers who explore the practices of each artist.

RELATIONS includes work from artists such as Larry Achiampong, Hurvin Anderson, Kamrooz Aram, Firelei Báez, Moridja Kitenge Banza, Frank Bowling, Lubaina Himid, Bharti Kher, Rick Leong, Manuel Mathieu, Jordan Nassar, Yoko Ono, Maia Cruz Palileo, Rajni Perera, Jessica Sabogal, Curtis Talwst Santiago, Marigold Santos, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Shanna Strauss, Salman Toor, Hajra Waheed, and Jinny Yu.


The exhibition premiered at the PHI Foundation from July 8 until December 7, 2020 and is currently presented at Esker Foundation from July 24 through to November 27, 2021.

ISBN 978-3-7774-3599-2
224 pages, hardcover
Languages: English and French
Colour images
31 X 23 X 2.5 cm

$70.00

Robin Arseneault: Falling Off The Log

Edited by Shauna Thompson
Text by Naomi Potter
Design by Bamff

A limited-edition artist book to accompany Robin Arseneault’s solo exhibition Falling Off The Log. Designed by Bamff to highlight and embody the physical experience of her work, this unique artist book is performative, provocative, and luxurious.

Arseneault’s work often begins with sketches, small collages of found photographs, torn paper, and ink drawings, much of which is captured in, and between, the 64 pages of this book as intimate reflections of the artist’s working methods and material considerations. Also included is a text by Naomi Potter that highlights the work in both the eponymous exhibition and this publication.

ISBN 978-0-9880263-9-1
64 pages, softcover
Colour and black & white images
21 x 33 cm
Language: English

$50.00
Edition of 300

Samuel Roy-Bois: Présences

The Animals Guide to Calgary

Travelling to the city for food, shelter, or the chance to find a mate?

Just sightseeing with your family?

Passing through on your way to somewhere else?

Whether you’re arriving on hooves, paws, fins, or feathers, this map will guide you to some of the prime spots of interest, hopefully divert you away from the many potential dangers for animal visitors to Calgary, while providing some historical fun facts for you and your family. Be advised that things may have changed since you were last here: trails may have been blocked, fences installed, or road traffic increased — creating dangers for travellers. On the bright side, there are new green spaces, a new weir, and lots of ways to move about, even if it means sharing paths with skateboarders. While some human attitudes towards wildlife in the city are changing, there are still plenty of misunderstandings, particularly about the dangers posed by our four-legged brethren. Enjoy your stay, but please be mindful of risks posed by humans.

Contributors

Artist: Rita McKeough

Writers: Shelley Alexander and George Colpitts

Editor: Jim Ellis

Graphic Designer: Glenn Mielke

Vivek Shraya & Shamik Bilgi: ANGRY by TOO ATTACHED

TOO ATTACHED is two siblings: Vivek Shraya & Shamik Bilgi. VIVEK is a multidisciplinary artist whose album with Queer Songbook Orchestra, Part-Time Woman, was nominated for the Polaris Music Prize. SHAMIK is a producer and beatboxer who has performed in 15 countries and toured with Method Man & Redman, Bassnectar, and Tanya Tagaq.

Too Attached grew out of Vivek and Shamik’s childhood history of singing devotional songs together in Edmonton, obsessing over pop and r&b as teenagers, and informal collaborations throughout their individual decade-long artistic careers. In 2015, they released their first EP, BRONZE, and toured across Canada while opening for Tegan and Sara.

Most recently, Too Attached were listed as one of IN Magazine’s 2018 Canadian Artists To Watch and their newest album, ANGRY, was described by CBC as one of “Canada’s most incisive, radical and galvanizing albums.”

Cover art by hatecopy.

Listen to the album on bandcamp here.

Workers Stand Up Map

Words: Kirk Niergarth
Images & Words: Karen Mills
Editor: Jim Ellis

Available as a folded map, and as a rolled poster.

Calgary’s labour history is extensive, diverse, and very much alive. In spite of its current branding as a city of rugged individualists, Calgary was built, literally and metaphorically, by workers who organized to promote the common good and community well-being.

Along its central streets and at its peripheries, Calgary has a rich history of solidarity and struggle among working people. This map invites you to trace Calgary’s labour history in person. Some of the sites described still stand, while others must be imagined as they were – an exercise in seeing the familiar anew.

The legacy of this history is not in statues or monuments, but in values Calgarians have been committed to for generations. When you demand public access to quality education, to health care, to housing, to fair treatment by employers, and to an equitable distribution of wealth among those whose labour ultimately produces it, you are continuing Calgary traditions as old as the city itself and vital to its development and success.

 

About the Calgary Atlas Project

The Calgary Atlas Project seeks to recover crucial stories about Calgary’s past and present, stories that illuminate in surprising ways the character and diversity of the city.  Forgotten or overlooked stories from Calgary’s history are mapped onto the city’s geography, highlighting significant sites, events, and people in Calgary’s past. Ultimately the project will produce eighteen to twenty maps, spanning the earliest moments of habitation and settlement to the latest re-developments in the East Village.

The first two maps produced showcased Calgary’s LGBTQ2S+ history and First Nations participation with the Calgary Stampede. Newly completed maps explore the history of alternative art movements, labour activism and Calgary’s lost cinemas. Upcoming maps will illustrate immigration waves (as reflected in ethnic groceries and restaurants), Calgary’s architectural heritage, our connections with animals and the notable faces and places of Stampede Wrestling.

Each map has text written by local historians and images specially commissioned from Calgary artists, in most cases artists who have a relation to the history they are interpreting. The Atlas aims to bring a new vision of Calgary to Calgary; to show us how we got to where we are, and who we came to be.

The Calgary Atlas Project is an initiative of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities at the University of Calgary, and is generously supported by the Calgary Foundation. Individual maps are available from Calgary’s fine independent bookstores including Shelf Life Books, The Next Page, Pages Kensington, Owl’s Nest Books, as well as Map Town and Lougheed House. The project is steered by a group of five professors at the University of Calgary: George Colpitts (History), Jim Ellis (English; CIH), Nancy Janovicek (History), Graham Livesey (School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape), and Charles Tepperman (Communications, Media and Film).

In Summer 2020, the Atlas Project was the recipient of a Calgary Foundation Grant. We are enormously grateful for this grant as it has allowed us to hire a project manager to oversee the production of the forthcoming maps and to work on effective distribution schemes for the maps, making sure that they are read by the communities that would benefit from them the most.