The Gallery

If culture has a job, it’s connection. Culture exists to connect us with each, to our environments and fellow creatures, to ourselves and our own purpose and creative potential, and to something greater than ourselves - spirituality, and generations past and future. 

The Gallery is an experiment that asks: in a city alive with diverse cultures, how can a streetscape play a role in building a sense of connection?  Not a lowest common denominator space, sanitized of anything that might offend. Not a space that allows us to politely sidestep each other and our discomfort, but a rumbling, joyful, perhaps sometimes discordant cultural space. A space that still brings us into an attentive and meaningful engagement with each other, in all our difference.

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The Gallery is a place-based prototype that is focused on the sidewalk space on the north side of Edmonton City Centre, on 102A Avenue, between 100 and 101 Street. The goal of this prototype is to explore how we can support more authentic connections - in the sidewalk space or even through elements in the space. We will experiment and learn together. The Gallery seeks to bring together people experiencing the downtown space from different perspectives, often in tension; for example, business owners and street involved Edmontonians. Our hunch is that we need to create humanizing encounters across difference. Through the Gallery, we hope to learn: 

  • What makes for a good encounter, for whom? 

  • What grows motivation to engage, despite discomfort

  • Who are our champions?

The basic thinking behind the prototype is that experiencing a moment of connection with someone with which they currently experience tension could unlock possibilities. It’s also about changing the narrative around tension - that it isn’t inherently bad, that it shouldn't stop us from connecting. Finally, it is about practicing new behaviours.

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Relation to RECOVER’s Wellbeing Framework

Targeted Outcomes: We are hoping to strengthen the community and culture connections.

Tools/Levers: We are intentionally trying to pull the interactions & environments, and frames & narratives levers.

What We Have Done So Far

Lighting and art have been installed. The lighting is meant to draw you into the space and create a sense of warmth and whimsy. Art featuring Indigenous artists that are street-involved is also installed; it is accompanied by their own stories, and insight into how they find meaning and purpose in connecting with their cultures. The art includes paintings, blankets and beadwork.

The prototype team identified key assumptions, key interactions to explore, key questions, made plans for testing programming options in the space, and timing. Jacquelyn Cardinal from Naheyawin developed a framework for a workshop series targeted at the business community and those who have lived experience with marginalization. The hope was that these events would be opportunities for these two groups to practice connecting in spite of tensions. We ran our first workshop series in October 2021, and our second one in August 2022.

What We Have Learned So Far

  • We have learned that we need to be very careful not to get too caught up in planning the physical elements of the space, that we also need to think hard about the connections we are hoping to nurture, the relational aspects.

  • We have learned that we really need to focus our efforts on specific people and interactions, that this place-based experiment cannot be all-encompassing.

  • We have learned that navigating the City’s bureaucratic requirements for physical installations in public space is difficult - even with “insiders” on the team.

  • We have learned that we had to wait to run the experimental workshop series until COVID restrictions ease and more people return to downtown.

  • We have learned that the workshops have helped some participants to be more empathetic, more curious, and open to connecting with people living in the margins in spite of tensions.

Where to From Here

We will continue to offer more workshops targeted at the business community and those who have lived experience with marginalization . We hope to try some programming options in the space to learn about what ideas work, or which parts of ideas work, for whom, and under what circumstances. We hope to hone in on features and conditions that make a difference to people (and for which people) so we can apply these learnings elsewhere.


The Gallery is a RECOVER project in partnership with the Downtown Business Association, Edmonton City Centre, Boyle Street Community Services, and the Neighbourhood Empowerment Team.