This summer Chamberfest once again highlighted churches as fantastic downtown arts venues. Re-imagining or re-purposing “the church” is happening a lot more these days. The Sunday Event With fewer parishioners spending Sundays at churches, especially in downtown areas, beautiful old church buildings are being forced to diversify or dissolve. There is a migration of well-established congregations purchasing cheaper property in the suburbs and following families out of the city, such as the Metropolitan Bible Church formerly on Bank and Gladstone Street (shortly to be a new condo block). Churches are expensive. They rely on funds from Sunday collections and fundraisers to support their operations. Downtown property taxes and older buildings are a strain and increasingly challenging to maintain. While some are selling off their parking lots to make ends meet, other parishes are finding new uses for their spaces and attracting new audiences, beyond Sunday’s main event.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="599" caption="Jane's Walk 2009 in the Byward Market"][/caption] With 35 captivating neighbourhood-based walks on the program, this year's edition of Jane's Walk promises to be the most deliciously diverse version of the festival yet. We don't have the space to preview all of the tours on offer this weekend, but we do want to draw our readers' attention to several of the walks with a strong Spacing connection. From the outset of this blog, the people behind Apartment 613 have been huge supporters of Spacing Ottawa and it is no surprise ...

In the dense forest of corporate buildings in downtown Ottawa, wouldn’t it be nice to distinguish one corner from another? Too many offer only the pre-requisite coffee shop or dry cleaner tucked inside a big glass wall. One solution that enlivens urban centres is investment in corporate sculpture. When I was young, I had the chance to go to Chicago on a school field trip. To an art student, downtown Chicago is the epitome of cool. It’s a city that appreciates art and urbanism. We took architecture walks down streets lined with architecture by the likes of Louis Sullivan and Mies van der Rohe and you couldn’t help but notice the large commissioned sculptures that proudly sit in front of many of the city’s big buildings. It’s commonplace to give directions by saying: “Turn left at the big bat.” The “bat” being Batcolumn, a monumental grey skeleton of a baseball bat by pop artist Claes Oldenburg. Not only that, but people love the bat, gather and eat lunch in its shadow.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="267" caption="Voice of Fire: the template for curatorial controversy since 1989"][/caption] You might remember the ink spilled several months ago over Maria Cook's Ottawa Citizen article revealing plans for a 10-storey Roxy Paine sculpture, a kind of giant stalagmite atop Nepean Point. Online commentators quickly lashed the New York artist's Hundred Foot Line, and in the tradition of taxpayer critiques, ridiculed the commission as yet another foreign and aloof New York abstraction pushed onto the "suckers" at the National Art Gallery. Not to be outdone, the curatorial establishment rallied to defend the installation, apparently eager to assume the role of a cultural bastion desperately resisting the philistine masses. (A Mount Carmel complex which says a lot about the gallery's PR doctrine and its evolution since the early 90s, but let me concentrate for a moment on what seems vital.) These art controversies may strike us as naive, foolish, or ridiculous, but I believe they present some otherwise unavailable clues or code outlining larger processes in Ottawa's historical development. More specifically, these public art installations are likely the latest phase in Ottawa's well-known spatial mutation, beginning in the 1950s, when the horizontal city — the "Edinburgh of the West" whose only towers were the spires on churches and on Parliament — burgeoned into the familiar vertical experience of glass and concrete, the stunted mockery of Toronto or New York. (With all that came packaged: wild architectures; kaleidoscopic visual stimulation, etc.)

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Even spectres congregate at World Exchange ampitheatre "][/caption] It’s the time of year for renovations and construction projects, getting ready for the onset of the busy Ottawa tourism and “good weather” season. One of the renovation projects I have been keeping an eye on is the World Exchange Plaza Ampitheatre. In downtown Ottawa, the World Exchange is a well-utilized mixed-use facility. The property is managed by Bentall LP, known for their “responsible property management,” comprehensive green programs, and integrated approach to real estate. Office towers above, a mall on the main floor and free public parking below, the Exchange is perhaps best known for the Empire Cinema at its heart. The cinema is busy throughout the year, drawing people from Centretown, Lowertown, the Glebe, Sandy Hill and users of the transitway. Finding such “draws” is something that Spacing Ottawa has been actively talking about lately, especially on the issue of how to create that energy on nearby Sparks Street, where tumbleweeds have been seen rolling through the silent corridor at night. World Exchange has been sprucing up its outdoor pedestrian garden and popular lunchtime seating area (bordering busy Metcalfe, Albert and Queen), and enhancing its outdoor performance space.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Can "one percent" bring art to streets beyond the national gallery? "][/caption] When you see public art projects on Ottawa streets, do you wonder how they get there? Who pays for it? Many Ottawans don’t realize that every new Ottawa street re-vitalization project is subject to the City’s “1% for public art” policy. The idea of “percent-for-art” programs has been around for a while and is contingent on a mandated allocation from government (or corporate) initiatives. As it says on the City of Ottawa’s website: “One percent of funds for new municipal spaces is put aside for public art in order to beautify the space and make art accessible to everyone.” For example, the Community Design Plan for the Wellington West road reconstruction has a $25+ million price tag for capital improvement. 1% of that budget, approx. $250,000, is intended for commissioned public art. Other such projects include Bank Street, Preston Street and in the future, streets like Sussex Drive. Does the 1% always get directed to public art? No, but 1% initiatives are becoming more visible due to the strength and persistence of Ottawa’s vocal community groups who are starting to hold the City to its funding policy.

By Marcus Bowman, cross-posted from Spacing Toronto An unprecedented collaborative report mapping the concentration of artists in Canadian cities was released last month. The study was a result of the collective effort of the cultural departments of the cities of Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. Published by Hill Strategies, and based on data from the 2006 census, the report paints a fascinating picture into the make-up of Canada's artistic and creative communities. Each city  has its own trends in the way its artistic and creative communities have located. Vancouver had the highest overall percent of artists at 2.3% but has its artistic community spread widely throughout the city. Toronto has by far the largest artistic community; it is home to one in six Canadian artists. Toronto has also seen its artistic neighbourhoods shift slightly since to 2001 to different areas of concentration. Montreal has perhaps the most densely located artistic community and is home to three of the country's top five artistic employment postal codes. The Montreal neighbourhood of the H2T postal code (northward from avenue du Mont-Royal to avenue Van Horne between St-Denis and Jeanne-Mance) is the most artistic in Canada with artists accounting for 7.8% of its workers, ten times the national average. Ottawa and Calgary have artist concentrations closer to the national average, interestingly they also both have the largest income gaps between artists and the rest of the workforce and the largest percent of female artists. Maps of these trends are shown below.