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BUMP Launches RFP for Its Inaugural Public Sculpture Program

Monday March 2, 2026

As we enter our 10th year, BUMP Festival Arts Society is stepping into an exciting new chapter in our evolution. In 2026, we will launch the inaugural BUMP Public Sculpture Program, one of the most ambitious projects in our history and a defining moment in the future of our organization.

For nearly a decade, BUMP has transformed Calgary through murals and temporary public interventions. In 2026, we expand into a new dimension: three-dimensional, site-responsive works that occupy shared space, confront viewers physically, and hold complexity in real time. Our RFP is open now and will remain so until March 29th.

Why Public Sculpture, Why Now?

Calgary is a city shaped by powerful and often conflicting narratives. It is both “Cowtown” and a rapidly densifying urban centre. A gateway to the Rockies and an oil capital. A place defined by deep First Nations histories and by the systems that attempted to erase them.

Public space is where these tensions surface most clearly. Our new Public Sculpture Program seeks artists who understand the city not as a fixed identity, but as an ongoing negotiation between visible narratives and hidden realities.

We hope to address the gap between short-term activation and permanent monument through this medium, bringing to life artworks that are substantial, semi-permanent propositions that hold complexity rather than resolve it.

Calgary does not need monuments that flatten its identity. It needs artworks that allow its contradictions to surface. Through this program, sculpture becomes a civic tool, one that reflects the official image of the city while also revealing what lives in its shadows.

Guest Curator: Ken Lum

The inaugural edition is curated by internationally acclaimed Canadian artist Ken Lum, whose practice examines how public space constructs identity, belonging, and power. We first invited Ken to Calgary  as the keynote speaker for our 2025 Urban Art Conference, built around ‘Monuments & Memory’. The exchange and dialogue that unfolded last August was both exciting and generative, sparking conversations that stayed with us long after the festival closed. That momentum has grown into Ken returning to BUMP in 2026 as Guest Curator of our inaugural Public Sculpture Program, bringing his critical lens and deep engagement with monumentality to shape this next chapter of our work.

As Co-Founder and Chair of Monument Lab, Lum has critically examined how monuments shape collective memory and how cities might imagine more equitable forms of remembrance. His curatorial framework invites artists to work within tension, to interrogate urban symbols, surface what they obscure, and propose new ways of seeing Calgary.

What We’re Commissioning

In 2026, two artists or artist teams will be commissioned to create public sculptures in Calgary’s Beltline neighbourhood

  • Each selected artist/team will receive a total project budget of $65,000 CAD, inclusive of artist fees and fabrication.

  • Installations will be semi-permanent and remain on site for a minimum of three years.

  • The program will become an ongoing annual initiative, building a long-term lineage of contemporary public artworks across Calgary.

The call is open to local, national, and international artists working across sculpture, installation, architecture, and interdisciplinary spatial practices.

Apply

If you are interested in proposing a project for the inaugural BUMP Public Sculpture Program, we invite you to review the full Request for Proposals and submit your application here.

Our Application Deadline is March 29, 2026 at 5 PM MST