Public Sculpture Program
Launching 2026
In 2026, BUMP Festival Arts Society expands into a new dimension of public art with the launch of the BUMP Public Sculpture Program. This inaugural edition will commission two artists or artist teams to create ambitious public sculptures in Calgary’s Beltline neighbourhood.
For nearly a decade, BUMP has transformed Calgary’s streets through murals and temporary interventions that reshape the civic imagination. The Public Sculpture Program builds on that legacy, choosing to work with a medium that occupies space differently. Sculptures and installations asks to be walked around, it can interrupt movement and create encounters in real time. This program invites artists to work at that scale, to create works that exist not only visually, but physically, within shared space.
The RFP for this program is now open. Please click here to view full details, submission requirements, and application guidelines.
Why This Program Exists
Calgary is a city defined by layered and often conflicting narratives. It is both “Cowtown” and a rapidly densifying urban centre. A gateway to the Rockies and a global energy capital. A place shaped by deep First Nations histories and by the systems that attempted to erase them. These identities coexist, producing pride, friction, aspiration, and contradiction.
Public space is where these tensions become visible.
The BUMP Public Sculpture Program addresses a gap between short-term activation and permanent monument. These works are not decorative gestures, nor are they fixed memorials. They are substantial, semi-permanent propositions, artworks 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.
2026 Sites
The inaugural installations will take place in Calgary’s Beltline neighbourhood at:
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Humpy Hollow Park
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Louis Szabo Commons
These commissions mark the first chapter of an ongoing annual sculpture initiative that will build a long-term lineage of contemporary public artworks across Calgary.
Guest Curator: Ken Lum
The 2026 edition of the BUMP Public Sculpture Program is curated by internationally acclaimed Canadian artist Ken Lum.
Ken Lum’s work has long examined the symbolic language of cities : how public images, signage, monuments, and built environments construct identity, belonging, and exclusion. His practice engages directly with the politics of visibility: who is represented, who is omitted, and how power operates through public space.
For this inaugural program, Lum invites artists to consider Calgary’s symbolic identities, bucking horses, oil wealth, mountain landscapes, livability and the social, environmental, and historical consequences embedded within them.
We move away from reinforcing dominant narratives, with this curatorial framework asking artists to work within tension. To create sculptures that understand the city as layered and contested. To produce works that reveal the relationship between aspiration and erasure, celebration and critique.
Under Lum’s guidance, the BUMP Public Sculpture Program launches as a platform for artists to engage Calgary at its most visible and most unresolved.
