The Bay Building Hoarding: Public Art Installation
BUMP Festival Arts Society has partnered with ASTRA to transform the construction hoarding surrounding Calgary’s former Hudson’s Bay building into a large-scale temporary public art installation.
Stretching more than 283 feet along 1 Street SW, the installation brings together four original digital artworks by Calgary based artists Leechuts, WAPOSHPYII, Jarett Sitter and Katherin Leivikov. Each artist has created an independent work across an approximately 70 foot wide canvas, with the four compositions coming together as one expansive outdoor exhibition in the heart of downtown.
Centred around the creative prompt WHAT MIGHT EXIST HERE?, the project invited the curated artists to consider a city in transition: the relationship between what was, what is, and what might come next. Through their individual visual language and creative practices, each artist offers a distinct interpretation of change, memory, movement, identity and possibility.
The artworks have been digitally produced and printed onto vinyl, transforming an otherwise temporary construction barrier into a public facing canvas. Experienced by pedestrians, commuters, downtown workers and visitors, the installation brings contemporary art into the everyday life of the city, outside the walls of a traditional gallery.
THE ARTISTS
Visit these artists pages to learn more about their design.
WHY THIS PROJECT?
Cities are never finished. They are continually being built, dismantled, remembered, imagined and made again. In Calgary, where significant changes are unfolding across the downtown core, these periods of transition present an opportunity to reconsider what our city looks like, who gets to shape its identity and imagine its future.
The former Hudson’s Bay building has been a fixture of downtown Calgary since 1913. Following the closure of Hudson’s Bay in 2025, this familiar landmark enters a new chapter. As the building undergoes change, the construction hoarding surrounding it creates a temporary boundary between the site and the surrounding public realm. We saw an opportunity to approach that boundary differently.
Rather than treating construction hoarding as something that simply conceals a building in transition, BUMP and ASTRA saw it as an opportunity to create something for the city in the meantime. The project asks what happens when artists are invited into conversations about development, not simply to decorate a finished space, but to contribute their perspectives while a place is being transformed.
For BUMP, this is part of a larger vision for public art in Calgary. Artists should be recognized not only as contributors to a city’s cultural life, but as active participants in shaping its public spaces, identity and future. Through this partnership, four local artists have been given the opportunity to create ambitious work at an architectural scale, reach audiences beyond conventional arts spaces and bring their own perspectives into one of downtown’s most recognizable locations.
WHAT MIGHT EXIST HERE? is an invitation to look at a familiar place differently, to sit with the uncertainty of change and to imagine the possibilities that exist between what a city has been and what it could become.
Mural Title
“WHAT MIGHT EXIST HERE?”