Drawing inspiration from the rich history of CP Rail in Bowness and a celebrating a shared love of freight trains, the Prairie Grain Transport mural will contain imagery of towering grain elevators and a grain hopper train line wrapping around the back parking lot of Leopold’s Tavern in Bowness.

The Prairie Grain Transport mural will be completed between August 13-16. This project is funded with help from Jim & Brian Sipthorpe, Leopold's Tavern, and The Mainstreet Bowness BIA. Click the image to learn more about Ocea on her artist spotlight page.

With help from the ActivateYYC Grant we are pleased to be creating three unique "creative breadcrumbs" sidewalk murals on the street along Bowness Road. Located infront of Tao of Peace Martial Arts & Life Skills, Bow Cycle, and Leopold's Tavern, the murals will help lead visitors from the eastmost mural on the One Stop towards our westmost mural behind the Bowness Library.

ActivateYYC started as a tactical urbanism microgrant initiative by the Federation of Calgary Communities, first launched in May 2017. It helps Calgarians temporarily change spaces to encourage people to activate movement and empower their community.

Envisioned as an opportunity to create a safe space for intersectionality marginalized folks in the BIPOC and Queer communities, we are creating a mural and associated web page on the Mixed Manifest website. This mural will be painted on the west end of the Bowness Library alley wall. The mural will include a paraphrased quote from Janet Mock with the verbiage “Telling our stories is a revolutionary act”. Also included in the mural is imagery of traditional Chinese folklore with carp fish jumping over a waterfall and transforming into a dragon.

The digital component will include a QR code placed on site leading to the mural’s page encouraging folks to submit anonymous stories about their experiences, both positive and negative, in the Queer X BIPOC space. The stories will be reviewed for content and showcased on the project web page as a running log of community engagement. The intention is to harvest the anonymous stories for a year and use them as seed data into a data visualization algorithm out of which we will get a lovely visual born from the community's experiences. We plan to paint this visual as a subsequent mural on the larger portion of the back of the Bowness Library building next summer.

The We Love Bowness Mural is partially funded by the Ripples Community Building Grant and will be executed by two local artists with strong ties to the neighbourhood of Bowness. Bohdi Smith and Casey James will be painting a mural on the East facing wall of the One Stop on Bowness Road celebrating the community and thanking Bowness for allowing us to create an alley way decorated with graffiti pieces at last summer's "We ❤️ Bowness Graffiti Jam" project.

Stop by to say "Hi!" and be sure to take a stoll down the alley way to peek at the colorful pieces we created at our last event.