Page 43 - 08_Oct-2025
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I
was still a university student when
I first exhibited artwork 21 years ago.
My professor introduced me to a curator
at the Works Art and Design Festival,
who arranged an exhibition featuring
my photographs alongside work by two other students.
I barely understood what I was trying to create back then
and resisted calling myself an artist — a title that, being
so new to the field, I wasn’t sure I’d earned. In the years
since, I’ve produced and collaborated on projects of all
kinds, from books to installations. And yet, I still avoid
calling myself an artist. Rather, I say I work as one — a
distinction meant to remind people that art is work.
It’s not always clear to our audiences how much labour
goes into what we create. But let me tell you: it’s a lot. And
while a lucky few make a healthy living from art, most
do not. Edmonton’s arts sector runs on second jobs, side
hustles, fundraisers, donations and public funding — a
patchwork that has kept it alive. However, that foundation
is beginning to crack, putting the artists and organizations
who depend on it at risk.
Now, this might sound like familiar hyperbole. Aren’t
the arts always “in trouble?” It’s true: artists and arts
organizations could always use more money, would always
benefit from spending less time fundraising and justifying
their practice. But a confluence of recent circumstances
has turned routine underfunding of the arts into something
more existential.
The circumstances I’m referring to were recently
outlined in the Edmonton Arts Council’s (EAC) economic
impact report, which details municipal arts funding and
its social and economic effects. As an artist, I promptly
read the report upon its release in July, and it’s all business.
It uses 2024 financial statements from arts organizations
funded by the EAC — a list that includes the Edmonton
Folk Music Festival, the Art Gallery of Alberta and
Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre — to thoroughly
outline how much taxpayers benefit from subsidizing the
sector, totaling $14 million per year. While there is a brief
mention of more intangible benefits (“social cohesion,
civic engagement, and community well-being”) these
are unlikely to sway a government trying to fend off
consecutive deficits and an alarmingly close debt ceiling.
Instead, the report is filled with assertive statistics about
art as an economic driver ($68.4 million in value-added
GDP) and as an employment generator (over 1,400 local
jobs created and funded directly by the EAC). The study
aims to persuade its audience — first and foremost the
City of Edmonton, which evaluates EAC funding every four
years — that the arts are a profitable investment.
In recent years, much of the municipal funding that
supports artists and arts organizations has stagnated or
been redirected. The City of Edmonton, for instance, last
reviewed EAC funding in 2023 but hasn’t raised levels since
2019, despite staggering population growth. For artists,
this means more competition for the same pool of money.
The impact study notes that in 2024, the increase in grant
applications led to “an all-time low in the application
success rate for individuals and collectives.” Meanwhile, the
province has increased support for the Alberta Foundation
for the Arts by $4.5 million for the second consecutive
year — a welcome investment, but one that can’t offset the
pressure when municipal funding stands still.
Factors like the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation and
global trade disputes have made it costlier to be an
artist (consider associated expenses like materials, rent
and transportation). Such challenges might once have
prompted action from the private sector, but a significant
amount of corporate giving has shifted in the wake of the
pandemic. Earlier this year, for example, TD Bank ended
its long-time sponsorship of a series of jazz festivals
across Canada, leaving organizers little time to address the
deficits. Edmonton Opera Executive Director Robin Whiffen
says this shift reflects a national trend that’s challenging
fundraising efforts. “We’re having to work twice as hard for
the same amount of money,” she told me.
This alone would be enough to hinder growth and
development in Edmonton’s arts sector. However, it comes
at a time when consumer behaviour is also changing, with
some local arts events seeing declining attendance. Not
all are struggling — the Fringe Festival just posted record
numbers — but overall, audiences are harder to reach and
less consistent. The reasons are many: inflation affects
patrons as much as artists, and tighter budgets often
change how they engage with the arts. An EAC survey
conducted in 2024 confirms this, adding that lack of time
and insufficient knowledge about local events are also key
barriers to participation — a gap that may have widened
since the loss of alternative weeklies that were once the
go-to guide for local listings. Now we all reach for our
smartphones, which offer algorithmically tailored info,
much of which has nothing to do with Edmonton.
It’s difficult to ignore the impact of this technological
shift, which has given us round-the-clock access to
attention-grabbing entertainment, a lot of which — TikTok,
for example — is free. As American literary critic Parul
Sehgal notes in essays for The New York Times and Sydney
Morning Herald, much contemporary literature, music and
television has become simpler and shorter to appeal to our
waning attention spans. That doesn’t bode well for galleries,
playhouses and other traditional venues that require
participants to leave the house, silence phones and sustain
attention for longer than a scroll.
Identifying the conditions of these funding
challenges is merely a diagnosis. Artists and arts
organizations must now determine how best to ride it
out — or if this shift proves to be permanent, how best
to stay afloat.
I spoke with administrators from a range of local arts
organizations — including the Citadel Theatre, Freewill
Shakespeare Festival, Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre
and Edmonton Jazz Festival Society — and their stories
overlapped in striking ways, particularly regarding budgets
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