Bear Street Public Art

Banff's newest public art installed on Bear Street

The Town of Banff’s latest public artwork was installed on Bear Street on July 4, 2024.

Artist Tiffany Shaw's artwork, ask the water, elicits curiosity about our evolving relationships to the Rocky Mountain ecosystems connecting the park. It offers people in Banff an opportunity to reflect on their surroundings in relation to the cycle of water.

The Bow River, and the valley through which it flows, were created by glaciers during the last Ice Age. The continued melt of the glacier at the headwaters of the Bow has allowed the river to flow without interruption for the last 10,000 years.

ask the water references the glacial processes that have shaped the mountain landscape surrounding the Town of Banff and the cycles of life created by repeated glaciation. Impressions of the surface of the Athabasca Glacier were made by the artist in 2023 and cast in glass to capture the surface character of glacial ice on a microscale. The glass and Kootenay Stone sculpture brings rarely seen impressions of the Athabasca Glacier to Bear Street to visualize a moment in the glacier’s evolving geological lifespan.

Project Team: Artist Tiffany Shaw; Town of Banff Community Art Committee; Angela Schenstead; CMCK Public Art; Firebrand Glass Studios; Carvel Creative.

A project launch event to celebrate the newest addition to Banff's public art collection will be scheduled in September.

2022 Project Update

Artist selected for Bear Street project

The Banff Community Art Committee is excited to announce the selection of Tiffany Shaw for the Bear Street public art project. The interdisciplinary artist based in Alberta will take the next few months to work with a professional curator hired by the committee before creating the work for installation.

The Bear Street redevelopment completed in 2021 focused on creating a pedestrian-priority street in the heart of Banff. The comprehensive infrastructure project to replace all underground utilities and install block pavers, public seating, planters and event space included public art as part of the Bear Street experience. All planters with trees, shrubs and grasses on Bear Street sit on top of a network of soil cells that automatically irrigate the landscaping and serve as a filter system for rain runoff before being diverted back to the Bow River. The artwork will be located near the centre of Bear Street.

“I am thrilled to have received the public art commission for Bear Street. I look forward to amplifying conversations that identify past, present and future responses that the surrounding landscape is speaking to for the town of Banff,” said Shaw.

Oscillating between digital and analogue methodologies, Shaw’s work gathers notions of craft, memory and atmosphere. Her practice is often guided by communal interventions as a way to engage a lifted understanding of place.

Shaw has exhibited widely including the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Pier 21, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Architecture Venice Biennale, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial. She has been the recipient of multiple public art commissions such as Edmonton's Indigenous Art Park and Winnipeg’s Markham Bus Station. Among her public art projects Shaw has produced several notable transitory art works and is a core member of Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective.

Shaw is Métis, was born in Calgary and raised in Edmonton. Her Métis lineage derives from Fort McMurray via Fort McKay and the Red River.

“We are pleased to award Tiffany Shaw the eighth public artwork commission by the Town of Banff,” said Charlene Quantz-Wold, the chair of the Community Art Committee. “We are impressed with the sensitivity and thoughtful approach that Shaw brings to her art practice and are excited to see what she creates for this vital hub of our downtown that serves both residents and visitors alike.”

Shaw holds a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University, a Masters in Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and is currently working as a registered architect at Reimagine Architects in Edmonton.

The Bear Street work will be funded from the Banff public art reserve, up to $105,000 for all materials, installation, transport and commission fee. The Community Art Committee contracted a professional public art curator to help select the successful artist, and they will continue to support her through the project's development.

About the artwork

Before the work was developed, Tiffany Shaw, the artist awarded the Bear Street public art commission, spent time in Banff and the surrounding areas, researching the specifics of place: natural ecosystems and the character of the Rocky Mountains. Shaw is interested in the life cycles of water in relation to glaciers, how they form and shape the alpine terrain and how these systems are inextricably linked.

The artist has focused particularly on glaciers, as an embodiment of time; how glaciation has shaped the mountains and landscape, and how glaciers express entropy, the transformation from one state to another. The Athabasca Glacier is one of the defining aspects of Banff National Park and is intertwined and integral to the ecosystems in Banff. Tiffany asks what is the glacier’s character? What is it telling us; what does it want, and how does it express its character?

In the summer of 2023, Shaw and the project team were taken on a guided walk of the Athabasca Glacier, with Zucmin Guiding, an Indigenous Tour company, and Ice Walks. Tim from Zucmin Guiding shared stories of ancestors and the ways in which time and experiences of generations are captured in the land and the waters of the glacier.

The guides talked about the ways the glaciers’ form changes over time and the natural processes by which they are shaped; the way the glacier captures histories and stories of peoples in this area.

Shaw finalized her concept in fall 2023, and began working on fabrication through the winter, with installation planned for summer 2024.