Dancer Robin Poitras of New Dance Horizons. Photo: Don Hall.
“For the size of the population, it’s amazing how vibrant the cultural scene is,” explains Dunlop Art Gallery director/curator Jennifer Matotek. “Go to New Dance Horizons (2207 Harvey St.) and you’ll see a cross-section of the performance, art and film communities.” The MacKenzie Art Gallery (3475 Albert St.) and the Dunlop Art Gallery (2311 12th Ave.), as well as artist-run centres such as Sâkêwêwak (1440 Broadway Ave.) and Neutral Ground, offer exciting exhibitions of contemporary art year-round.
“We have great film festivals,” says Timothy Long, head curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery, “like mispon, a celebration of Indigenous filmmaking. The Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative does an active program and there’s [also] Queer City Cinema,” which recently incorporated Performatorium. Artist Risa Horowitz describes how Performatorium artistic director Gary Varro and his team do “some of the most excellent queer-oriented performance-based and cinema-based programming.”
There are multi-purpose spaces such as Artesian (2627 13th Ave.), which includes a theatre/performance venue, while Creative City Centre (1843 Hamilton St.) has a gallery, artist studios and the artist-run printmaking centre Articulate Ink, whose recent Flatgrafika Printmaking Symposium, according to Long, “had printmakers coming in from all over the place for workshops, tours and exhibitions.”
“In the last couple of years a lot of creative young entrepreneurs have been opening businesses,” says Dunlop Art Gallery assistant curator Blair Fornwald. She recommends Seed Sustainable Style (3100 13th Ave.), a shop that sells clothes by independent fashion designers, and Malty National Brewing Corp. (1130 15th Ave.), an innovative craft brewery that “never brews the same beer twice.” For a quick bite, keep an eye out for the latest streetside stop of Tijuana-born chef Mariana Brito‘s Mexican food truck Malinche. Horowitz swears by the coffee and baked goods at Tangerine (2230 14th Ave.) and declares Nature’s Best Market (2224 14th Ave.) as “one of the city’s best health food stores.”
This article is adapted from Site-Specific: Regina | Saskatoon, a special section in the Spring 2018 issue of Canadian Art.
