Join us for the next edition of Family ARTventures—our monthly, drop-in artmaking series inviting children, youth, and families to create together. This event is free and open to all, with materials provided.

This month, we draw inspiration from the recently published book by acclaimed visual artists Diane Borsato and Laura Carlin What Is a Sculpture? Together we will transform everyday objects and recycled materials into sculptural worlds and characters!

Diane Borsato's exhibition A Clean Place to Swim is on view at Walter Phillips Gallery and runs through December 13.

What Is a Sculpture? published by Tundra Books and Penguin Random House Canada books will be available for purchase.

The Family ARTventures Program is generously supported by

Celebrate the final chapter of Literary Cabaret: Memoir with an evening of original writing hosted by renowned poet, novelist, and essayist Dionne Brand. Residency participants share selections from their developing work, with a special reading from Brand closing the series.

This two-week residency encourages writers to explore new ideas in memoir, develop creative works of nonfiction, and strengthen their storytelling with the guidance of faculty mentors.

Dionne Brand is an award-winning poet, novelist, and essayist. Her writing is notable for the beauty of its language and for its intense engagement with issues of social justice.  A former Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto and a Member of the Order of Canada, Brand’s acclaimed works include A Map to the Door of No Return, The Blue Clerk, Theory, and the Toronto Book Award-winning novel What We All Long For.

Enjoy a drink from the bar, browse a curated selection of books from onsite bookseller Pages Books, and immerse yourself in an evening of memoir. Doors open at 6:15 p.m. in CLVB ’33, with readings beginning at 7:00 p.m. Afterward, mingle with the writers and faculty until 9:30 p.m.

Join us for the final chapter and celebrate the voices, stories, and possibilities of memoir.

Literary Journalism: Memoir Writing residency is supported by the Rogers Communications Chair in Literary Journalism.

Stories take centre stage in the second chapter of Literary Cabaret: Memoir, hosted by writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote. Hear original works from participants in the Literary Journalism: Memoir Writing residency before Coyote closes the evening with a special reading.

This two-week residency encourages writers to explore new ideas in memoir, develop creative works of nonfiction, and strengthen their storytelling with the guidance of faculty mentors.

Born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon, Ivan Coyote is the author of 13 books and the creator of films, stage shows, and albums that combine storytelling with music. Their books have won the ReLit Award, been named a Stonewall Honour Book, and been shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize for non-fiction and the Governor General's Award for non-fiction twice.

Enjoy a drink from the bar and immerse yourself in an evening of memoir. Doors open at 6:15 p.m. in CLVB ’33, with readings beginning at 7:00 p.m. Afterward, mingle with the writers and faculty until 9:30 p.m.

Come hear these stories as they take shape and connect with the writers behind them.

Literary Journalism: Memoir Writing residency is supported by the Rogers Communications Chair in Literary Journalism.

Begin the Literary Cabaret: Memoir series with an intimate evening of original writing hosted by acclaimed essayist and author Kyo Maclear. Participants from the Literary Journalism: Memoir Writing residency share selections from their work, followed by a special reading from Maclear.

This two-week residency encourages writers to explore new ideas in memoir, develop creative works of nonfiction, and strengthen their storytelling with the guidance of faculty mentors.

Dr. Kyo Maclear is an essayist, editor, novelist, and children’s author whose books have been published in more than 25 countries. Her nonfiction includes the hybrid memoir Birds Art Life, winner of the Trillium Book Award, and Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Enjoy a drink from the bar, browse a curated selection of books from onsite bookseller Pages Books, and immerse yourself in an evening of memoir. Doors open at 6:15 p.m. in CLVB ’33, with readings beginning at 7:00 p.m. Afterward, mingle with the writers and faculty until 9:30 p.m.

Experience original memoir writing as it moves from the page to the stage.

Literary Journalism: Memoir Writing residency is supported by the Rogers Communications Chair in Literary Journalism.

Join us for the September edition of Family ARTventures—our monthly, drop-in artmaking series inviting children, youth, and families to create together. This event is free and open to all, with materials provided. 

This month, we welcome the return to school with two creative options: design a one-of-a-kind reusable lunch box, or, drawing inspiration from Diane Borsato's exhibition, A Clean Place to Swim, craft a reusable bag to carry your swimsuit. 

The Family ARTventures Program is generously supported by

Drop-in at this new workshop series for children and youth at Walter Phillips Gallery!

Join us on the second Saturday of every month for Family ARTventures—creative artmaking activities for all ages. The workshops are drop-in with materials provided. 

The Family ARTventures Program is generously supported by

Drop-in at this new workshop series for children and youth at Walter Phillips Gallery!

Join us on the second Saturday of every month for Family ARTventures—creative artmaking activities for all ages. The workshops are drop-in with materials provided. 

The Family ARTventures Program is generously supported by

A rainbow appears in the spray above the Bow River. If you have spent time walking alongside it below the mountain, you may have witnessed one. There is power in the water, with a roar as you approach the waterfall at certain times of year. It is not a place you could forget.

By their nature, rainbows appear, then disappear. There is a certain feeling—of luck, of surprise and happiness when encountering one. The image, Misty Bow River, 2022 by Steven Beckly was made while the artist was on residence. This rainbow formed in river mist features on a postcard mailed to artists and others who have been a part of Walter Phillips Gallery’s history, in recognition of its fiftieth anniversary in August. Each recipient will receive a postcard and invitation to return it with a recollection from their experience, alongside a second postcard to keep or mail to someone they connected with through Banff.

As additional postcards are mailed out and responses arrive through the year, an archive takes visible form. Following the exhibition, the postcards will become a resource for future research and comprise a social history available at Banff Centre’s archives. One arc completed, this exhibition is dedicated with gratitude to those who we have been formed with and through.

Walter Phillips Gallery gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of Alberta through Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

Curated by Jacqueline Bell

In A Clean Place to Swim, Diane Borsato presents new and past works that explore the liberating, intimate, and communal possibilities of being in the water. Acts of teaching and learning, encounters across backgrounds, as well as illustrations of our shared right to clean natural environments, commingle in works made in lakes, rivers, hot springs, and community pools.

At the entrance of the exhibition is Floats, Holds, Strokes, 2026, a new video in which the artist, together with dancers Naishi Wang and Lukas Malkowski, considers the gestures inherent to swimming lessons to create movement experiments recorded in the dance studio. In choreographies of floating, support, and synchronized breath, the work explores the physical poetics of moving in water.

A Clean Place to Swim (Ukrainians), 2025, and A Clean Place to Swim (Snow), 2026, record a group of Ukrainian Canadians who meet regularly at Lake Ontario in Toronto to swim together all year long—without regard to weather or water quality—in scenes of both joy and defiance. The title of these works and the exhibition are adapted from a line in The Culture of Nature, 1991, by Alexander Wilson.

In Pools, 2014, photographs of the artist’s family swimming together in geothermal waters across Iceland, foreground moments of anxiety and tenderness in the context of a sensitive and changing environment.

In Swimming with Mathematicians, 2018, made in Banff during a heatwave, the artist invited mathematicians from the Banff International Research Station (BIRS) to swim together with resident artists in the Bow River’s cold waters. Despite different personal and professional worlds, diverse participants shared an unlikely, conscious moment together in the landscape.

Finally, in Borsato’s new dual-channel video installation, Swimming Lessons (Mom/Dad), 2026, the artist put her recent certification as a swimming instructor to work by teaching both her mother and father to swim. In the intimate footage we see how hierarchies in family relationships might be suspended in the water, while other dynamics are magnified by it.

In all of the works in A Clean Place to Swim, swimmers embody new possibilities for relating to one another and with the wider world.

Walter Phillips Gallery gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of Alberta through Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

The artist would like to extend special thanks to Jacqueline Bell, Amish Morrell, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Please join us for the opening reception of Diane Borsato: A Clean Place to Swim with the artist in attendance.

In A Clean Place to Swim, Diane Borsato presents new and past works that explore the liberating, intimate, and communal possibilities of being in the water. Acts of teaching and learning, encounters across backgrounds, as well as our shared right to clean, wild environments to swim in will be brought together under a title drawn from a phrase by Alexander Wilson from The Culture of Nature.

Walter Phillips Gallery gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of Alberta through Alberta Foundation for the Arts.