Garfield Morgan didn’t set out to become a professional artist. Always interested in creative work, he took a slightly more practical path to his early career, training in graphic design and working for several advertising agencies in his native Jamaica. Successful but feeling stuck, he applied to the design program at a state university in east Texas in hopes of gaining new skills and new perspectives.
He got more than he bargained for. Upon arriving in the United States, Morgan was informed that the design program he’d been accepted into no longer existed. He could either head back home or transfer into the school’s fine arts program.
“I tell people that the universe obviously had plans for me,” Morgan laughs as he explains how he found his way to being an artist. Impractical as a master’s degree in fine art may have seemed, returning home empty-handed felt even worse, so he embraced the new program.
The degree led to a teaching position in Jamaica before he chose to pursue art full time, eventually moving to Montreal and starting a practice there. French language struggles prompted one more relocation, this time to Edmonton, drawn in part by the reputation of the city’s arts scene.
“The first week I was here, the Edmonton Arts Council was having a meeting,” Morgan recalls. “They invited people to come in for a question-and-answer kind of thing at their headquarters at the armoury. I remember before I even joined the meeting, one of the ladies, I took her [aside] and I said, ‘I just arrived in Edmonton. Do I qualify for a grant?’”
“She says, ‘Garfield, as long as you have an Edmonton address, you qualify for a grant.’ And that was it.”
Within months, Morgan had received his first public funding. Shortly afterwards he was accepted for his first residency. In his five years in Montreal, Morgan hadn’t applied for a single grant, viewing it as a “waste of time” as an English speaker in a French-dominated arts scene. Now, only months after his move to Alberta, his career was taking shape.
Morgan’s story is in many ways the ideal of how people imagine arts funding to work: an ambitious emerging artist, drawn to a new city by the promise of its artistic vibrancy; an accessible public funder actively reaching into the community to find new talent to support; and readily accessible grants that quickly translate into new creative opportunities.
But the reality of public funding of the arts in Alberta is often far less straightforward.
Funding for the arts comes from dedicated granting agencies at all levels of government: the federal Canada Council for the Arts, the provincial Alberta Foundation for the Arts (AFA) and such municipal funders as the Edmonton Arts Council and the Calgary Arts Development Authority (CADA). All of these granting agencies support a roster of individual artists, ad hoc collectives and professional arts organizations through a mix of one-off project grants and ongoing operating funding. To complicate matters those arts organizations vary dramatically in scale, with budgets ranging from thousands to tens of millions of dollars annually, and they work within and across vastly different disciplines and serve disparate and sometimes overlapping audiences and communities.
When Montreal cites Alberta as a cultural inspiration, we truly are in unusual times.
Because professional arts organizations in Canada are typically incorporated as non-profits or charities, they also interact with funding programs with mandates extending beyond the arts, such as the cultural programs at the federal Department of Canadian Heritage, the community grants offered through Alberta’s Ministry of Arts, Culture and Status of Women, and Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis’s charitable programs. That’s not to mention a panoply of corporate donors, individuals and foundations whose names can be spotted on event programs and venue exteriors throughout the province. Also, public art programs are funded by cities’ infrastructure budgets.
Amid this complex landscape Alberta is currently witnessing unprecedented investment in its arts infrastructure. The government increased funding at the AFA by $4.5-million last year and $3.5-million in 2026 for a total budget of $38.1-million, setting new records. All levels of government have collectively directed hundreds of millions of dollars towards signature projects in Calgary’s downtown, anchored by the expansion of the Werklund Centre (formerly Arts Commons) and the reimagining of the Glenbow Museum.
Others are noticing the investment. At a recent funding announcement, Montreal mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada referenced those Calgary arts megaprojects in a call for her own city to “step up.” When Montreal cites Alberta as a cultural inspiration, we truly are in unusual times.
Despite this investment, the future of the arts, not just in Alberta but around the world, has arguably never been more in question. The lingering impacts of COVID-era closures continue to ripple, while the looming disruption threatened by AI-generated content has many artists questioning whether they have a place in the future economy at all.
Alberta’s arts sector is facing both generational uncertainty and unprecedented investment. Now is the time to ask: Are we spending those public funds in a way that will make the most of this moment?
First we need to see what we’re currently funding. There is an old maxim that “the purpose of a system is what it does.” In other words, the intention behind a system is less important than what actually happens in practice. And in practice most arts funding in Canada isn’t directed toward artists such as Garfield Morgan. The bulk of it goes to arts organizations.
At the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the funding split is in the range of 80–20, with four out of every five grant dollars directed to organizations. The exact proportions vary with each funder (Calgary’s municipal agency, CADA, is closer to 70–30, for example), but the trend is clear: at all levels, most grant funding goes to organizations rather than individuals.
For the portion that does go directly to individual grants, the demand far outstrips the available funding. Of the 1,561 individuals who applied for AFA funding in 2024–25, only 446 received project funding. That 28 per cent success rate aligns closely with CADA’s results, where roughly 31 per cent of individual project applications received funding. Morgan was fortunate to receive a grant the first time he applied; more often than not that isn’t the case.
Of the funds that go to organizations, granting tends to be dominated by a handful of the largest players. In the 2024–25 fiscal year, for example, 412 organizations received operating funding from the AFA, but over 40 per cent of the total was apportioned among just 10 organizations. Those 10 groups received over $7-million from the AFA—more than the bottom 384 organizations combined.
That pattern holds for Alberta’s other major funders as well. At CADA the top 10 organizations received about as much operating funding as the bottom 150. The Canada Council provided operating grants to 65 Albertan organizations, of which the top five received roughly as much as the bottom 50.
The way funds are spread throughout Alberta’s arts ecosystem is at least partly due to differences among disciplines. A literary magazine could in theory operate with just a photocopier and an excess of determination. Orchestras, theatre companies and operas are inherently much more expensive to run, employing actors, musicians, craftspeople and more. Audience size, artistic merit and community impact are all factors too, and most grant applications are reviewed by juries of professional artists and arts administrators who ensure the projects most aligned with a program’s goals rise to the top.
That process has resulted in a system where fully one-fifth of the total grants distributed by the AFA goes to operating funds for just five organizations, at a time when Alberta’s smaller arts organizations—even those that support thriving communities—have struggled to stay afloat. Calgary’s Evergreen Theatre, for instance, closed its doors in 2025 after more than three decades in operation. A charitable arts organization with a focus on making environmental science accessible to youth, Evergreen also owned and operated Evergreen Community SPACES, a 24,000-ft2 venue in the neighbourhood of Mayland Heights that it rented out as affordable rehearsal, workshop and performance space.
Hosting nearly 5,000 activities in 2024 alone, SPACES provided a vital resource for more than 80 arts and community organizations, who used it to develop their practice and reach new audiences. But despite a mix of private and public funders supporting its operations, Evergreen ran into difficulties with the Social Enterprise Fund (SEF), a lender co-founded by the Edmonton Community Foundation and the City of Edmonton with a mandate to support “ventures that deliver both measurable social impact and financial return.” The SEF controlled the $5.5-million loan that Evergreen had used to purchase SPACES.
When Evergreen made the purchase in 2015, its plan was to pay off the building quickly and use revenue from operations to reduce their dependence on government funding. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted that plan—and most of the global arts sector—when lockdowns and health concerns all but eliminated in-person events. Despite multiple extensions and amendments to the agreement, SEF ultimately made “the difficult decision to not renew the loan,” as SEF director Ryan Young put it in an emailed statement to the CBC.
With that announcement, dozens of arts organizations—companies that support youth, seniors and artists with disabilities, as well as emerging and independent artists—were left scrambling for new homes.
The fallout from Evergreen’s collapse shows what can happen when we undervalue the contributions of Alberta’s small and mid-size organizations—a point that some in the sector have been making for years. “I am of the opinion that large-scale arts institutions aren’t the way to go in terms of how we cultivate an ecosystem,” says Jung-Suk Ryu, the president and CEO of Calgary’s National accessArts Centre (NaAC), an organization dedicated to disability arts training and programming.
“As much as Evergreen had its problems, there was something there, right?” Ryu says. “There were 45 resident companies out of Evergreen, mostly from marginalized, very ethnically diverse communities…. There’s so much art and creativity that bubbles at that level.”
Having worked at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity as director of external and community relations, Ryu has seen the benefits of working at a well-resourced, well-connected institution. Since joining the NaAC (in 2017, when it was still operating as the Indefinite Arts Society), he sees the role of large organizations with a skeptical eye.
Size has a way of supporting more size: bigger budgets mean more resources available for advertising, fundraising and lobbying, along with navigating the complexities of finance and operations. Those dynamics can mean, in Ryu’s view, that “some of the larger institutions get away with perhaps not delivering as much impact, just because of the sheer size of the organization or because of the legacy of how the organization was started or how long it has endured in our country.”
The NaAC is no small organization itself, having grown its operating budget from $700,000 to $2.8-million annually over Ryu’s tenure, and with its own $30-million “Accessible Arts Learning Campus” set to open in Calgary next year. But while Ryu acknowledges the benefits of those resources, the NaAC’s clientele has kept his eyes open to the uneven nature of the funding landscape.
As Ryu sees it, smaller organizations are more nimble than their larger, more bureaucratic peers. While individually they have fewer resources to navigate major economic shocks, smaller organizations as a whole are better able to navigate the cultural and technological shifts that have rocked the sector in recent years as well as the ones poised to further destabilize it in the near future. Rather than putting all our cultural eggs in one basket, he’d prefer to see support going to organizations catering to more unique, under-served niches.
At all levels, most grant funding goes to arts organizations rather than individual artists.
“If we talk about a growing, burgeoning creative economy,” Ryu says, “where we talk about accessibility in the creative economy, where we know that there are marginalized voices who could actually absolutely thrive in the creative economy, but then by pooling a billion dollars into three projects downtown, I think that that’s incredibly short-sighted.”
The “three projects” Ryu is referring to are the large-scale renovations of Contemporary Calgary, the Glenbow, and Arts Commons, now known as the Werklund Centre—the same projects that inspired Montreal’s mayor to “step up” earlier this year. The three have budgeted over $900-million for their buildings, representing a level of investment that Calgary hasn’t seen in many decades.
With $680-million of that total intended for the renovation and expansion of the Werklund Centre, that project has become the face of Alberta’s arts boom. So far the City of Calgary has put up $300-million, the province $103-million over seven years and Dave Werklund $75-million. The Werklund Centre’s CEO, Alex Sarian, hasn’t shied from the role of arts ambassador, proudly advocating for what he views as a transformative project for the city. To him these projects are an investment in much-needed cultural infrastructure—the “hardware” on which cultural events can run.
“We have to understand that the reason we need more infrastructure, the reason we need more hardware, is because the software has been hitting it out of the park,” Sarian says, referring to the artists and arts programming that fill the city’s venues and art spaces. “Meaning that we’re at capacity. Calgary needs more venues, not because I say so, but because the data is there that the software has outgrown the hardware.”
As the metaphor implies, the software (art) and hardware (arts spaces) are mutually reliant, and both need to be maintained and supported. The hundreds of millions of dollars going into arts spaces in Calgary’s downtown addresses a shortfall, but if that funding comes at the expense of artists, Sarian warns, “you’re going to have beautiful buildings that nobody knows what to do with.”
He has no intention of letting that happen. In 2025 the Werklund Centre hosted more than 2,000 events, primarily programmed and run by its five resident companies, who receive subsidized access to the space. That puts pressure on the rates charged to all other events so the venue can make up the difference.
Part of the reason for the expansion, Sarian explains, is to spread that financial burden in a manner that “welcomes other organizations into the fold in ways that are perhaps a little bit more equitable than the past 40 years have been.” At the same time, the expansion allows for “enough space to create commercial activity and commercial revenues so that we are not having to go to government to say ‘Continue supporting us in our subsidies of local arts organizations.’
“Our business model for the future campus, if we can execute on it correctly, actually has us decreasing our dependency on government funds by 26 per cent year over year.”
According to Sarian, reducing the Werklund Centre’s reliance on grant funding played a significant role in securing provincial support for its expansion. As he explains, “The concern for any order of government is ‘Why am I going to double the size of a beast that I’m going to have to feed for the next 40 years?’”
That perception of the arts as an ongoing drain on the public purse is persistent in Alberta, even though many studies have found that the idea of cultural spending as a negative societal expense is mistaken. Last summer the Edmonton Arts Council released a study showing its organizational funding generated $1.45 in economic returns for every dollar spent. Another 2025 study from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce found the “arts and culture sector generates $29 in economic activity for every dollar in federal investment,” describing the finding as “an extraordinary return in addition to the social benefits that the sector generates.”
Similarly, a report from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts found that between 2018 and 2023—a period that notably includes the pandemic-induced shutdown of the sector—AFA-funded organizations generated $2.4-billion in economic output, with each dollar of AFA support producing a return of $1.76. As AFA chair Cynthia Moore explained in a statement provided for this piece, “The arts not only enrich Albertans’ quality of life and preserve our unique culture and history, they also drive economic growth.” She described the results as “an incredible return on investment.”
Impressive as those statistics are, they don’t make the case for arts funding on their own. After all, if the arts return $1.45 for every dollar spent, and a hypothetical AI data centre generated $1.50, a purely economic lens would recommend following the money. At best, the economic case acts as a safety valve, a reassurance to the more skeptical stewards of public funds that they can trust their investments are creating jobs and economic activity, even if they aren’t fully sold on providing grants to sculptors, dancers and performance artists.
Ultimately, the reason every province funds artists and arts organizations is simple: it’s because of their social value.
When the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (more commonly known as the Massey Commission) laid the foundations of Canada’s modern approach to arts and culture in 1951, it described its task in grandiose terms:
“The work with which we have been entrusted is concerned with nothing less than the spiritual foundations of our national life.”
That same reasoning echoes through conversations with artists and mandates of funders alike. The Canada Council for the Arts, which was established directly as a result of the Massey Commission, is currently operating under a strategic direction to support the arts as a driver of “social cohesion and cultural vitality.”
The AFA’s mission is to champion the arts “as an essential contributor to quality of life,” one that “fosters understanding and promotes belonging.” CADA works to ensure the arts can “create vibrant communities and bring together diverse voices and perspectives,” while the Edmonton Arts Council sees its role as “reshaping” the cultural landscape of Edmonton “to reflect our diverse and always changing city and people.”
Two-thirds of artists see their project grants turned down.
The Massey Commission also knew those goals wouldn’t come for free: “If we in Canada are to have a more plentiful and better cultural fare,” they wrote, “we must pay for it. Goodwill alone can do little for a starving plant; if the cultural life of Canada is anaemic, it must be nourished, and this will cost money.”
The use of a gardening metaphor is apt. Funding a thriving arts ecosystem is not like managing a public service with clear outcomes and deliverables, or scaling up technology infrastructure, with an intuitive mathematical relationship between hardware and software needs. It’s more like tending to a particularly large and diverse landscape. You know it matters where you water and where you prune, but understanding your exact impact is more complex.
The difficulty with maintaining an ecosystem is that the health of each element, large or small, is determined by the tangled weave of the whole, and the relationships can be impossible to predict. You can’t direct all your resources toward the biggest plant and trust that the rest will follow—just as you wouldn’t just tend to the ground cover and assume the trees are fine. A system where a handful of institutions receive the majority of available resources while two-thirds of artists see their project grants turned down is not in balance.
The solution isn’t to starve those larger institutions. With over 2,000 events per year, it’s clear that institutions such as the Werklund Centre are in demand. But so are facilities like Evergreen, which shut its doors on dozens of organizations over a loan that amounted to less than 1 per cent of the Werklund Centre’s renovation budget—and less than one-fifth the cost of the NaAC’s new campus. If we want to truly support the mission of our public funders and live up to the legacy of the Massey Commission, finding a new balance may be the key.
Think of it as a rewilding of the arts. The resulting landscape would be more chaotic in some ways, with new projects emerging and others closing their doors more regularly than we’re used to in our current models. But it might also be better able to respond to a rapidly changing cultural landscape. As Ryu noted, niche content and creativity flourish in smaller, more nimble organizations before filtering up to the largest institutions.
At the very least, rebalancing could lead to more stories like Garfield Morgan’s, artists empowered to follow a path that found them as much as they found it. Asked what change he would make to Alberta’s arts ecosystem if he could simply wave a magic wand, he answers, “If I could, I’d increase their funding tenfold so that more people can benefit from the joys of being funded to pursue ideas,” however “crazy” those ideas may be.
“Crazy can be good too, actually,” he laughs. “Crazy is probably why we maintain our sanity, not just as artists but as a society.”
Peter Hemminger is a writer, editor, radio host, arts advocate and communications professional in Calgary.
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