I think BUMPs mission beyond making Calgary a more vibrant, connected, artistic city.

That's the baseline.

But I think my mission is actually to change the noise of our city.

My name is Priya Ramesh.

I am the creative director of BUMP Festival.

We are a public arts festival and urban arts festival, if you will.

But really an urban art movement that is disguised as a mural festival that runs for two weeks every summer in Calgary.

But was actually founded by Peter Schreiber and Peter Oliver, an urban planner and an engineer.

They went, what if we start slowly changing the way the city looks?

So it begins as kind of a DIY neighborhood festival.

Bump stands for the Beltline Urban Renewal Project.

We're on the Beltline right now.

So it begins with let's start putting art on walls.

And then it kind of explodes into an urban art movement.

We are known for being an artist first festival.

We have a lot of artists coming in here who are major artists from around the world, so we don't want to be like, hey, paint flowers in a mountain on the side of this building.

But I think what makes us really unique is one side is murals and the other side is placemaking.

Events and activations.

While these murals are in Calgary painting, we are also activating the city through raids, through a graffiti jam to an urban art conference.

And equally important is understanding what makes public art a public good, all of which is accessible free public programing.

Every year we have a new jury.

In 2025, a thousand people, artists from around the world to apply to palm.

We need a jury who's able to assess each application, understands art, but can also catch applications that are falling in different gaps.

Juries made up of artists, curators, community leaders, programmers, folks who know art but also know the city and people from different communities so that we have a jury that can speak two words.

Different communities advocate for certain artists, and we trickle it down until we find our ten muralists.

Typically, the jury creates a long list of about 40 artists.

Then we pair them up with buildings.

Here's five artists that we think would make sense for your walls.

Where are your buildings located?

The texture of your building?

The length of your building.

You don't want to put an artist who's never painted a mural on a behemoth wall with 15,000ft.

Then the building's rank, the artists that we've sent them to be like.

These ones will work for us.

And you have our ten muralists.

Well, I'm actually very thankful for BUMP because it's awesome.

For me, it was a personal goal to be working with them.

Our number right now is at about 152 murals across Calgary.

If you've been around Calgary, it's very interesting.

The architecture here, it's a mix of brutalist and strange architecture that has come and stayed with us from the 80s and beyond.

And then now we have a lot of new types of buildings going up to.

Everything about this city, and it's designed for a very long time has been, you know, oil and gas energy.

And we are providing an alternative to that.

When you create so much public art, you are creating a lot of non permissive structures.

It puts into the public place this idea that there can be structures around you that don't have a transactional commercial purpose.

It also suggests art can belong to everyone.

When BUMP began, the public was a bit confused, like public art.

Why would I want that?

Why would I want a mural on my wall?

You're going to paint a mural on my wall.

It has to be cowboy boots.

It has to be a mountain.

Now, nine years later, we are actually really quickly becoming a major public art city.

Two years ago, we programed the tallest mural in the world in Calgary by an artist in Berlin named dime.

We don't want the murals to just be downtown.

We've moved outward.

It's in different neighborhoods now, but ideally it could be more and more and more further out from the downtown in the Beltline.

But tons of people want murals right now.

People want public art.

They understand that when you put public art on your building, it becomes a place that people want to gather.

People become really civically engaged.

People start caring about the outside more.

So now people want murals.

They want their business to become a landmark spot.

They understand the value of it.

We also have a roadworks program, which is a smaller public art installation series.

If you're driving around Calgary, you might see concrete Jersey barriers around different patios.

That is a program that also facilitates.

So this year we had 26 roadworks artists, all local, over 400 public art installations.

If you count roadworks and some of the other projects we've done, we have a few mural festivals.

The big ones that Canada is known for is Mural Vancouver Mural Festival.

Bump is now one of the big ones too.

I would say we're probably the biggest public art mural festival in Western Canada right now.

We're also a festival that is not actually under the city, so we're not city funded.

We're not government funded.

So in a way, we get to go rogue.

We get to program art like this, which is interesting.

As festival directors, we are setting themes early and the themes are a little bit more abstract.

They're not like, hey, we want artists who are painting nature.

So last year, one festival's theme was the electric and the intentional.

The year before was played this year.

The theme is”What if BUMP Festival was a place that we were building and creating together.” I think the noise we're bringing to Calgary is changing it, actually.

Everything we do, everything we program is a conversation we're trying to have with the public.

Let's think about the city in a more civically engaged way.

And I think that's a really big part of what I've seen.

Entire projects flip the conversation in our neighborhood, change how people think about where they live.

So right now, the appetite for public art in Calgary is really strong, and I think we've had so much to do with it.