Calgarians will once again have a chance to ride in style inside something beautiful: a Calgary Transit city bus.
For the next six months, Calgary Arts Development’s art bus program will be shuttling passengers in custom-wrapped city buses with the latest designs from eight local artists.
The program, now entering its second year and with plans for a third, has been one of the largest public art projects in the city in terms of people viewing the end result.
More than one million Calgarians and visitors will have a chance to see the art buses by the time the project is complete in 2025.
“It really feels like we’re meeting our goals of bringing art to as many people as we can to the public. It’s really helping people learn what public art can be,” said Tiffany Wollman, Public Art Project Lead for Calgary Arts Development.
“It’s not just murals and sculptures. It is performances. It’s temporary. It’s gardens, gathering spaces, it’s a lot of different things. So to have it on public art on a public transportation, it just seems like such a great collaboration.”
This year will feature 14 buses, she said, reflecting seven different unique designs.
“I think it’s great because it just brings joy and surprise to the community. Everyone gets to share their different stories, and the artists themselves are very diverse too, which really represents this city,” Wollman said.
Wollman said that although Calgary Arts Development doesn’t choose the routes, there was a goal with that partnership to ensure that the buses, at some point, will have reached every community in Calgary.
The artists selected for this year’s program were Dr. Hali Heavy Shield, La Guita, artist duo Mao Chen and Chris Savage, Moey Blanco, Presley Mills, Sam Hester, and Sydonne Warren.
Bus designs inspired by unique partnerships
Mills said that her design, which sports a playful array of dogs against a field backdrop, was inspired by both her heritage and her rescue and foster dogs.
“(I) Just wanted to kind of celebrate them, hoping to inspire other people to think about rescuing their next pet. I’m Métis, and beadwork is a craft I’m really focusing in on to reconnect with my Métis identity. So, I wanted to kind of celebrate the dogs through that,” Mills said.
“The flowers on the bus are all beadwork inspired. Then all of the dogs are shown in tapis, which are Métis dog blankets, or in little kokum scarves with different patterns of Métis beadwork to show that they are part of the family.”
Her whimsical design for the bus came about from a desire to make passengers and people seeing the buses smile and laugh.
“I saw the art buses last year, and I thought they were really beautiful. I saw other Indigenous artists participating and getting to showcase their culture as part of the bus, and that was really inspiring,” Mills said.
“I thought, ‘wouldn’t that be cool if I could do the same and share a little bit about myself and my own kind of creative practice.'”
Chen and Savage, who are collectively known as Mao and Chris, drew on their ceramic practice to design their blue-tiled bus.
“We used real tiles and real ceramic shards that we’ve kind of collected in our studio over a number of years. We run a ceramic art design studio, and it’s really about the beauty and diversity and the strength and unity in the overall design,” said Savage.
Chen said that through their work, they collected many different ceramic pieces that didn’t meet their standards to sell to the public, but were nevertheless beautiful in their own way.
She said that instead of throwing those pieces away, they kept them and eventually used shard tiles created from those works to create a full bus design.
Chen said turning those pieces into a single art project was an important metaphor.
“We are from really different backgrounds… and a lot of our collaboration is about cross-country experience, how we’re so different, but we still can work together and make something like super unique and interesting,” she said.
“I think this message is really important for the contemporary world.”
The opportunity to put their work in front of a city-wide audience was incredible, said Savage.
“I think it’s helping us, helping us reach a lot a lot more folks, and hopefully inspiring them to develop collaborative approaches of their own,” he said.
All of the designs for the art bus program are available at calgaryartsdevelopment.com/public-art/projects/art-bus-2025.
Calgary Arts Development will be issuing an RFP for the 2026 art bus program later this summer.
