Calgary’s oldest and largest disability arts organization has announced they are rebranding themselves.
Following recent mergers with Momo Movement and Artistic Expressions, the Indefinite Arts Centre will now be known as the National accessArts Centre.
There’s also talk about the centre moving.
The Centre’s current location is in an adjoining facility to the Fairview Arena, which had its roof collapse in 2018. The City of Calgary then completed an assessment of the building, deemed it unsafe, and plans to demolish it.
While this news didn’t come as a surprise, it did make the centre’s future even more unclear.
“This has been two-and-a-half years of incredible anxiety for our organization,” NaAC CEO Jung-Suk Ryu said. “We have 300 artists and families that access the space each week during regular times, and we’re a lifeline for so many of them.”
READ MORE: Indefinite Arts Centre continues funding fight for new home
One location that has been identified for the centre to move into is the former Scouts Canada building along Memorial Drive. The building is comparable in size to the centre’s current location in Fairview, but upgrades would need to be completed on the city-owned facility to make it accessible for artists disabilities.
“The bells and whistles to make it an art space, we can raise money for that” Ryu said. “The fact is right now the basic built-in environment is incredibly inaccessible to the vast majority of our artists, so we would like the city to support us in fixing that.”
It’s Ryu’s understanding that this will be the centre’s final winter in their existing site, which gives them approximately a year to work with the city to address the challenges with the potential new building.
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