With the weather warming up and summer approaching, Revelstoke is gearing up for construction season.
The Revelstoke Visual Arts Centre has some big plans underway, some of which will see fruition by August this year.
The centre’s garden boxes were installed last year, but there’s much more in phase two of their landscaping overhaul.
“Our long term mission for the facility — we’ve had this vision since we got going there … [is] we’re working on ourselves and our grounds as a major attraction,” said Jacquie Pendergast a director with the Revelstoke Visual Arts Society. (They oversee the centre).
The art gallery’s proposed community gardens are about four times the size of the current community garden at the Revelstoke United Church and the organization has turned to Selkirk Planning and Design for some modern concept plans.
“[The gardens] there [will be] much more focus on actual food production. At the front of the building, there is a space designated for a public art installation,” Pendergast said of the landscaping concept.
As soon as the snow disappears, construction of the path will begin and a grand opening of the gardens is expected at the end of summer.
Another change will be to the gallery’s exterior colour. They have found their location at 320 Wilson Street — a charming former RCMP detachment building — is not visible to people walking past. Centre organizers struggle with the fact that many residents and visitors don’t realize it’s even there. They plan to solve this by painting the building fire engine red.
The gallery also will extend its number of exhibitions this year, opening for a total of ten months, rather than its usual nine.
“We had 21 exhibits that we changed out over a period of nine months [last year],” Pendergast said.
“We had a 2,437 visits in that time (including school visits). We have eight artist studios and we rent those out for a nominal rent. There’s something going on there seven days a week,” Pendergast said in a presentation to Revelstoke City Council on Mar. 10.
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