NWT Art Centre group draws nearer to finalizing location

A group working to create a new NWT Art Centre in Yellowknife says it has “a good sense” of its preferred location for the facility.

The NWT Art Centre Initiative aims to build a “non-commercial art gallery and visual-arts-focused community centre in Yellowknife,” according to its website.

The organization said in December 2023 it had secured three years of operational funding.

A site investigation and analysis began a few months ago, with a longlist of seven potential sites being reviewed by an architectural firm.  

As that happened, the organization also launched a territory-wide survey for residents to share their thoughts on the potential sites.

“We got a lot of great feedback,” said Adrian Bell, the initiative’s project director.

“That helped us sort-of define our criteria that we fed back to the architects, and working together with those sources of information – our own research, the public survey and the expert advice of the architects – we cut the list of seven sites down to three.”

The three remaining contenders haven’t been announced. Geotechnical, environmental and civil engineering work is now taking place to determine the best option.

“We’re very close to done, and we have a good sense of what’s going to be our number-one lot,” said Bell. “We’re already starting to have some conversations about that site.”

The site investigation’s final report is set to be shared with the project’s steering committee in approximately six weeks. Once the steering committee has reviewed it, Bell said, the report’s results can be shared with the public.

In the meantime, the organization is working to obtain its charitable status and secure funding from the city, territorial and federal governments.

The initiative is also assessing possible partners to share the space.  

“We’re looking for some opportunities to have other services or other features in the building that draw in more traffic in a complementary manner,” said Bell, adding that would also allow the sharing of some costs.

“We’ve got a couple of really, really interesting, promising potential co-location partners, and so we are in negotiations with those parties,” he said, adding “there are still a lot of details to iron out.”

While work to secure a site continues, the group is preparing to hold an architectural design competition for the centre.

“We’re hoping to structure it or present it in such a way that it gets a lot of participation from architects from other countries, from other circumpolar regions, and really try to come up with an inspired design,” Bell said.

“We think at the end of the day it’s going to be about a 40,000 sq ft building,” he added, comparing its size to that of Yellowknife City Hall.

A large part of that footprint will be devoted to an archival and collection space, which will enable the exchange of art exhibitions with other institutions around the world, in addition to the centre’s own art collection.

Artists in the NWT have long complained that no dedicated non-profit gallery and centre has been created for their work, though some commercial spaces and a smaller gallery at Yellowknife’s visitor centre do now exist.

Sara Komarnisky, the initiative’s art centre development specialist, said the group is also “finding our place as an organization, and finding out where we fit in with the other groups already operating and what we can offer.”  

“It’s a really unique challenge to be involved in,” Komarnisky said, “to create something new, like an intellectual and creative space that’s really grounded here in the Northwest Territories, but that has the chance to connect to that wider art world. It’s just really fun to think about the possibilities in that.”