Cool Gardens 2016

Description

Cool Gardens is a public exhibition of contemporary garden and art installations that offers a shift of sensation for the summer—cooling—as a general theme for public projects in Winnipeg’s downtown. Cool Gardens brings architects, landscape architects, designers, artists, and the public together, celebrating the interface between urbanism, landscape and design.

The competition will feature locally, nationally, and internationally acclaimed artists and practitioners in the Winnipeg context, highlighting the value of art and design in public space. Presented by StorefrontMB and The Forks, Cool Gardens was established as a central Canadian counterpart to the Reford / Jardin de Metis concept, celebrating the interface between nature, art, urbanism and design. The exhibition has run in Winnipeg for the past three years, with 2016 marking the fourth annual event. Past exhibitors include BGL, SPMB, Sol Desharnais, Scatliff+Miller+Murray, Ewa Tarsia, ATLRG, and Claude Cormier.

The event is highly accessible to a broad audience including children, tourists, shoppers, cyclists, and business people. Cool Gardens mirrors Winnipeg’s internationally acclaimed Warming Huts Winter Program. Cool Gardens places design culture at the center of the summer activities in Winnipeg and satellite locations, while offering pleasant relief from summer’s exasperations. In Winnipeg, installations will run from Main Street to Provencher Boulevard, highlighting this generally unrecognized pedestrian linkage that bridges the Anglophone and Francophone communities. Installations along this axis provide an engaging, creative, and active experience of downtown Winnipeg. New this year are satellite sites on Waterfront Drive and in Brandon.