Following Creative Paths: Re-centering Northern Artistic Life

This event will explore how arts & culture can thrive in small(er) communities without urban systems and support. Using Prince George, BC as a case study/launching point, this virtual panel and Creative Paths screening will bring together artists who stayed in Prince George and artists who chose to relocate to larger urban centers. Exploring questions of professional development, metric of artist success, and grassroots vs. institutional community development, this panel efforts to re-center arts and culture conversations away from larger metropolitan cities, and toward more remote regions. This event explores the lived experience of the unique artistic community of Prince George, focusing on the challenges, concerns, differences, and future development of this (and other) non-metropolitan communities.

About Creative Paths

Creative Paths explores how Prince George, a community in the heart of British Columbia’s dense forests, managed to forge and cultivate a thriving art community in relative isolation. Through the eyes of the city’s grassroots cultural organizations and people of the past and present, Creative Paths examines how the city’s culture began and evolved, how the Community Arts Council (CAC) was founded, and how the CAC supports arts and culture today. Despite the struggles of rural cultural stigma placed on Prince George by influential urban centres and the flawed “blue-collar” perception of the city itself, Prince George’s artistic community has survived through the passionate dedication of local people fanning the fires of a cultural renaissance which will, hopefully, motivate and fuel generations of Northern artists to come.