Central Library's Artist in Residence programs are three-month, paid community engagement residencies that support individual artists, arts organizations, and collectives working in Indigenous art and place making, children's art and illustration, or the newcomer experience.
The resident is invited to work in a designated space at Central Library and engage with the public at libraries across the city. Artists are selected in partnership with arts and culture organizations.
Jordan Wieben is the descendant of a family whose photo albums feature more airplanes than faces; he is the broken link in a lineage of pilots stretching back in time to the earliest days of flight.
What Jordan inherited in lieu of a love for flying was a conviction about how personal mythology shapes modern identities. He became a visual storyteller whose work explores the way legacy shapes future generations.
This Calgary-based artist has spent a decade collecting personal histories and translating them into concrete visuals ranging from museum displays, costume designs, and children’s illustrations.
In 2017, Jordan founded Grasshopper Tailor Studio, a greeting card company best known for a unique series of narrative greeting cards. Using art techniques drawn from animation and picture books, he hand-paints illustrations to cover both the inside and outside of the card. His designs usually feature animals experiencing the excitement and inconveniences of everyday life.
Jordan is an emerging artist whose artistic practice is centered on the ability to translate personal experience and culture into expressive characters.
He believes that the ability to design characters allows people to build connections with others in a way that transcends the barriers of time and culture. Jordan’s goal with his art is to help people recognize the stories we tell about ourselves and to supply everyone with the tools to create transformative narratives about their own place in the world.
Through their residency, chosen artists working in any artistic discipline will bring their Indigenous identities, experiences, and perspectives to the public.
The Newcomer Artist in Residence is an artist who recently arrived in Canada (five years or less) and is the winner of the annual Calgary Catholic Immigration Society (CCIS) New Canadian Artist Award at the Mayor’s Luncheon for Arts Champions.
This residency recognizes the contribution of children’s artists to literature through exhibitions and workshops for all ages.
