/reddeerartscouncil
July 2026 Schedule
GALLERY GUIDE (2026 Edition)
The City of Red Deer has a well updated gallery guide that includes socials, websites, addresses and phone numbers of all the working galleries in Red Deer. Take a look at it here: https://www.reddeer.ca/media/reddeerca/recreation-and-culture/arts-and-culture/galleries/Red-Deer-Gallery-Guide.pdf
Life in clay
Artists: Jennifer Kalika-Kivinen, Roger Neufeld, Dana Rubik, Lyn Andres-Anderson, Debbie Berlinguette.
Medium: Ceramic Sculpture
Location: Kiwanis Public Art Gallery, Red Deer Public Library – Downtown Branch, 4818 49 Street
Exhibition Dates:July 2nd - August 16th
#FirstFridaysRedDeer Opening: July 3rd 2026, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm.
Red Deer Arts Council and Red Deer Public Library are pleased to present: “Life In Clay”
Life in Clay brings together 5 artists from the Red Deer Pottery Club. This collection of sculptural ceramic work reflects on various themes of human life and experience. Clay has a life of its own, and lives forever in the layers of the earth. It has told us so many stories about people from the past and can be a medium to tell stories of today. There is a connection that has run deep into the lives of so many for so long. These artists have also chosen clay as a way of expression; a Life in Clay.
Bailey Horton: Displaced in Time
Artist: Bailey Horton
Media: Various 2D Mediums
The Corridor Community Gallery, 4501 47A Ave, inside the Don Moore Recreation Centre
Dates: June 4th – July 24th, 2026
#FirstFridaysRedDeer
Exhibition description:
Displaced in Time is an exploration of learning to love a new city.
Through this collection of landscape and domestic drawings, Bailey Horton reflects on her changing identity and sense of place she has recorded since settling in Red Deer in 2022 after living in BC for 16 years. In connecting with Red Deer, Bailey fostered her arts practice. Her landscapes, portraits, and domestic drawings illustrate a growing familiarity of place, and by extension, self. Through landscapes of Bower Woods, Barrett Park, and Waskasoo; her love of learning local trails is recorded in charcoal. Portraits from throughout the last few years explore a changing understanding of self as she settles into the city. They are her meditations on moving, settling in, and mapping her new home as she navigates both in and out of her domestic spaces. For her, drawing offers a sense of reflection on her journey to Red Deer. A landscape of a community she has become a part of, alongside you.
About the Artist:
Bailey Horton is a multidisciplinary artist with an interest in exploring how art can foster community connections, both personally and geographically. Through vulnerability in her own arts practice, she seeks to connect to our collective experiences of person-hood. She is currently located in Red Deer, AB, and works with the Red Deer Arts Council.
Bailey’s artistic practice ebbs between curatorial, educational, and personal practice. She is obsessed with slow, meditative processes. Slowly layered hatching, stitching, and careful accuracy are often found in her drawing work. Bailey is fascinated by the relationship between community, place, and mapping memory. Her memory is grounded in mapped trails and hallways, and in the ever changing localities of where one calls home.
Howl in the Grass
Photo Credit: John Hall, Field No. 3, n.d, Woodcut on paper,12 5/16 x 9 1/2 in, Collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts
Artists: Group Exhibition
Don Cardinal, Gerry Dotto, Aaron Falkenberg, Gary Fryklind, John Hall, Campbell Henderson, Philip Kanwischer, Illingworth Kerr, Bryce Meyer, Blair Pinder, Thelma Manarey, Jacques Rioux, Theodore Shehinski, Matthew Spidell, Adrian Stimson, George Webber, and Tom Willock.
Medium: Mixed Medium
Viewpoint Gallery, City of Red Deer Culture Services (old Intermediate School,) 5205 48 Avenue
Dates: June 25 – July 22
First Friday Reception: July 3, 5-8pm
Exhibition Statement
Howl in the Grass is a group exhibition alluding to the mystery and aliveness of land and sky in the prairies. As any howl is a method of attracting attention, connecting with others, and announcing a presence – this exhibition invites viewers to listen, to feel, and to connect with the diverse calls of the land along the Great Plains in Alberta and beyond.
Rita Leistner: The Tree Planters
Location: Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery (MAG), 4525 47A Avenue
Artist: Rita Leistner
Medium: Photographs
Dates: June 6th – August 22nd ,2026
First Friday: Artist Reception | June 5, 2026 5–8pm
Tree Planting for the Tree Planters | June 6, 2026 10am
Screening of Forest for the Trees | June 6, 2026 12:30pm
Artist Talk with Rita Leistner | June 6, 2026 2pm
Trees and Food and Gardens, Oh My! |June 24, 2026 6–8pm
#FirstFridaysRedDeer
Description:
You can’t plant a tree without believing in the future .Each spring and summer, thousands of people head into the remote backcountry of British Columbia to do some of the hardest work most Canadians will never see. Tree planters move through uneven, rocky, fire-scarred terrain – bending, driving, moving – in a rhythm that sits somewhere between elite sport and industrial labour. An experienced planter might put 1,000 to 4,000 trees in the ground in a single day, each one an act of physical and environmental commitment.
Rita Leistner’s The Tree Planters is a series of large-scale, painterly portraits that document the people behind one of Canada’s most essential and overlooked forms of environmental labour. These photographs ask us to look closely at the land, at the work, and at the people who are out there showing up for both!
About the Artist: Montreal-based photographer Rita Leistner knows this work from the inside. She spent a decade as a tree planter herself, putting over half a million trees in the ground before going on to a career as a photojournalist, including coverage of the Iraq War, and eventually returning to the forest with her camera.
The result is The Tree Planters: a series of large-scale, painterly portraits that document the people behind one of Canada’s most essential and overlooked forms of environmental labour. Leistner’s images are intimate and monumental at once, honouring the endurance, grit, and quiet heroism of the people doggedly helping our nature recover. Leistner’s project also gave rise to the documentary film Forest for the Trees and a 220-page monograph published by Dewi Lewis Publishing.
These photographs ask us to look closely at the land, at the work, and at the people who are out there showing up for both.
Held in Balance: A Symmetry Between Structure and Narrative by Steve Mitts
Location: Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery (MAG), 4525 47A Avenue
Artist: Steve Mitts
Mediums: Mixed
Dates: May 2nd - July 30th
#FirstFridaysRedDeer
Description:
Held in Balance: A Symmetry Between Structure and Narrative, explores how structure and narrative intertwine, inviting curiosity, reflection, and wonder. Using wood salvaged from century-old grain bins and composed entirely of reclaimed materials, each piece carries a subtle story, creating a quiet dialogue between visual form and underlying meaning. The work re-imagines prairie structures; buildings shaped by time, weather, and change. What was once obsolete becomes resonant through deliberate acts of material and conceptual renewal.
About the Artist:
To learn more about artist Steve Mitts and his work, visit: https://www.stevemitts.com/
Check in with these galleries directly for updated exhibition information:
Artribute Art School, 212 – 4836 50 Street, in the Old Courthouse. Treaty 6 & 7
Art in the Hallway, Northside Community Centre YMCA, 6391 76 Street
Curiosity Art & Framing, 5002 48 Street, Red Deer
Lacombe Performing Arts Centre, 5227 Calgary Edmonton Trail, Lacombe, AB
The Corridor Community Gallery, 4501 47A Ave, inside the Recreation Centre
The White Gallery, downstairs from Sunworks Living, 4913 50 Ave, Red Deer, AB
Lacombe
Memorial Centre 5214 – 50 Ave, Lacombe, AB
