Season One: Contours of Identity

When we started working on this project, one of the characteristics we kept emphasizing was that of place—be it the city, region, or biome that we are from. In many of our conversations, “Prairies” became the word—the catchall—for the complexity of the place we were trying to encapsulate. As the project progressed, we started to wonder what exactly we meant when we said “making art in the Prairies,” or, “in the West.” With that question in mind, we decided to focus our first season on the Contours of Identity—in this case Prairie identity, and all the other ways of describing the land west of Ontario and east of the Rocky Mountains. Over the next few months we will have conversations, produce writing, and think about how we begin to answer this question.

Nomad Land: An Interview with Michelle Deanne Schultz

If you’ve worked in the arts sector in Alberta over the last ten years, you’ve probably come to know the name Michelle Deanne Schultz—through her work as the director of dc3 Art Projects and Bookshop, as the former executive director of Latitude 53, or, most recently, as an independent arts consultant and strategist. Those experiences helped make Schultz a mainstay of Alberta’s contemporary art scene. But some of the most essential work she does—work we get only a glimpse of through her Instagram account, where she occasionally posts an image of a packed cargo van, or of her dog, Belle, tucked into the backseat of her car—involves getting behind the wheel and driving.
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