containR Mural Camp 2026

The containR Summer Mural Camp sees a collection of youth artists who work collaboratively in small groups to design and paint murals on the side of shipping containers at containR Art Park in Crescent Heights. Mentored by local artist Stephanie Banszky, youth artists and community members engage in a week-long camp to develop their creative practice, interact with and build local arts communities, and hone their creative voices!

For this collection of murals we brought together younger emerging artists and community members to tackle the question: “What does a vibrant community mean to you?” Through two days of conversation and design, as well as some asset mapping, we came up with four large designs and four table designs to talk about this theme.

The Murals

The Dance Party

This piece is a celebratory and vibrant mural that shows people and their animals joyfully dancing together. The music pulses and the lights shine behind them. The world is a colourful reverie of dopamine as they lose all track of time and move to the beat. This reflects 16th Avenue and Centre Street North in Crescent Heights as an epicentre of dance schools and companies. This area is surrounded by multiple prominent studios in a nearby vicinity, and hundreds of dancers come to this area to learn and build community every year. The amount of joy experienced in this corner of the world on any given night of the week is unquantifiable, and it brings people together of all ages for the love of dance, movement, and community.

Pond of Fish

This piece depicts a pond with lilypads and goldfish that you may find in someone’s backyard.

Day and Night Dichotomy: The Sun Shines on the Wild Ones

This mural features urban wildlife. A sassy skunk, a clever coyote, a beautiful peacock and a fluffle of curious little bunnies. A sun shines in the centre on this group of critters. It is a common reality for all of us to run into many of these animals throughout our day-to-day life. You may be out on a walk and just down the street, a coyote crosses your path, hunting for its dinner. You pass a front yard with a skunk actively foraging for dropped apples. In another yard, a family of bunnies lingers and then quickly skitters away as you approach. You head to the nearby Calgary Zoo and the peacocks walk around, untethered and unbothered. We wanted to showcase that Calgary and Crescent Heights are home to so many different animals.

Day and Night Dichotomy: Storytelling in the Night

Opposite the mural with the Sun, we have a darker piece, reminiscent of the night, community, and magic. This piece echoes the stories you tell when you are in circles of community, in the dark of the night. We laugh as we recount the time we caught a bat in the university, or when the snail ate our fresh tomatoes, or about the new family of ducks and their babies in Confederation Park. We talk about the neighbour that keeps a yard of fake pigs, or the one that roasts coffee for others and leaves it in a little cabinet, the flowers we planted this season, the neighbourhood cat that howls in the night, the owl we heard calling, and the fish we saw in the river. We tell stories of magic, journeys, and mystery – like the ghost that haunts the Cat and Fiddle down the road. The night is where we sit in circle with the ones we love. We share our deepest thoughts together and we laugh at the amusements of the day.

Bright and Vibrant Community

This vibrant piece pulls in colourful textures, gradients and pops of colour. It features flowers that are often common in Calgary gardens, a happy group of people, a little fish from our waterways, and a dog looking at you as you pass. Crescent Heights is surrounded by wonderful places to go eat, drink and be in community. This neighbourhood is also close to the Alberta University of the Arts, as represented by the palette, and is a very important institution and alma mater for many of our artists in this mural series.

Garden of Wonder

The Garden of Wonder shelters a group of gatherers. They work together to harvest the late summer bounty. The long, warm days of the late summer with the deep jewel and tobacco tones. In Calgary, it is the beginning of the harvest. As our fingers are still stained deep purple and blue from the Saskatoons, the apples are starting to swell up and turn rosy, and the sage is in full growth, heading into its final flower. The prairie grasses and flowers are high and blow in the wind at the top of Nosehill. The community gardens nearby have gardeners busy tending to their annual crop, celebrating the bounty of the season, and sharing their excess with their friends and family. Laughter is heard deep into the night as we sit around tables, with the dishes made from our harvest, and sharing stories with friends.

Playful Ducks

Calgary is known for it’s waterways and urban birds. This playful piece shows a family of ducks playing amongst the water plants, ripples and bubbles.