It looks like Arts Days will be blessed with good weather for Arts Days this week.

 It’s not like a couple years ago when we had snow,” said Allied Arts Council Projects manager Tara Gillanders, noting due to Covid , most events will be outside this year.

“We’re working hard to ensure that everything is safe. So we had planned to move as much as we could outside even before the current restrictions came into effect,” she continued.

 Lethbridge’s annual celebration of the arts begins on Thursday, Sept. 23 with local artists painting the outside windows of of several downtown local businesses including Classique Dance Works, The Allied Arts Council shop, Casa and Sill and Soil.

“It’s an excellent opportunity for people to stop and chat with the artists about their work,” Gillanders said.

 The musical portion of ArtsDays begins on Friday, Sept. 24 with doom folk band Makiisma and local garage rock/new wave band Body Lens, who perform on Rotary Square outside Casa from 7 -9 p.m.

CASA reopens with a bang as  new exhibits “Inside Out” and “Summer Salon” opens July 3, showcasing a burst of creativity for 74 Southern Alberta artists .

“ It”s been seven or eight months since we had an exhibit here,” said Casa curator Darcy Logan.

“Originally it was just going to be an outdoor exhibit, because we didn’t know what was going to happen at this time, but we put together a great team to make it work,” Logan said, noting they put out an artists call in May, which southern Alberta artists answered in force.

“ None of it is directly related to the pandemic,” he said.

“ There’s a wide range  of works in all sorts of mediums. There‘s abstracts and realism. And we have works from all kinds of artists from teens to well respected professionals,” he said, adding the  main gallery focusses on paintings including a variety of subject matter including birds, landscapes, wildlife and  a quirky submission of a horse riding another horse.

 There are also several outdoor exhibits.

Troy Nickel and  Michelle Sylvestre have larger installations in the kiosks.

As things start getting back to normal, that means there will be new art exhibits and openings happening downtown.

 The Southern Alberta Art Gallery focuses on architectural styles for their four new exhibits, which officially open, Saturday, July 3 with an opening reception at 7 p.m.

“That is deliberate. We like to have programming with a  special connection and a similar theme. these exhibits feature modern projects involving architecture,” summarized interim curator Adam Whitford.

There will be  some familiar images in the upper gallery as Vancouver and Vienna based  artists Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber’s “Performing Educational Modernism” features images of works of Arthur Erickson, who designed the University of Lethbridge main building as well as Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

“They explore egalitarianism and optimism from the ’50s-’70s,” he said.

“It’s how these open community spaces allowed students and  faulty to gather and cross -pollinate.”

The downstairs gallery features Edmonton sculptor Catherine Burgess‘s “Almost Actual.”

“She’s a senior Alberta artist. Her work plays with spatial  orientation, form and void and the basic  method of delineating  three dimensional space,” he said, adding burgess works in  steel and stainless steel. The names of the  works are an essential component as are the effects of the shadows the make on the walls.

“ She’s exhibited here three times. The first time was in the ’90s,” he said.

Another Edmonton artist Morgan Melenka’s “There Are No Walls, Only Shimmering Membranes,” is on the walls of the SAAG library gallery.

“We like to focus on emerging Alberta and Southern Albertan artists in the library,” Whitford said.