This year The Works Art & Design Festival is displaying 51 exhibits. One of the exhibits that I am especially interested in is an installation by Dawn Marie Marchand titled a place to hang your stories.

Marchand’s installation is an extension of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She is offering an opportunity for those affected by Alberta’s Indian Residential Schools to have their voices heard.

Contemporary art has more market value in the 21st Century than ever before thanks to online sales and art auctions. In this highly commercialized art world, the commodification of art intensifies, threatening to compromise the social and cultural agency of the works. A public art festival, however, has the potential to work against this trend by engaging the community, and thereby restoring art’s social, political, and cultural agency.