The Urban Prairie

Virgil Hammock is head of the Canadian section of the International
Association of Art Critics and chair of the Department of Fine Arts at
Mount Allison University.

This handsome, large-format book is the product of a collaboration
between Saskatoon’s Mendel Art Gallery and Fifth House. It is a
catalogue of a large exhibition (put together by Mendel assistant
curator Dan Ring) that traveled to five Prairie cities between October
1993 and April 1995. The five cities—Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Regina,
Edmonton, and Calgary—also provided the subject matter for The Urban
Prairie, which is about the development of urban culture in western
Canada between 1880 and 1960.

Before 1880, these cities (with the exception of Winnipeg) were little
more than villages. The coming of the railroad and the massive
emigration from Europe at the end of the 19th century quickly changed
all that. The people attracted to these new Prairie cities were keen on
retaining the pleasures of the urban civilization they had left behind
in eastern Canada or Europe. The ruling class of the new Prairie
dwellers was British and wanted, among other things, a public
architecture based on British models.

Dan Ring’s “The Urban Prairie 1880 to 1960,” the longest of the
book’s three essays, is a cogent and well-written treatment of Prairie
culture. It is key to understanding the underlying themes of both the
book and the exhibition. Ring writes about boosterism and about how art
was used to promote immigration to the Prairies. He also writes about
the attempts at grand architecture in the early years of this century,
some realized (the provincial capital buildings), some not realized
(Thomas H. Mawson’s utopian plan for Calgary). The essays by Guy
Vanderhaeghe and George Melnyk provide other perspectives on the
urbanization of the Prairies, and are well worth reading.

This first-rate book on a subject about which little has been written
should be in every Canadian university library.