The Pink Door Show opens this weekend with 30 artists in its new incubator program

The 120-year-old Crescent Heights house that hosts the Pink Door Show. Photo: The Pink Door Show

When the Pink Door Show opens a Crescent Heights house to the public on Friday, the 30 Alberta artists on its walls won't just be selling art for a weekend. They're the first group in the show's new year-long Artist Incubator Program, built to help them make a living from their work.

The Pink Door Show runs Oct. 23 to 25 at 223 7 Ave. N.E., with more than 400 original pieces hung throughout the 1,100-square-foot home, Artistic Director Kersten Hardy Fairleigh told the Calgary Citizen.

Fairleigh is a visual artist herself. She went full time in 2023, took a studio at the 500 Collective and was scouted into the Pink Door's second show in 2024 as one of its artists. When one of the founders stepped down, she was asked to come on as artistic partner, and she wanted to turn the annual pop-up into something bigger.

"How could we build something that would help artists make a sustainable living off of their expertise and their profession and their creative works?" she said.

Getting to know Calgary's working artists, she kept hearing about the same trap. Gallery spots are limited and hard to get, she says, while online and in-person markets cap prices so low that once materials and hours are counted, "you're not even making minimum wage off of the time that it took to create these pieces."

Fairleigh had done incubator work in an earlier career in branding and design, helping entrepreneurs build their businesses, and she saw artists the same way. "Professional artists are also entrepreneurs," she said, but many don't have "the education and the knowledge base and the awareness of those things that are really helpful when you're trying to build a sustainable career."

"This has been applied to almost every other industry," she said. "Why not take a look at what this could potentially look like for artists?"

The program, a beta run that started in September, has three parts:

The goal, she says, is "to bring more agency to visual artists, having them be more of the decision makers" on things like pricing.

An open call in April drew 73 applications. Fairleigh and founding partner Jacelyn Benner did studio visits with 40 of the applicants and chose 25 artists, who join five founding artists for this season's 30. They range from emerging artists to established ones, some with gallery representation. Two are from Edmonton; the rest are from Calgary.

The whole thing runs on volunteers. Each artist in the program commits about 50 hours over the year, and Fairleigh says she has been working close to full time without pay. This beta year is meant to show whether the Pink Door should become a non-profit, a social enterprise or a business.

For Fairleigh, getting artists seen is the other half of the job.

Last October's show drew more than 1,400 people over three days, and Fairleigh says most artists sold more there than at almost any other show they do in Calgary. Sales and attendance have doubled every year since the show started in 2023, she says.

"The public overwhelmingly is very interested and wants to be able to connect with local artists and to purchase original art," she said. "But, where do you find the opportunity to do that in a way that's comfortable and personal?"

That's why she wants the artists in the house all weekend. "That is when they're going to have the most opportunity to be with the public, to talk the most about their work, to connect to the market," she said. It's also a chance for artists to see whether what they're trying to say with their work is landing: "You can also see if the way that you're creating that is being successful as well."

Fairleigh curates in what's known as salon style: mixing different sizes, shapes, mediums and subjects so they work together as a whole, instead of giving one artist's matching body of work its own white wall.

The house is more than 120 years old, which means odd corners, a fireplace and plenty of nooks. "I have circles, I have minis, I have massive pieces. So it's easy to kind of find something that works in every space," Fairleigh said.