Canmore’s oldest art studio turns 50

CANMORE – Canmore wasn’t always considered an arts community.

Long known for its coal mining industry, that changed, in part, when a group of ceramic artists founded the mountain town’s first art studio and gallery, Stonecrop Studio, half a century ago.

“It feels like it went by in the blink of an eye,” said Tony Bloom, a 77-year-old Canmore artist. “Other times, overnight, doing a firing can take forever, it seems. [It’s] just like having kids – some nights feel like months and other months just feel like a day.”

The studio was founded by Bloom, Les Manning, Bart Robinson and Bonnie Lebowitz. John Borrowman, a long-time mayor of Canmore, and Robin Sturdy joined later.

Bloom described how the founders had been “a group of far-sighted individuals when Canmore was still a scruffy coal town and didn’t know it was about to be bitten by the art bug.”

“I was teaching at the Banff Centre, and it was clear to me that there was an opportunity to bring this into the town of Canmore,” he said. “It was a way for us to make a living, although we didn’t really know whether we were gonna make a living at it or not.”

When the studio first opened its doors on Dec. 7, 1974, hundreds of people from across Alberta showed up, with cars parking along both sides of the road for half a mile in each direction. Within a few weeks, the studio was featured on the front page of the Calgary Herald’s arts section and interviewed by CBC.

The studio was named after a “tenacious” flowering plant, known as a stonecrop, which produces a star-shaped flower with five petals.

“In those days, we were making stoneware pottery, and the ‘crop’ could be seen as a ‘crop’ that comes out of the kiln,” Bloom said.

Bloom started making clay pottery and sculptures before getting into casting bronze in the 1980s. He now mainly works with metal, but occasionally digs back down to his clay foundations.

More than 100 people have come to work at, or with, Stonecrop Studio to establish or burnish their careers. Bloom said most of these artists were from out of town, but a few were Canmore locals.

“Some very accomplished, good people came through, so even though I’m the one remaining [artist], I still have people that will work for me on kind of a temporary basis,” Bloom said.

In the early years, the studio hosted competitive “bake-offs”, dances, Raku parties, Sunday afternoon “jump ups” (percussion jam sessions) and even a one-off film festival. It was a founding member of the Canmore Arts Guild and worked on various iterations of an art centre that eventually resulted in artsPlace.

In 2014, Stonecrop was honoured with the Lifetime Contribution to the Arts award by the Town of Canmore and featured in a poem by then-poet laureate Bert Dyck.

“I think the studio’s contribution, as much as anything else or more than anything else, would have been just a contribution to the possibility of arts surviving in a small town in Alberta,” Bloom said.

Although it was once suggested to him that he could move to New York, where there would be more clientele on one block of Park Avenue than in all of Alberta, he ultimately wanted to be a trailblazer.

“Somebody else would have done it, but we got there, and we just got in front of the parade,” he said.

On May 30, 1992, the studio suffered a fire that damaged the roof and cost $10,000. Bloom said the blaze was caused by a combination of a hot day, a freshly tarred roof and a kiln firing underneath. He made sure to warn firefighters that if they sprayed water on the kiln, it would explode.

“It was not the greatest moment, but we survived and came back in October, November,” he said.

After 50 years of operation, Stonecrop is still humming along, although Bloom has become more selective with his projects.

“I’ll focus more on the things that interest me, and if people show up and want to put some time in with me, I’ll also entertain that thought, because I get people in their 20s just wanting to know, ‘How do you endure for 50-plus years?’” he said. “But for me, I want to make sure that the time I’ve spent is spent on doing things I want to do, not things I have to do, and I’m in that position at this point.”