2024 TD Incubator Fellow Wakefield Brewster is known as one of Canada’s most powerful professional performance poets. He also just might be one of Calgary’s biggest cheerleaders when it comes to the city’s art scene. He was raised in Toronto by parents from Barbados, but he has lived in Calgary since 2016 and champions the city as a great place to foster an arts career.
“I believe that the arts and the arts communities are the heart and the heartbeats of this city. We have become such an inclusive, exciting and outwardly reaching, creative community that we are finally keeping our hometown heroes home,” he says. “We are bringing artists from abroad, from Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver — cities where Calgary artists not that long ago believed they needed to go to have their careers become something more fulfilling and outward reaching.”
He says that’s why the city’s emerging arts programs are so important. “Without these types of programs and opportunities, I believe that artists who need this kind of amplification will not receive it in many cases,” he says. “I believe that it is not only an opportunity and a program, but it’s a platform and a portal.”
Wakefield believes that once any artist has used every resource provided by a program and opportunity like the TD incubator program at Arts Commons, they can’t help but be a bigger, better, more fantastically fuller artist. “It is paramount that we have these types of opportunities and programs so that artists are able to reach audiences unbeknownst to them.”
