Sustained investments in arts and culture will be good for business in Ottawa’s downtown core, the CEO of the Ottawa Art Gallery says.  According to Alexandra Badzak, the need for those investments became truly apparent as the city came out of the pandemic.  “We were certainly seeing a downtown that was suppressed. People didn’t feel […]

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Sustained investments in arts and culture will be good for business in Ottawa’s downtown core, the CEO of the Ottawa Art Gallery says. 

According to Alexandra Badzak, the need for those investments became truly apparent as the city came out of the pandemic. 

“We were certainly seeing a downtown that was suppressed. People didn’t feel safe to come downtown and there just wasn’t a great atmosphere out there. But we really asked the question, ‘What can we do from an arts lens?’ So we started workshopping with a ton of different stakeholders and seeing that a lot of people were feeling the same way,” she said.

Now, the OAG is looking to encourage investment in Ottawa’s cultural sector with a couple of big projects in 2026.

First, it’s partnering with local artists to beautify buildings in and around the ByWard Market to create an arts corridor. 

“We did a giant mural of the side of Les Suites (hotel). Working with a private business and bringing this amazing artwork by Eric Chan onto that building, it immediately changed the atmosphere right outside our own doors,” Badzak said.

Going forward, OAG will be looking for more underutilized spaces, such as the former Hudson’s Bay building on Rideau Street, to help change the way the downtown core is perceived. 

“There are a lot of different institutional shifts that need to occur to make the downtown core feel better, like it’s a place you want to be, but the arts can certainly lean into that.”

The second project is turning Ottawa’s downtown core into an ACE (arts, culture and entertainment) district by connecting artists with the small businesses and organizations that contribute to the cultural economy. 

“With ACE, part of its job is to change the channel on (the disconnect between investment and the cultural economy) by bringing all the players around the table to start to do the research. Who’s out there? What are our assets? What are the gaps? And what do we need to get to the next stage?

“By naming the downtown core as an ACE district, we’re basically saying, ‘Look, we’re paying attention to what already exists, which are amazing anchor organizations as well as small businesses, bars, restaurants that are supporting a creative economy.’ But the goal is ultimately to connect them from a marketing and storytelling perspective and then from a capacity-building perspective,” she explained. 

A perfect example is Nuit Blanche, an all-night arts festival, Badzak said. 

“Nuit Blanche, coming up in the fall, is an example where that’s going to take all of us around the table to make sure that that really comes together in a coordinated way, because there’s a lot of moving parts. When you think about it, it’s not just pure culture. It’s culture through an economic development lens,” she said.

Improving Ottawa’s arts and culture economy will increase foot traffic to the downtown core, which will in turn increase spending at local businesses, she said. 

“It’s creating that ‘stickiness,’ where you may come (downtown) for one thing, but then you go discover something else and spend your whole evening in the downtown core,” she said. “When a city embraces culture at its core, you see the benefits – economic benefits, tourism benefits and social fabric benefits.”

In the short-term, the OAG will foster new partnerships to contribute to the city’s 200th anniversary celebrations. For example, the gallery will partner with the Bytown Museum on an exhibition showcasing the city’s history through photographs. And, working with the Ottawa International Animation Festival, the OAG will tell the story of Ottawa-Gatineau’s animation history. It will also partner with global design experience studio Immersive International, which opened its first North American headquarters in Ottawa last year, to bring new life to underutilized spaces in the downtown core. 

While the city’s bicentennial is a catalyst for increased investments and partnerships in 2026, Badzak said the OAG is looking at the celebrations as “Ottawa 200-plus.”

“We’re interested in recognizing that the Algonquin-Anishinaabe have been here for much longer, and then we’re also future-oriented. Where are we going to go next?”

She added that the OAG learned from investments made for the country’s 150th anniversary in 2017. 

“You can do amazing spectacles and they have their impact immediately. But what we didn’t think through … was that we needed to build out infrastructure that would elevate and build capacity for the arts, culture and entertainment sectors,” she reflected. 

“One of the ways we’ve been thinking about ACE is that it’s a legacy of the 200th. It launches this year, but its job is to be going into the future through building supports to encourage growth. We haven’t completely figured it out at this stage, but there’s no doubt it’s going to be about working cooperatively through public-private partnerships.”