How BUMP Festival is Enhancing Calgary’s Cultural Script
From left to right: Anna McLaren, Eman Safadi, Ryan Tram and Priya Ramesh. Photo credit: Daman Singh (@damaann_)
There’s a new kind of cultural leadership rising in Calgary and it’s got perfect taste and deep roots in the underground.
At the helm of BUMP Festival, Calgary’s most progressive and visually striking public art initiative, is a team of artists and creatives who are flipping the narrative on what city festivals can, and should, look like. Led by Creative Director Priya Ramesh (aka CONTRA of goonda rap group Cartel Madras), Director of Visual Programming Anna MacLaren, and Director of Festival and Events Ryan Tram, the current iteration of BUMP is about more than murals. It’s about reimagining space, celebrating subcultures, and showing the city what can happen when the coolest people in the room are the ones running the show.
The street-savvy perspective this team brings is no accident. Ramesh and many of her BUMP collaborators are part of FOREIGNERZ, a Calgary-based art and production house pushing boundaries in film, music, installation, and visual culture. Known for their maximalist aesthetic and visionary storytelling, FOREIGNERZ projects blur the lines between gallery and club, cinema and street. Their signature: big ideas, global references, and a commitment to narrative disruption.
“When you are designing a festival and you're tapped into the underground, we can do whatever we want, in an interesting and cool way.” says Ramesh. “Sometimes when we're in conversations with the powers that be in different organizations, funders, partners… the conversation in the room is like, ‘no, what you guys are doing is not working because you're not tapped in.’ What do you listen to? We were able to bring BAMBII to the festival because we went to all of BAMBII's parties in Toronto when we lived there. It’s important to be tapped into music scenes and fashion scenes and art scenes. It allows us to make connections in those different undergrounds and be like, ‘okay, we're like listening to you.’”
That ear-to-the-ground programming has defined BUMP’s evolution into one of Calgary’s most culturally relevant festivals. In recent years, they’ve brought in headliners like MikeQ, a pioneering figure in ballroom and vogue culture, for a legendary Kiki Ball that fused drag, dance, and rave culture. They’ve hosted events with dancehall selector BAMBII, and worked with collectives like Vogue YYC and Ambien (a local music collective of up and coming DJ promoters). “We’ve partnered with the emerging ball scene in Calgary and figured, wouldn’t it be cool if we did a ball as part of the alley party? So it’s not just DJs—we have something to punctuate the event so people have a reason to stay,” Tram shares.
The same spirit of experimentation continues this year which sees BUMP team up with Foundation Collective and Scozzafava Deli to showcase everything from Jersey Club to graffiti jams. Their Crash Out street party will feature punk bands and club music. There will also be deeper critical conversations at the Urban Art Conference taking place at Contemporary Calgary. These moments aren’t just entertainment, they’re culture-making. They’re how BUMP continues to carve a new identity for Calgary - one mural, one rave, one absurdly good sandwich pop-up at a time.
A Festival That Cooks
Though BUMP began in 2017 as a humble mural project in the Beltline, its current form was largely shaped by a wave of cultural workers who joined forces in 2021–2022.
“I think I had worked at BUMP for a summer and like as a coordinator and then I was like no. I think this festival could eat—so I was like let me come back—let me cook,” Ramesh laughs. “And then the folks we were working with were also like let’s bring more people in who are interesting and touching different spaces. There was an opening, and Ryan jumped in, and then Anna jumped in... Eman Safadi jumped in..., the film crew jumps in. It starts to shape the festival as you bring more people into it who are in relevant artistic spaces.”
Tram says the transformation was both intentional and structural. “We inherited a lot of the style of how things were done… and we kind of re-evaluated that, reshaped that, re-visited it, and then optimized it—from a project management standpoint and also from an impact standpoint.”
“I think we're also easily bored as a team,” he adds. “So it's like okay, that was great, why don't we do something completely different the next year.” This mindset has led to BUMP becoming one of Calgary’s most consistently fresh and experimental festivals, where muralism is just the beginning. From warehouse raves and kiki balls to public art installations and critical panel discussions, the programming is as multidimensional as the artists curating it.
BUMP Festival Team - Photo credit: Daman Singh (@damaann_)
Programming with Taste (and Intention)
“We hate wasting time and wasting money,” says Ramesh. “Nothing's worse than just wasting a grant on something that no one sees—which happens in the city a lot. If we're gonna have a festival and it's gonna be a little bit crazy for two weeks, at least every single thing has a point. Everyone we wanted is in the room. When the festival ends you're like wait, holy shit, that was crazy. That sort of intentionality is a driving factor on how we plan our events.”
Their approach to public events is rooted in lived experience and years of collaboration. “We're constantly hearing this refrain from people like, we need to access the younger audience,” says Tram. “But the majority of them are serving something that is not at all relevant to the cultural zeitgeist of the time… We’re lucky that we’re chronically online. We are always discussing all of the cultural artifacts, whether it's Love Island or the music that we listen to.”
MacLaren is blunt about the disconnect between legacy arts programming and actual culture: “There are people programming events in the city who have no idea what’s happening in the city. Like they think of Calgary as Stampede... They don’t even know that there is an underground here. It doesn’t exist to them.”
BUMP’s success is the result of doing the opposite: knowing the underground intimately and giving it a platform that feels elevated, not sanitized. While BUMP is still rooted in muralism, (it added 83 new public artworks in 2024 alone!) its direction is shifting towards more immersive, multifaceted programming.
“We’ll keep doing the murals—the murals are a hit—but it’s important to us to keep adding a more diverse repertoire,” says MacLaren. Internally, BUMP has also been refining how it supports artists, such as ensuring fair pay, clear communication, and an intentional curation model that prioritizes equity.
“We try to make things more professional, more standard,” says Tram. “That impacts how artists perceive the programming.” Selection is overseen by an independent jury, carefully curated for both representation and cultural awareness. “They apply, we interview them,” says Ramesh. “We need a jury that’s connected to their community, so they can catch the applications others might miss… we are also looking for agents of change who are artists.”
Monuments and Memory
Another expansion to their programming, taking place August 5–6 at Contemporary Calgary, is the second annual BUMP Urban Art Conference which digs deep into the politics of placemaking, storytelling, and cultural memory. This year’s theme is Monuments and Memory. “The conference was a way for us to take that energy and bring it into a room,” says Ramesh. “Thinkers who typically wouldn't be on panels together. Conversations that are maybe happening when you’re gone for drinks with your friends or like on the side of a mural site, you know, off the record when a bunch of graffiti artists are talking. What if we were to program those conversations, but also make it completely accessible?”
Tram is excited about the cultural commentary embedded in panels like “The Age of the Editorial,” that will feature Wesley O’Driscoll who runs a podcast called Nowhere Fast, in addition to being a fixture in the Edmonton skate community. “There’s an essence of storytelling to a lot of content that you can find on social media and podcast platforms… So it’s interesting for a public arts conference to broach that. How do we think about how things are captured in media?”
Photo credit: Daman Singh (@damaann_) - from left to right - Anna McLaren, Priya Ramesh, Ryan Tram
CrashOut: The Finale
If the conference is the brain, the finale party is the heart. BUMP’s closing events have become legendary in Calgary, from last year’s Trinity Kiki Ball to this summer’s CrashOut on August 16. “It’s meant to be kind of absurd and over the top,” says Ramesh. “A fun way to end the festival... A cool pivot from last year to keep people on their toes.”
Hosted outside Scozzafava’s Deli, CrashOut brings together DJs, punk bands, skaters, and sandwich lovers in one glorious, chaotic street jam. Headliners include Baltimore club duo Woe, Jersey Club phenom O.J.C, and Vancouver’s Tee Noble, with local DJs and a Scozzafava deli pop-up rounding out the experience. “There’s gonna be a punk show segment in the middle of the day and it'll transition into an electronic music dance party,” Tram explains. “Jersey and Baltimore Club. It’s gonna be wild.”
As Calgary’s skyline fills with ever more condos, murals, and rapid redevelopment, BUMP is asking deeper questions about access, memory, and cultural power. “Calgary is doing this odd thing where a lot of development permits now require a mural or public art to be included,” says MacLaren. “But we work outside of that. Our funding isn’t tied to developers, so we can push the boundaries of the type of artwork that's going up.”
Ramesh is even more pointed: “We’re also trying to change the way a city thinks about art and place. That’s a long game…but how do culturally the people who are witnessing BUMP also be a part of that goal?”
The answer? “Be more open to the arts. Come downtown. Come to the heart”
HOW TO PLUG INTO BUMP 2025
Festival Dates: Launch Party, July 30, 2025. Festival start - August 1–18, 2025
CrashOut Finale: August 16 at Scozzafava’s Deli
Urban Art Conference: August 5–6 at Contemporary Calgary (Free, RSVP required)
Mural Tours, Public Art, Live Events: All festival long
More info: www.bumpfestival.ca
