In the second of five ten-year eras of Calgarian art to be celebrated at the Glenbow, Made in Calgary: the 1970s offers an intimate array of eclectic pieces created by a tightly woven artist community at an explosive time in the city’s art history.

Cleverly selected and hung, no two pieces too alike or too dissimilar are to be found on the same wall. The Glenbow Museum selected a guest curator whose memory and desire to re-exhibit the creative decade is exuded in his excitement and knowledge of each and every piece.

"If you weren’t there you wouldn’t have a hope," Ron Moppett says about the job of curating this collection. "If they had chosen someone else it would have looked different but it would have looked similar in a lot of ways."

He is speaking on some of the big names in art of that time that no one would have missed. Names like Katie Ohe, the sculpturess who creates what Moppett calls "these wonderful kinetic kind of things" that many of us have seen and spun without knowing it.

Ohe’s sculptures are showcased on the first, second and fourth floors of the Glenbow, the latter two as part of the show, as well as on the University of Calgary campus. Ohe has been a longtime professor at the Alberta College of Art and Design, sculpting in difficult shiny media. Her works entitled Puddles are composed of spinning chrome steel and bronze, baring the mark of excellent crafts-woman-ship.

Ohe is known as one of the first Canadian artists to practice abstract sculpture in Alberta.

Moppett happily points out ten silk-screened Christmas cards Ohe made over the course of the ’70s – one from each year of the decade – displayed on a wall of the fourth floor section of the exhibit, intimating he might have been a recipient of such.

Ohe’s husband, Harry Kiyooka, is also featured, his nameless styled canvas conjuring a feeling of one peering through a castle window in some long ago prairie landscape.

Another power art-couple likely to have been selected regardless of curator are the painters Joyce and John Hull. Their flowery, bright pieces – conceptual still lifes – are perhaps the focal pieces of the entire show, literally drawing one in from across the rooms in which they are hung.

Moppett worked closely with Hall in the days of the Rose Museum, a collection that was on display at the old Glenbow Museum location before it moved to its current home in 1976. A symbolic throwback to this collection is presented in a glass case on the fourth floor – featuring just what the original exhibit had, virtually anything containing a visual or written rose. This could mean a stencil, a letter, or an actual flower.

The 1970s were an intense time for the art scene in Calgary. Not only was the Glenbow moved and expanded, ACAD opened its doors and through them walked a realm of artists and instructors from nations wide.

The pieces featured in Made in Calgary are just as the title of the exhibit suggests; they were all crafted or created in the city by artists living, teaching or showing here, though not necessarily by locals.

"You sort of had to be there," Moppett says on selecting these roughly 100 pieces, adding that in some capacity he knew all of the artists included in the show, either through seeing their work at the time, as a student at ACAD himself, later as a teacher, or in his career as a curator. "You can’t go to a book and find out the top ten best artists in Calgary."

"The way you make that discernment is like a thousand things synapse in your brain and give you the answer."

This means resumes were not considered. Nor were sales volumes, or current notoriety, or where the pieces had traveled or showed.

"Some of [the artists] are out there in the public domain and others are retired or more quiet in their practice," Moppett says. "It doesn’t make [the art] better, just different circumstance. And some are no longer with us."

This is art for the sake of art: a dynamic expanse of material and matter. No one theme exists, a fact that Moppett feels distinctive of the Calgary art scene.

The ’70s show conveys an art period where no boundaries existed; when artists abandoned the ideas of the time and gave themselves over to a complete freedom to express. You will, refreshingly, not find a single equine canvas in this show.

You will find, however, an abstract, boxy take of the Calgary Tower, as seen through a window, by artist and selected curator for the upcoming 80s show Jeff Spalding, "referencing a surrealist kind of image thing," Moppett says.

You will see tapestries of monsters, woolen lava, billowy textile, mixed material sculpture, wood etching, earthenware, photos of installations that occurred throughout the decade, stoneware, and works by "the king of Canadian mail art" himself, Don Mabie.

The button making craze that came out of ACAD was lead by this creative genius, another Calgary artist who never posted a letter without decorating it to the point of assured safe keeping by its recipient.

Moppett says Mabie is "like a saint in the art community" and was a big player in the implosion of artist run centres that occurred in the city in the ’70s.

"[Artist run centres] were a new breed of animal that purportedly could respond much more quickly than the institutions," Moppett said – venues for a new population of artists that had something to say and a wanted to say it now.

"Everybody was just so in the moment that you will see a poster that says August 2nd to 23rd; there’s no year attached," Moppett says. "That’s kind of a wrinkle."

If you could travel back to 1963, and ask Moppett as an art student whether he could see himself putting together this show, he likely would have said no. His first three years at ACAD were spent focused in ad art, with an aim to one day work for Walt Disney as an animator.

"Then art school opens your eyes to all of the other options out there that one doesn’t know about," he says. Furthered by a trip to England, in which he had the opportunity to view what he called "real paintings", he returned to his fourth year of college with a new desire: a desire to paint.

Curating became his day job, a less emotionally draining career choice than teaching proved to be, and has allowed him to meet a host of fine artists and keep active and relevant in the art community at large.

It also meant he knew where to go to find the pieces that compose this show. With few exceptions, most of the works displayed were procured pretty close to home. Many are taken from the Foundation of the Arts compendium, others from the Glenbow itself, the City of Calgary collection, the Nickle Arts Museum, and ACAD’s store.

Although these Made in Calgary shows will not travel, "there is a hope that after the five decades have gone that a proper catalogue will be published documenting the shows and work that has gone into them," Moppett says.

In any event, your opportunity to view this intriguing collection is now.