Glyde Commemorative Mural

The 1950s were boom times for post-WWII Edmonton. A spirit of industrial optimism suffused public building, and in this environment, Edmonton’s long-delayed first City Hall, finished in 1957, expressed a modernist sensibility and design. 

The art commissioned for the 1957 City Hall included a 14-foot long by 4‑foot high (4.25 X 1.22 metres) mural, then located in the rotunda, and now placed high on the wall just outside the Heritage Room in the present 1992 City Hall. 

More accurately a shallow bas-relief, the mural depicts the builders of Edmonton from Indigenous peoples (Cree and Blackfoot) to the mid-20^th-Century industrial age, with dominating images of male human figures engaged in building, agriculture and resource extraction. It was designed by Henry George Glyde, R.C.A., Professor of the Fine Arts Department of the University of Alberta. 

Exact details of the commissioning, name and intentions of this artwork have been lost, but Glyde is still remembered as a Eurocentric Modernist artist whose work and teaching contributed to the development of the visual art milieu in Alberta. Glyde was born in England in 1906, came to Canada in 1935 to teach art in Calgary, and died in Victoria in 1998. During his long career, based in Edmonton from 1937 – 46 until his retirement, he was an important co-founding figure in the art programmes at the Provincial Institute of Technology in Calgary (later SAIT and Alberta College of Art), the Banff School of Fine Arts, and the Extension Department and Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Alberta. 

The whole mural weighs about 500 lbs (225 kg) and is made in four sections. It was cast in aluminum by metal craftsman John Behrends at Behrends Bronze, Ltd., a fine arts foundry established in Edmonton in 1952. The sand-casting process would have started with a ​“pattern” in wood, clay, or plaster. A tightly-packed mixture of silica sand and Bentonite clay in a wooden frame created a one-time-use clamshell-style mold for the molten metal. The metal cooled, the clay was removed, and the artist would have been involved again for the finishing stage. Aluminum was probably chosen because it is about 1/3 the weight of bronze, making it easy to handle and hang manually using ladders or scaffolding. 

While he was limited in his subject matter choices by the social attitudes of his time, Glyde saw his work as ​“mythic in intention” (as his daughter, curator Helen Collinson, put it) and intended to reflect on the human condition through its symbolic elements. Glyde often used the images and forms of social realism, with its emphasis on the human figure and human industrial achievement, to express themes of expansion and optimism in pieces of public art. 

The title of the mural has been arbitrarily assigned, and is inaccurate in that it is not commemorative of Glyde but of Edmonton’s history. It was not the original title, of which no record remains.