A gigantic free art gallery waits above the bustling streets of downtown Calgary

Blink and you'll miss it, but there's a striking piece of glass artwork along the path between TD Square and Courthouse Park in Calgary's Plus 15 skywalk. A kaleidoscope of blue, yellow and red colours the glass along the bend of the lowly lit hallway, which leads to a window where you can get a stunning view of the BirdO Mural along 5th Avenue. "This is an amazing piece of glass artwork, and it's just sitting here with no placard or artist information," everyday tourist blogger Richard White mutters as we stop our whirlwind tour to take it in.

Ever since its initial construction in 1969, the Plus 15 has been one of the quirkier bits of Calgary culture. It's a dazzling network of 86 bridges over 16 kilometres of elevated walkways through our city core, providing a handy way to roam our city without ever touching the ground. As I recently discovered despite living here for over 30 years it also offers free public access to hundreds of visual art pieces in the public spaces and building lobbies it leads you through.

White suspects that the bonus density program in Calgary is part of how this free gallery exists, where developers can get additional floors if they provide public amenities such as visual art. His 30+ year career has taken him from curating a public art gallery to directing a 3D animation studio, and he's written extensively about Calgary's Skyway and the renowned artwork it contains. "What I love about the visual arts is that they can really become part of your life," he says as we sit in sleek Arne Jacobsen chairs inside Eighth Avenue Place. "In the Plus 15, the art and all public art becomes a touchstone."

As I stroll from the brightly decorated cow sculptures of the Udderly Art Legacy Pasture to marvel at the paintings of Jack Shadbolt and Marcelle Ferron hidden in grotto-like corners of the Eighth Avenue Place lobby, hidden artworks everyone walks past are what stick with me.

Colorful figures made of LEGO can be seen hugging hand sanitizer stations inside Stephen Avenue place thanks to Hugman, a summer sculptural installation by Nathan Sawaya.

An impressionist painting of hard lines and amorphous shapes can be seen through the window of a dentist's office in Watermark Tower.

When you exit Arts Commons, an explosion of colour greets you at the bottom of the stairwell: a mural of hands and flowers surrounding a Nelson Mandela quote: "Arts education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world."

Calgary's intersection

Sometimes, the bridges themselves become the art piece. Splaying over 8th Avenue between 6th and 7th Street is Derek Michael Besant's DAYDREAM (1996), an installation of 24 white images on the bridge's windows, each paired with a brief sentence that reads like an overheard end of a conversation. One reads, "What did she really mean?" paired with a drawing of a hand holding a tissue. As you look out, the images and words on the glass blend and distort the streets below and the buildings above.

"When I was at the Downtown Association, I thought of the entire thing [downtown] as a public artwork, a performance piece," says White. I think about this as I gaze at Dale Chihuly's Winter Garden Chandeliers (2009), which hangs over reflecting pools in Jamieson Place off the northern end of the Plus 15. The jagged hand-blown glass spectacle calls to mind our city's snowstorms, while the snippets of busy Calgary life I heard around me ("We have 16 million under management") scored my free public art tour.

This audio-visual experience continues in the southeastern end of the Plus 15, above Arts Commons. As you walk down a liminal hallway, The +15 Soundscape surrounds you in plunked pianos and crackling radios as you peer through The Ledge Gallery at the work of artists in residence. When I visit, Michelle Ku had set up shop with a gallery of pastel visuals. A nearby placard with her artist statement reads, "I'm currently exploring the mind-body-spirit connection through my paintings."

This leads down to the +15 Galleries on the west end of the walkway between City Hall and the Glenbow Museum, where the public can take in eight free galleries of community-driven artwork. The current exhibition is called Building Bridges and ReconciliACTION, and it features artists like Brendon Many Bears and Slavek Pytraczyk exploring the relationship between Indigenous and settler narratives.

Calgary's many identities are intersecting every day, 15 feet above the streets.

Get lost

When I asked Richard White how he would recommend people explore the Plus 15, he answers simply: "The best way is to get lost." The network is open to the public from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekends. I spent a Tuesday and a Saturday exploring, and I still feel like I just scratched the surface.

Several entry points make the most sense (the Centennial Parkade has underground parking, and Arts Commons is near a train station), but seriously, just look for a stick figure on a sign wearing a cowboy hat walking up a set of stairs and start from there.

As I wander through the Suncor Energy Centre lobby I find myself surrounded by Brent Laycock's landscape portrait, only to enter Livingston Place down the street and reckon with Scott Plear's abstract painting, Alberta Aurora (2007).

Gargoyles that used to adorn the outside of the Calgary Herald building now guard over a hallway in the Telus Convention Centre's section of the Plus 15, a bona fide piece of Calgary history that I stumbled upon almost by accident.

This random, unplanned approach is a big part of why visual artist Julya Hajnoczky finds the Plus 15 so fascinating. "There's a challenge to kind of run around and just see what you can find," she told me. "They're not artworks that you would necessarily seek out, or exhibitions that you would normally attend. So I think that sort of surprise the thrill of the hunt is really cool."

In the lobby of Brookfield Place, I come across Lili Yas Tayefi's Elemental Alchemy (2024), a sculpture of stacked shapes that she created out of upcycled materials as a part of Brookfield Properties' 315 Artist Residency program. It's going to be moved through Fifth Place and Bankers Hall as the year goes on, its primordial images contrasting with the sleek corporate surroundings.

"Art builds our atmosphere," says Tayefi. "Depending on how you stumble upon it, if you're looking at a sculpture on the street from a Plus 15 perspective versus if you're walking outside and you end up right in front of it, you can feel it with the impact of the scale in front of you. Either one is a different experience"