The City of Lacombe and the Encore Art Committee is getting ready to unveil their latest public art piece this fall, honoring the clydesdale parade at the Lacombe Research and Development Centre.

The clydesdale horses became the signature breed used in the fields at the research station, and were shown off during parade to local farmers who could pasture their mares at the station and have them bred.

The new piece will be located on the north wall of the YU-Turn Youth Centre in the downtown core, after the mural presently there, a local favourite known as Nanton Street, was partly blocked due to new building construction.

City of Lacombe Community Services Executive Assistant Maureen MacKenzie says the new mural will be smaller than Nanton Street so it'll be more visible, and it will also be easily to preserve and transport.

“Our new standard, and the standard for most communities doing murals now, is that they are painted on… an aluminum substrate that you attach to the wall, and that way if the building has to come down, or a building gets built in front of it like what occurred with our (Nanton Street) mural here in Lacombe, we can actually take that mural off the wall and install it somewhere else.”

MacKenzie says whenever she's out representing Lacombe in different communities or at conferences, she hears nothing but praise for our communities support of the arts and culture.

“There’s a huge tourism aspect to our murals and public art. If you talk to the gals down at the Flatiron building, every day they have people coming in asking questions about the murals, asking where the public art is.”

The next mural on their list is still in the design stage, but it will be a recreation of the Nanton Street mural the new Clydesdale one is covering up, and it will be installed on the north wall of the Dollarama building.

John Ellenberger of Little John’s Airbrush Art is a local artist who has been commissioned to create the new mural. In 2016, he was hired to complete the Phase II historic murals behind BMO.

The new mural will be unveiled in October.