McMichael Canadian Art Collection Reopens on July 21, 2021

The McMichael Canadian Art Collection is pleased to announce that it will reopen to the public on July 21, 2021. The Gallery has been preparing to reopen following the public health guidelines specified in Step 3 of Ontario’s Roadmap to Reopen. The health and safety of staff members and visitors remain the top priority as the McMichael welcomes visitors back to the home to the art of Canada.

• The McMichael’s grounds are open daily. Outdoor restrooms and the parking lot will be open during public gallery hours from 10 am – 5 pm. Please note that the parking booth will not be accepting cash payments at this time. Credit and debit touchless payment options are available.
• The Gallery Shop will be open with limited capacity, social distancing, and touchless payment in place.
• The McMichael Café will be open with safety restrictions and touchless payment in place. Limited dining options may be available. Please visit mcmichael.com for details.
• Both virtual and in-person adult art programs and children’s ArtVenture camps will continue as planned.
• Virtual tours of the Gallery’s current exhibitions will continue for those who wish to experience the art of Canada from home.

Exhibitions on View

• “A Like Vision”: The Group of Seven at 100
  A landmark exhibition of the group’s finest pieces from the McMichael’s extensive permanent collection. Revisit old favourites and discover new gems by Canada’s canonical landscape painters.
• Tom Thomson
  Often wrongly assumed to have been a member of the Group of Seven, Thomson died too soon. However, his legacy as one of Canada’s most influential landscape painters is secure.
• Early Days: Indigenous Art at the McMichael
  From its beginnings, the McMichael has had a long and proud history of collecting Indigenous art, now with more than 1,500 works ranging from eighteenth-century ceremonial regalia, through to items made for trade with settlers, to works by the vanguard of artists coming of age in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s — among them Robert Houle, Carl Beam, Norval Morrisseau, Alex Janvier, Greg Staats, Faye HeavyShield and Shelly Niro — and onward to leading contemporary artists such as Kent Monkman, Meryl McMaster, and Rebecca Belmore. Early Days: Indigenous Art at the McMichael gathers the remarkable artworks of these artists and the stories that go with them, is a celebration of these powerful legacies. The show also includes recent acquisitions reflecting the diversity and vitality of Indigenous art in Canada today.
• Denyse Thomasos: Odyssey
  Denyse Thomasos was a Trinidadian-Canadian artist whose epic paintings incorporate imagery from a range of sources, including Caribbean textiles, historic slave ships, industrial shipyards, graveyards, villages, and maximum-security prisons. The structures that confine and define us — whether political, social or architectural — served as the subject of her works. The McMichael’s exhibition will gather works from all phases of Thomasos’ career in celebration of her historic contribution to BIPOC voices in Canadian art.
• Jon Sasaki: Homage
  Jon Sasaki: Homage is a suite of photographs depicting petri dishes with bloomed bacterial cultures derived from swabs of the palettes, brushes, and easels used by members of the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, objects held in the archives of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. These large-scale works are monumental in scale yet they reveal microscopic detail, affirming a playful reverence towards the Group’s legacy while reframing the genre of landscape painting through the lens of photography. The artifacts from which the microscopic organisms were gathered will be exhibited in dialogue with the photographs, presenting a poignant entanglement of past and present-day artists in the story of Canadian art. This exhibition is part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.

Coming Soon

• Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment
  Opening on September 10, 2021, Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment is a major exhibition of Canadian women artists that coincides with, and offers commentary on, the centenary celebration of the Group of Seven. The exhibition will gather more than 200 pieces of art by a generation of extraordinary women painters, photographers, sculptors, architects and filmmakers from a century ago — pioneers who opened new frontiers for women artists in Canada – as well as works made by their Indigenous female contemporaries working in traditional media, for a cross-country snapshot of female creativity in this dynamic modern moment.

Hours:

• Tuesdays – Sundays and holiday Mondays, 10 am – 5 pm
• Grounds Only: Mondays, 10 am – 5 pm

About the McMichael Canadian Art Collection

The McMichael Canadian Art Collection is an agency of the Government of Ontario and acknowledges the support of the Ministry of Heritage, Sport, Tourism and Culture Industries, and the McMichael Canadian Art Foundation. It is the only major museum in the country devoted exclusively to Canadian art. In addition to touring exhibitions, the McMichael houses a permanent collection that consists of more than 6,500 works by historic and present-day Canadian artists, including Tom Thomson, the Group of Seven and their contemporaries, Indigenous artists and artists from the many diasporic communities. The Gallery is located on 100 acres of northern landscape and hiking trails at 10365 Islington Avenue, Kleinburg, north of Major Mackenzie Drive in the City of Vaughan. For more information, please visit mcmichael.com.