Press Releases

Savour: Food Culture in the Age of Enlightenment invites visitors on a journey from the steamy kitchens of cooks who advocated light, flavourful cuisine centuries before our time to the dining rooms of connoisseurs who relished their meals served on newly-invented vessels.

The Gardiner Museum presents the Canadian debut of Cannupa Hanska Luger: Every One & Kali Spitzer: Sister, an installation opening on August 30 that brings visibility to the crisis surrounding murdered and missing Indigenous women, girls, trans, and queer community members.

Launched in 2016, the Community Arts Space promotes experimentation and socially-engaged art through a full summer of free public projects, including exhibitions, hands-on workshops, talks, and performances that inspire conversation and social action.
This year’s theme, “What we long for,” explores the ways in which justice and pleasure can co-exist as counterpoints to calling out, gaslighting, exhaustion, and burnout. The four public projects engage with community healing, survival tools, the gaps between community and institutional memory, and how craft creates opportunities for acknowledgment and action.

On February 28, Ai Weiwei: Unbroken will open at the Gardiner Museum, featuring iconic ceramic works, including Sunflower Seeds and Coca Cola Vase, recent works in blue-and-white porcelain depicting the global refugee crisis, and objects in other media, including wood and marble, that playfully subvert notions of traditional craftsmanship and Chinese cultural identity with pointedly political imagery. The exhibition also marks the international debut of a new LEGO zodiac installation.

Ai Weiwei, one of the world’s most influential artists and activists, and one of China’s most formidable critics, has released a statement through the Gardiner Museum in response to heightened diplomatic tensions between China and Canada since the arrest of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou and the detainment of two Canadian citizens on suspicion of endangering state security.

The Gardiner Museum’s annual 12 Trees exhibition has become New + Now, a celebration of national and international ceramics in support of the Museum’s clay education and outreach programs. The highlight of this year’s inaugural New + Now event is a dramatic celestial installation commissioned from Toronto-born artist David R. Harper.

The Gardiner Museum has revealed a new monumental ceramic sculpture by acclaimed Toronto-based artist Shary Boyle. The 9-foot-tall sculpture, Cracked Wheat, now sits in front of the Museum on Queen’s Park—a voluptuous cartoon figure to compliment the squat silhouette of the Jun Kaneko “head”, a fixture on the Gardiner Plaza since 2013.

The Gardiner Museum has partnered with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum, and private collectors to reunite for the first time what survives of the collection of Sir William Van Horne, the American-born builder of the Canadian Pacific Railway who became one of Canada’s foremost art collectors.

The third installment of the Community Arts Space project, presented by TD Bank Group, is inspired by the theme Recent Histories, illuminating stories that have been marginalized in an attempt to make space for local histories and represent the experiences of the city’s diverse publics.

An exhibition of major ceramic works by Ai Weiwei, one of the world’s most influential living artists and human rights activists, will debut at the Gardiner Museum in February 2019.