The Gardiner Museum is open seven days a week. Explore our permanent collection, discover special exhibitions, get hands-on with clay in our studios, dine, shop, and more. We look forward to welcoming you!
Enter a world at once familiar and uncanny. The exhibition hall has been transformed into an immersive reimagining of Montreal-based artist Karine Giboulo's home. Brought to life by over 500 miniature polymer clay figures, this is no ordinary house. The figures tell stories that reflect our most urgent social issues, from the pandemic and climate crisis to food insecurity and housing instability. Get tickets!
A new season of clay classes is open for registration! Sign up for stoneware, hand building, wheel throwing, and special exhibition courses. Winter is the perfect time to stay warm in the studio and learn a new skill. Register now!
Every object in our permanent collection can be accessed through our eMuseum portal. Learn about individual collecting areas, like Italian Maiolica or Modern and Contemporary Ceramics, or search the full collection by keyword. You'll be amazed by what you discover!
Limited time offer! Purchase or renew a Gardiner Friendship before January 1, 2023 and receive a free Get Acquainted pass (valued at $30) to gift to the art lover of your choice. Become a Gardiner Friend today!
Betty Woodman (American , b. 1930) is among the most original and most important contemporary ceramic artists. Since the 1970s, she has produced a significant and distinctive body of work that explores the boundaries between ceramics, painting, and sculpture in exciting and innovative ways. Her work has been collected by major museums around the globe, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. In 2006, Woodman was given a full retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an honour rarely bestowed by that institution on living artists.
Betty Woodman: Places, Spaces & Things features a selection of Woodman’s painted ceramics and wall installations from the past 20 years of her career. The heart of the exhibition is a group of fifty porcelain vessels that were created by Woodman during multiple residencies at the Sevres Factory in France between 1987 and 2009. Inspired by historical examples, these porcelains feature expressively distorted forms and brightly painted surfaces that recall the work of modern masters like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. In addition to the Sèvres pieces, the exhibition also includes a number of large-scale painted ceramic vessels and several of Woodman’s monumental canvas and ceramic painting installations.
Places, Spaces & Things is the first major exhibition of Woodman’s work in Canada. The exhibition is guest-curated for the Gardiner Museum by Patterson Sims, former director of the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, working in conjunction with the artist.