Join us for a delicious three-course lunch while enjoying one of the best views in the city. Try our famous CLAY burger, ricotta gnudi, and more inspired local fare.
Join us for a full summer of free community programming inspired by the transformative power of clay. Four public projects explore how justice and pleasure can co-exist as counterpoints to calling out, gaslighting, and exhaustion. Register for free talks, clay workshops, and more!
There's still time to register for our popular clay camps, now with earlier start times, art-filled field trips, and fresh new themes. Sign up now for a week of hands-on creativity!
The Gardiner Museum is among the few museums in the world focused on ceramics, and is one of the most important specialty museums internationally. It houses approximately 4,000 objects, including European porcelain, ceramics from the Ancient Americas, Chinese porcelain, Japanese porcelain, and contemporary ceramics. Search the collection online!
Everyone can love clay! Become a Friend at one of the world’s great specialty museums and enjoy the benefits, including unlimited admission, invitations to exhibition previews and special events, discounts on lectures and clay classes, and more.
Lobby Display Part of the Contact Photography Festival
Glenn Lewis: The Poetic Process is a conceptual work that opens a space for conversation between two media: ceramics and photography. Presented for the first time at the Gardiner Museum, this installation combines a series of five pots made during a residency at the Leach Pottery in St. Ives, England, and twenty large-scale photographs of roses taken in German and English gardens. The juxtaposition reflects on the long history and symbolism of the rose and vessel form: two dominant motifs and shapes from medieval Europe when art and craft were still creatively united. The installation also comprises a series of ceramic tiles printed with Lewis’ photographs of fragrant roses.
Glenn Lewis’ work asks viewers to look closely. His photographs reveal the details of the blooms—pollen, dew drops, and petals—tempting viewers to approach and smell them. The vessels’ surfaces are also inscribed with a history. When Lewis unpacked the pieces in Vancouver, he discovered that they were damaged. Rather than discard them, he repaired them using the Japanese technique of kintsugi, an art of mending by which the breaks are not hidden but revitalized through the use of gold, encouraging the viewer to see beauty in imperfections.