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.
Enter an immersive world created by Montreal-based artist Karine Giboulo, brought to life by over 500 miniature polymer clay figures that tell stories about our most urgent social issues, from the pandemic to the climate crisis. It will delight visitors of all ages!
Registration for our popular March Break camps opens to Gardiner Friends on January 23 and to the general public on January 25. From March 13 - 17, kids and teens can explore the Museum and get creative with clay in our pottery studios!
Experience the Gardiner's world-renowned collection, in person and online. From Chinese porcelain to contemporary Canadian ceramics, discover the people and histories behind the objects.
Everyone can love clay! Become a Gardiner Friend and enjoy the benefits, including unlimited admission, advanced clay class registration, invitations to exhibition previews and special events, discounts on lectures and classes, and more.
Online ticket sales are now closed. Tickets will be available at the door beginning at 6 pm. $18 General / $15 Gardiner Friends
Part of the Gardiner Signature Lecture Series The Ann Walker Bell Lecture
Blue-and-white porcelain from Jingdezhen, China’s porcelain capital, is the world’s most widely traded ceramic ware. From its late 13th-century creation to its contemporary reinventions, Jingdezhen’s blue-and-white porcelain has been admired and sought after by kings, connoisseurs, collectors, and consumers. Drawing from the Gardiner’s Chinese blue-and-white porcelain collection and artist Ai Weiwei’s practice in traditional Chinese craft, anthropologist and cultural historian Maris Boyd Gillette will explore how Jingdezhen porcelain has inspired, intimidated, and incited ceramists to create, copy, and counterfeit its glories.
Maris Boyd Gillette is a sociocultural anthropologist and cultural historian who researches changing economic practices, social identities, and material culture, primarily in modern China. Gillette works regularly with museums on exhibitions, public history, and educational outreach and has facilitated several community engagement initiatives in Philadelphia and St Louis. She is the author of China’s Porcelain Capital: The Rise, Fall and Reinvention of Ceramics in Jingdezhen (Bloomsbury 2016) and Between Mecca and Beijing: Modernization and Consumption among Urban Chinese Muslims (Stanford 2000). Gillette is Professor of Social Anthropology, School of Global Studies, the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Ai Weiwei, Blue and White Moonflask (detail), 1996. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.