In accordance with the announcement by the provincial government, the Gardiner Museum has closed temporarily. The health and safety of our visitors, staff, and the wider community remains our top priority. We'll continue to provide you with engaging digital content to keep us connected while the galleries are closed.
During our temporary closure, we're posting exhibitions and selections from our collection online. Discover Inuit ceramics, Chinese and Japanese porcelain, pottery from the Ancient Americas, and more!
On Thursday April 29 at 1 pm, join us for a free online lecture with Professor Alison McQueen, who will discuss the significant contributions of women working at Sèvres in the first century of its history. The presentation will feature works from leading international porcelain collections and bring attention to the often-overlooked roles of women retouching glaze, laying down prints, and burnishing. 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!
With the Museum closed temporarily, we need your support to continue to offer innovative and engaging exhibitions, programs, and community projects online, as well as plan for the future. Please consider making a donation to help us build community with clay.
Curated by Rachel Gotlieb and Michael Prokopow
This landmark exhibition explores more than seven decades of Nordic aesthetic influence on Canadian design. Examining the ways in which modern Scandinavian design was introduced to Canada and how its aesthetic principles and material forms were adopted and adapted by Canadians artisans and designers, True Nordic presents a comprehensive, critical survey of Canadian furniture, ceramics, textiles, metalwork, and glassware.
Scandinavian design initially reached Canada’s elite consumers and style-makers via museum and gallery exhibitions, showrooms, small retail shops and articles and advertisements in popular decorator magazines. However, it was the dynamic influx of émigré craftspeople from Scandinavia who both affirmed and vernacularized the aesthetic in Canada and who shaped profoundly the country’s design and craft movement from the 1930s onward. What was broadly known as “Danish modern” became synonymous with ideas about good design, and “comfortable and gracious living.”
Capitalizing on the market opportunities presented, Canadian manufacturers added Scandinavian design to their conservative repertoire of colonial and historicist offerings and called these lines, Helsinki, Stanvanger, Scanda and so on. The culminating section of the exhibition will ask why Scandinavian and Nordic aesthetics continue to resonate with so many contemporary Canadian designers and artisans at work today.
Featured artisans include: Carl Poul Petersen, Ernst and Alma Lorenzen, Janis Kravis, John Stene, Karen Bulow, Kjeld and Erica Deichmann, Lotte Bostlund, Thor Hansen, Rudolph Renzius, Sigrun Bulow-Hube, Ruth Gowdy McKinley, Niels Bendtsen, Sean Place, and Mjolk.
Exhibition Partner
Exhibition Supporters
Dr. Robert Buckingham Diana Reitberger Anonymous (In Honour of Wendy Russell and Rosemary Wells)
Publication Supporter
The McLean Foundation
Supported by
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.