Press Releases

The Gardiner Museum is pleased to announce that we will offer free admission Community Building Weekends for the rest of 2020. The goal of these free weekends is to encourage our diverse communities, particularly first-time visitors, to explore the Museum, participate in hands-on programs that connect families, and experience clay and ceramics in unique, inspiring, and unexpected ways.

In response to the success of the Gardiner’s free opening weekend, the Museum will continue to offer free admission to the public every Saturday and Sunday throughout the summer.

From sticky to crusty, pliable to powdery, and shaped to shapeless, clay’s ability to transform in real time is prompting a new generation of artists to explore the possibilities of this ancient material.The Gardiner Museum’s new exhibition RAW, opening on March 5, 2020, features the work of four leading artists who are pushing boundaries with unfired clay: Cassils, Magdolene Dykstra, Azza El Siddique, and Linda Swanson. 

On February 20, the Gardiner Museum will present the world premiere of a new performance work by internationally-acclaimed artist Cassils. Cassils, who was born in Toronto and grew up in Montreal, draws on feminism, body art, gay male aesthetics, and extreme physical training to make powerful statements about non-binary and trans visibility.

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.