Canada

Toronto biennial brings monument to resilience and spiritual liberation to a Sikh community centre

Nirbhai (nep) Singh Sidhu’s large-scale sculpture commission is now a permanent fixture of the Scarborough Gurdwara

‘Humour makes us Cree, makes us human’: Kent Monkman’s first public sculpture is a condominium for beavers on Toronto’s waterfront

The permanent commission for the new Lassonde Art Trail reflects on the past, present and future of North America with Monkman’s characteristic quirky twists

Vancouver Art Gallery makes its interim leaders permanent co-chief executives

Eva Respini and Sirish Rao will share chief executive duties, with the former also serving as chief curator while the later takes on the role of executive director

Fourth Toronto Biennial of Art brings more than 30 artists and collectives together around the theme of rupture

Titled “Things Fall Apart” and curated by Allison Glenn, the biennial unfolds across and beyond the city, on Lake Ontario and, thanks to a new partnership programme, in a half-dozen other cities

Prizesnews

Steven Shearer wins Audain Prize, one of Canada’s top art awards

The Vancouver-based painter and photoconceptualist will receive $71,000

From ailing cooling systems to toxic chemicals, a museum tour shines a light on the effects of austerity

To drive home the impact of stagnant support for arts and culture, the Museum of Vancouver is offering “austerity tours” of its aging campus

Amid affordability crisis for artists, Vancouver’s city council establishes cultural land trust

The model—already deployed in San Francisco, Helsinki and London—aims to protect creative communities from rampant real estate speculation and development

Awardsnews

Winners of 2026 Governor General Awards, one of Canada’s top art prizes, revealed

An exhibition featuring works by all eight recipients of this year’s awards will open in New Brunswick this autumn

Filmreview

A biting satire of the art world’s transactional wokeness

Nyla Innuksuk’s “In the Heart of the South” grapples irreverently with the fraught ethics of an Inuk artist tapping into narratives of collective suffering for her work

Police and firefighters break into gallery after sculpture is mistaken for a person in distress

The sculpture, of an art preparator whose torso is concealed in a crate with their legs sticking out, prompted a late-night rescue mission at Vancouver’s Access Gallery

Leader of the Art Gallery of Ontario will step down after a decade at the helm

During Stephan Jost’s tenure, the leading art museum in Toronto has launched construction of a new contemporary art gallery, added more than 18,000 pieces to its collection and navigated plenty of drama

Curveball at the Art Gallery of Ontario as Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Dylan Cease showcases painting skills

Cease, who took up painting in 2022, displayed one of his works at the revered Toronto gallery and launched a line of merchandise benefiting the institution

More than 100 works from Canada’s federal collection of Indigenous art are ‘unaccounted for’

The Indigenous Art Centre has been unable to locate 111 works from its collection of more than 5,000 pieces by First Nations, Métis and Inuit artists

From beavers to basketball hoops: a new public art trail opens in Toronto

The Lassonde Art Trail is part of a $1bn redevelopment project to revitalise the city's relationship with its waterways

Family of donor who helped establish Canadian Museum for Human Rights to pause support over Palestine exhibit

The Asper family’s foundation last donated to the museum in 2023, and Gail Asper says she has indefinitely paused a personal gift of C$50,000 over a display about the violent displacement of Palestinians

Trove of art by Basquiat, Javier Calleja and others at play in mammoth Vancouver real estate lawsuit

A lawsuit related to the collapse of the developer Coromandel Properties includes an art collection purchased for $4.9m that was used as collateral for a loan

Human rights museum’s Palestine exhibition sets off feud between Canadian politicians

The country’s heritage minister criticised curatorial choices in “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present”, drawing widespread rebukes including from the leader of the New Democratic Party

Canadian Museum for Human Rights show on Palestinian displacement offers nuanced, empathetic perspective amid uproar

Met with opposition and outrage from the moment it was announced, the show gathers historical objects and images, poetry, contemporary art and video interviews

Museums across North America hope to score with World Cup programmes

Institutions in host nations Mexico, Canada and the US are capitalising on the Fifa tournament

Prizesnews

Finalists for the Sobey Art Award, Canada’s top contemporary art prize, revealed

The six shortlisted artists, each representing a different region, will be featured in an exhibition opening at the National Gallery of Canada in September

Heffel’s spring sales, featuring rediscovered royal portrait and E.J. Hughes seascape, tally $16.2m

Works by famed Canadian figures including Emily Carr, Tom Thomson, Jean Paul Riopelle and Takao Tanabe also notched major results

Israeli organisation threatens legal action against Canadian Museum for Human Rights over Palestine exhibition

The Tel Aviv-based group Shurat Hadin is urging the museum in Winnipeg to pause its upcoming exhibition on the Nakba and its legacy to allow for a “legal and scholarly review”

Theatrereview

In new play, Norval Morrisseau forgery scandal prompts questions about authenticity and Indigenous identity

Drew Hayden Taylor’s “The Undeniable Accusations of Red Cadmium Light”, which recently debuted in Vancouver, interrogates fraud in several forms

Vancouver Biennale names senior curator for 2027-29 edition

This marks a return to Vancouver for the Brazilian curator Marcello Dantas, who organised a Vik Muniz project in the city as part of the biennale’s 2013-15 edition

Toronto Biennial takes waterways as inspiration for its fourth edition

Opening in September, the exhibition will feature works by 30 artists including Kent Monkman, Rebecca Belmore and Coco Fusco

Irreconcilable differences: Canadian cultural tourism to the US experiences a steep decline

A significant number of Canadians are shunning their neighbours to the south, a phenomenon felt most acutely by smaller museums and those along the border

Canada returns 11 artefacts to Turkey in the first repatriation between the countries

The manuscript pages, prints and calligraphy had been seized by Canadian authorities as they arrived in Vancouver from Istanbul

Canadian foundation with ties to Israel’s biggest real-estate company ceases funding for Toronto Arts Foundation following protests

Both the Toronto Arts Foundation and the Azrieli Foundation maintain that the end of the funding relationship is unrelated to recent protests; activists are framing the split as a victory

Researchers at Art Gallery of Ontario identify painter and subject of 18th-century portrait of Black woman

Curators at the gallery are now piecing together the transatlantic journeys of Eleonora Susette, an enslaved woman who travelled from present-day Guyana to Amsterdam and back

National Gallery of Canada receives donation of 24 works from collector Bob Rennie

The Vancouver-based real estate tycoon has gifted works by two Canadian artists and two US artists to Canada’s national art museum