The Gardiner Museum in Toronto has reopened after a 15-month, CA$15.5 million (about $11 million) renovation of its ground floor spaces.
The museum, founded in 1984 by George and Helen Gardiner, focuses on ceramics and has a collection of some 5,000 pieces dating from prehistory to the present. The reimagined galleries will enable it to show up to 40 percent of its holdings at one time, which is unusually high for collecting institutions.
Undertaken by Montgomery Sisam Architects and Andrew Jones Design in collaboration with studio:indigenous, the renovation features newly laid out collection galleries, a reworked entrance hall, a ceramics studio, and a community learning center. The makeover was made possible by gifts from public and private entities, including a CA$9 million ($6.4 million) donation from the Radlett Foundation. That gift also included more than 250 ceramic objects from the collection of the charity’s late founder, William B. G. Humphries.
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A showpiece of the transformed ground floor is “Indigenous Immemorial,” a gallery permanently dedicated to Indigenous clay art from the territory on which the Gardiner stands. Underscoring the museum’s increasing focus on Indigeneity, it was developed by Franchesca Hebert-Spence (Anishinaabe, Sagkeeng First Nation), the museum’s first curator of Indigenous ceramics, in collaboration with studio:indigenous architect Chris Cornelius (Oneida) and in consultation with an Indigenous advisory circle that included artists Kent Monkman, Tekaronhiáhkhwa/Santee Smith, and Mary Anne Barkhouse.
Inaugural exhibitions include a commissioned piece for the museum’s entrance by Montreal-based artist Nadia Myre (an Algonquin member of Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation), who uses clay pipe stems rescued from Ontario’s Thames River to create her work; an installation by Thai-Canadian artist Linda Rotua Sormin in the museum’s upstairs gallery; and displays of European pottery and work by Canadian and international artists.
