The Magazine

McMichael Director Sarah Milroy reflects on the gallery’s extraordinary holdings of works by Jean Paul Riopelle — paintings packed with gestural force that tell the story of Riopelle’s radical defiance in the face of social conformity and religious repression.

This fall marks the fortieth anniversary of Keyboard Fantasies, the iconic, genre-bending album by singer and composer Beverly Glenn-Copeland. To mark the milestone, the McMichael shares an excerpt from Glenn-Copeland’s essay for A Like Vision: The Group of Seven & Tom Thomson — a meditation on Lawren Harris’s Pic Island.

Elizabeth Wyn Wood (1903–1966) transformed what sculpture in Canada could be — rendering islands, rocks, and trees in three dimensions through clean, curving lines drawn from nature rather than imitating it.

Arthur Shilling (1941–1986), a member of the Chippewas of Rama First Nation, painted the land as someone who knew it intimately — resisting easy classification through bold colour and thick, expressive brushwork. This fall, his Waterfall Near North Rama—Near My Place (1973) travels from the McMichael’s collection to the Doris McCarthy Gallery.

While the McMichael’s doors may be temporarily closed, an extraordinary amount of work is happening behind them. Our Collections, Conservation, Tech Services, and Library & Archives teams are in the midst of a full decantation — the careful, systematic relocation of an entire collection — moving 90,000+ works out of a building on the verge of transformation.

Anne Savage painted landscapes full of rhythm, jewel-toned colour, and an intimate sense of place — from the hills of the Laurentians to the mountains of British Columbia — in whatever spare hours her teaching career allowed. Discover the life and practice of one of Canada’s most distinctive landscape painters in this artist spotlight by McMichael curator John Geoghegan.

Recently acquired by the McMichael, Rody Kenny Courtice’s Riverbank Flowers, 1954, offers a vivid introduction to one of Canadian modernism’s most distinctive voices — a painter whose richly patterned, experimental canvases resist easy classification.

Ann MacIntosh Duff (1925–2022) spent decades returning to the same boathouse studio on Georgian Bay, finding endless new possibilities in familiar landscapes — and the McMichael is proud to have recently acquired two hundred works from her estate. Read an excerpt from award-winning filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal’s moving essay on her dear friend’s life and singular artistic vision.

McMichael curator John Geoghegan’s new talk on Old Growth: Masterworks by the Group of Seven and Their Contemporaries goes beyond the gallery label — exploring why these iconic works continue to inspire both admiration and debate more than a century later.

A.Y. Jackson spent the final years of his life living and painting at the McMichael in Kleinburg — and this recently acquired graphite drawing is, as far as we know, the only located work by the artist depicting the gallery’s own grounds.

For nearly three decades, Camille Turner has challenged who gets seen, remembered, and celebrated in Canadian history — and her landmark retrospective Hometown Queen is now on view at the Art Gallery of Hamilton through January 3, 2027. Read about the McMichael’s recent acquisition of Pride and Possibilities and the powerful alter ego at the heart of Turner’s practice.

Sixty years ago this summer, Robert and Signe McMichael opened the doors of their Kleinburg home to the public — and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection has never looked back. Read about the remarkable story behind one of Canada’s most beloved art institutions, from a private passion for the Group of Seven to a permanent public legacy.