Touring Exhibitions

The Art of Canada comes alive as our exhibitions travel from sea to sea and beyond.

Canadian art doesn’t just live in Kleinburg. The McMichael Canadian Art Collection has a long history of circulating exhibitions to cities and countries around the world. Below is an ever-changing list of our touring exhibitions that may be coming to a museum or gallery near you. Check back often and tell your friends!

All details subject to change.

Into the Light: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald is a comprehensive examination of the accomplishments and legacy of the Winnipeg artist Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald (1890–1956), the last member to join the Group of Seven in 1932.

One of Canada’s most beloved folk artists, Maud Lewis (1903 – 1970) was famous in her lifetime for her brightly coloured and endearing paintings of rural Nova Scotia. Working from her cabin on the side of the highway in Marshalltown, in Digby County, she produced hundreds of small works that captured aspects of country life that were rapidly changing.

As one of the key members of the third generation Inuit artists from Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Pootoogook contributed to the transformation and reshaping of the creative traditions that were successfully pioneered in the second half of the 20th century by members of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative, at Kinngait Studios.

Denyse Thomasos (1964–2012) was a Trinidadian-Canadian artist whose epic paintings incorporate imagery from a range of sources, including Caribbean textiles, historic slave ships, industrial shipyards, graveyards, villages and maximum security prisons.

Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment is a major exhibition of Canadian women artists that coincides with, and offers commentary on, the centenary celebration of the Group of Seven.

Wolves: The Art of Dempsey Bob offers a personal encounter with the work of the leading carver of British Columbia’s Northwest Coast, and an immersive experience of the Tahltan and Tlingit mainland cultures. Produced in partnership with the Audain Art Museum.

Jon Sasaki: Homage is a suite of photographs depicting petri dishes with bloomed bacterial cultures derived from swabs of the palettes and brushes used by members of the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, objects held in the archives of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.

While women artists of the early twentieth century were known for depicting interior spaces as places of privacy and domestic quietude, Toronto artist Margaux Williamson’s (b. 1976) interiors reveal spaces of creativity, subjectivity, and a kind of anarchic experimentation.

Generations: The Sobey Family and Canadian Art tells the story of one family’s visionary engagement with Canadian and Indigenous art.

Revelations explores the career of this legendary Canadian artist. Now 94, Falk has explored the disciplines of painting, ceramic, performance art and installation, marking her as one of Canada’s most visionary and experimental artists.

Rajni Perera is one of Canada’s most promising contemporary multimedia artists. Experimenting with mediums as varied as painting, sculpture and photography, the Toronto-based artist expresses her vision of imagined futures in which mutated subjects exist in dystopian realms.

The McMichael and Remai Modern are proud to present a survey exhibition of a remarkable Canadian artist whose pioneering large-scale photographic works reflect her mixed Plains Cree/Métis, Dutch and British ancestry.

From its beginnings, the McMichael has had a long and proud history of collecting Indigenous art, now with more than 1,500 works ranging from eighteenth-century ceremonial regalia, through to items made for trade with settlers, to works by the vanguard of artists coming of age in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s — among them Robert Houle, Carl Beam, Norval Morrisseau, Alex Janvier, Greg Staats, Faye HeavyShield and Shelly Niro — and onward to leading contemporary artists like Kent Monkman, Meryl McMaster and Rebecca Belmore.

Louie Palu’s project documents the vestigial legacies of the Cold War and the increased military presence in the Arctic today. The changes in the region are exacerbated by the many unknowns the Arctic faces, among them the warming of the planet.

Tom Thomson (1877–1917) is indisputably Canada’s preeminent modern painter, and his catalytic achievement changed the face of Canadian painting forever. This exhibition will offer a close look at Thomson’s legacy, focusing on the small en plein air oil paintings, also know as oil sketches, of which he is the supreme master.

Winnipeg-born Marcel Dzama’s fantastical drawings, made with ink, watercolour, and root beer, brought him international fame in the late 1990s. Now in Brooklyn, Dzama’s work includes performance, sculpture, and video. Ghosts of Canoe Lake: New Work by Marcel Dzama showcases new work inspired by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, and his childhood in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

People of the Watershed: Photographs by John Macfie includes more than 100 photographs taken by John Macfie (1925–2018), a settler trapline manager who worked in Northern Ontario in the 1950s and 1960s.

In the late 19th century, the Impressionist movement found a footing in Canada, and Quebec artists quickly responded with works of rare beauty and sophistication. This show will assemble a choice collection of master works that trace a journey from the bustling streets of Montreal—then Canada’s financial capital—down the St. Lawrence River to Quebec City and through the beloved Charlevoix region.