Event Details

The McMichael Canadian Art Collection offers its visitors a unique experience. From the art on its walls to the surrounding landscape, the McMichael provides an introduction to Canada’s art, art making and artists.

Renowned for collecting only Canadian art, the McMichael permanent collection consists of almost 6,000 artworks by Tom Thomson, the Group of Seven, their contemporaries, and First Nations, Métis, Inuit and other artists who have made a contribution to the development of Canadian art.

The gallery welcomes on average 100,000 visitors annually. On average, 30,000 students and educators from more than 40 school boards and private schools visit the McMichael during the school year. In addition, the McMichael welcomes adults, families, and youth to programs and activities from lecture and film series to studio classes and summer art camps.

Designed in a modernist idiom, and built of fieldstone and hand-hewn logs, the McMichael houses thirteen exhibition galleries where floor-to-ceiling windows enable visitors to enjoy views of the densely wooded Humber River Valley. Beyond the galleries the McMichael provides 100 acres of forested land, from a ridgetop ‘wilderness garden,’ planted by the McMichaels to echo the northern forest beloved of the Group of Seven, to the heritage waterway important to Aboriginal peoples.

Through a network of outdoor paths and hiking trails, visitors can explore the newly installed Sculpture Garden as well as the unique McMichael Cemetery where six Group of Seven members and gallery founders Robert and Signe McMichael have been laid to rest.

The McMichael displays a wide range of exhibitions each year, curated from the collections or borrowed from other major institutions. The McMichael is a Category A gallery, and adheres to the highest standards of environmental and security norms for the protection of the works of art on display.

This funding is for the marketing of "McMichael Group of Seven Centenary”, special programming taking place from October 1, 2019 to October 31, 2020. To mark the centenary of the Group of Seven’s first exhibition, on May 7, 1920, the McMichael will present four large exhibitions and a series of special programs and events. Programming will include:

(1) “Into the Light: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald” (October 12, 2019 – February 17, 2020): Co-curated by Sarah Milroy, Chief Curator, Ian A.C. Dejardin, Executive Director of the McMichael, and Michael Parke-Taylor, this exhibition will be a comprehensive examination of the impact and influence of FitzGerald, the last member of the Group of Seven, joining in 1932, and the only member to live in western Canada;

(2) ““Group of Seven Centenary (Title TBD)” (January 25, 2020 – December 2020): a special blockbuster installation of work from the permanent collection. Featured works will include: Harris’ “Montreal River”, Jackson’s “First Snow, Algoma”, Carmichael’s “October Gold” and “Autumn”, MacDonald’s “Goat Range, Rocky Mountains”, Varley’s “Early Morning, Sphinx Mountain”. This exhibition will be curated by Ian A.C. Dejardin, Executive Director, McMichael Canadian Art Collection;

(3) “Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists of the 1920s and 1930s” (June 27 – November 3, 2020): also curated by the McMichael team, this major exhibition of Canadian women artists will gather the art of a generation of extraordinary women painters, photographers, sculptors, architects and filmmakers who opened new frontiers for women's art in Canada. The exhibition will also feature works by their Indigenous female contemporaries working in traditional media and women from immigrant communities in this period. For the first time, the art of the famed Beaver Hall Group of painters from Montreal (among them Anne Savage and Lilias Torrance Newton) will be shown alongside the paintings of Emily Carr from British Columbia, and sculptures by Toronto artists Elizabeth Wyn Wood, Frances Loring and Florence Wyle;

(4) Christmas at McMichael (December 2019): the gallery will exhibit a rare showing of Clarence Gagnon’s illustrations for Maria Chapdelaine, two exhibitions of Manitoba artists (L. L. FitzGerald and contemporary Anishnabe artist Robert Houle), and an exhibition of Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis; and

(5) ancillary programming including: (i) exclusive talks with artists and curators; (ii) programming in French; (iii) theatrical works; (iv) a concert series involving musicians who contributed to the Group of Seven Guitar project; (v) a variety of family programming; (vi) school programming.