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 application is for "The McMichael 50th Anniversary Season”, which will feature several programs and events centred on four major exhibitions taking place from October 1, 2016 to November 28, 2017.

1) “50/50/50” (June 4, 2016 to January 8, 2017). An exhibition curated around three key years in the lives of the Group of Seven painters and the history of the McMichael gallery and its collection. The exhibition will include the only artworks made by A.Y. Jackson in the year 1916, work from 1966 by Jack Bush and his Canadian contemporaries in the abstract expressionist movement, and a final section highlighting the the best of the collection’s current work by artists such as Stephen Andrews.

2) “Higher States: Lawren Harris and his American Contemporaries” (February 4 to September 4, 2017) will explore the role of American Transcendentalism in the lives and and work of Harris and other artists of the spiritual abstraction movement such as Kandinsky, Stieglitz, O’Keefe, and Hartley.

3) “The Group of Seven Guitar Project” (January 1 to December 31, 2017) A visual and aural exhibition including instruments made by seven guitar makers, each inspired by a Group of Seven painter. The exhibition will be accompanied by a film that documents the making of the guitars, and live musical performances.

4) “Passion over Reason: Tom Thomson and Joyce Wieland” (Summer/Fall 2017). Featuring select works from both artists, the exhibition will take a critical approach to our fascination with Thomson and will include drawings of Thomson's shack by Wieland and Diane Pugen that have never been exhibited before.

Ancillary programs will include six public lectures, the McMichael Guitar Concert Series, school programs and public exhibition tours.