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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 “Early Days: Indigenous Art at the McMichael”, taking place September 20, 2025, to January 5, 2026. The McMichael will mount an exhibition of Indigenous artwork from their permanent collection that will be, in fact, a re-presentation of an exhibition that opened at the McMichael in November 2020 but that was forced to close repeatedly due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, the exhibition has been on a tour through the United States and Canda where it has appeared in the following venues: Heard Museum in Phoenix, AZ; Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA; Alburquerque Museum in Alburquerque, NM and the Musee national des beaux-arts du Quebec in Quebec, QC. The reconfigured exhibition will be bolstered by a number of new acquisitions that have been made since 2020, including work by established and emerging artists including Gigaemi Kukwits, Michelle Sound, Maria Hupfield, Kent Monkman and others. It is also projected to be the final exhibition presented at the McMichael before the museum closes for a long anticipated, multi-year renovation of the building and site.

Ancillary programming will include: Gallery Talks; Matinées francophones; special family programming on free Family Sundays; school programming; and the “Living with Art Accessible Program for Young Adults Living with Exceptionalities”