The Gardiner Museum in Toronto has reopened after a 15-month, C$15.5 million (about $11 million) renovation of its ground floor spaces.
The museum, founded in 1984 by George and Helen Gardiner, focuses on ceramics and has a collection of some 5,000 pieces dating from prehistory to the present. The reimagined galleries will enable it to show up to 40 percent of its holdings at one time, which is unusual for collecting institutions.
Undertaken by Montgomery Sisam Architects and Andrew Jones Design in collaboration with studio:indigenous, the renovation features newly designed collection galleries, a reworked entrance hall, a ceramics studio, and a community learning center. The makeover was made possible by gifts from public and private entities, and included a C$9 million ($6.4 million) gift from the Radlett Foundation. That gift also included more than 250 ceramic objects from the collection of the charity’s late founder, collector William B.G. Humphries.
A showpiece of the transformed ground floor is “Indigenous Immemorial,” a gallery permanently dedicated to Indigenous clay art from the territory on which the Gardiner stands. Underscoring the museum’s increasing focus on Indignity, it was developed by Franchesca Hebert-Spence (Anishinaabe, Sagkeeng First Nation), the museum’s first curator of Indigenous ceramics, in collaboration studio:indigenous architect Chris Cornelius (Oneida) and in consultation with an Indigenous advisory circle that included artists Kent Monkman, Tekaronhiáhkhwa/Santee Smith, and Mary Anne Barkhouse.
Inaugural exhibitions include a commissioned work for the museum’s entrance by contemporary visual artist Nadia Myre (an Algonquin member of Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg First Nation), who uses clay pipe stems rescued from Ontario’s Thames river and clay beads to create her work; an installation by Thai Canadian artist Linda Rotua in the museum’s upstairs gallery; and displays of European pottery and work by Canadian and international artists.
