Thunder Bay Art Gallery

This Fall our touring show, 21 PILLOWS has opened at The Muse | Douglas Family Art Centre in Kenora. We are delighted this complex, interactive glass installation by Red Lake artist Cheryl Wilson-Smith is among the first exhibitions featured at Northwestern Ontario’s newest art gallery.

The Douglas Family Art Centre opened in late 2019 and represents the fulfillment of a long-held dream to create and sustain an art centre in Kenora. 21 PILLOWS represents an enriching of the relationship between the Art Centre and Thunder Bay’s own public art gallery.

21 PILLOWS highlights Cheryl Wilson-Smith’s dedication to glass and glassmaking techniques which she has explored with passion from her studio in Red Lake, ON. The exhibition is an important milestone in this regional artist’s creative practice.

The success of 21 PILLOWS at Thunder Bay Art Gallery (Dec 2018-Mar 2019) inspired us to tour the exhibition to other Ontario galleries. It has arrived in Kenora after visits to the Ottawa School of Art and the Art Gallery of Sudbury.

Visitors to Thunder Bay Art Gallery enjoy the travelling exhibitions we host each year, but many may not know we also organize and tour exhibitions to galleries in other communities. We have done so for many years.
Our most ambitious touring exhibition is “still on the road”.

UPRISING: The Power of Mother Earth, co-produced by the Thunder Bay Art Gallery and Carleton University Art Gallery, is the first retrospective show of works by Michif artist Christi Belcourt. The show is drawn from private and public collections and included works from our Permanent Collection. It reflects more than 25 years of creative endeavour by one of Canada’s most popular contemporary artists. Collaborative works created with artist-knowledge keeper Isaac Murdoch are also included in the exhibition. During its time at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, over 11,000 people viewed this significant exhibition, making it one of our most popular shows ever.

Visitors to UPRISING will remember the very large canvases that filled all three of our galleries. Sharing artworks of this size is complicated, but we are proud to say that Belcourt’s exceptional canvases have been enjoyed in galleries across Canada. The show has been at Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa, the Musée d’art de Joliette (Joliette, QC), the MacKenzie Art Gallery (Regina, SK) and the Art Gallery of Guelph (Guelph, ON).

This month UPRISING travels on to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (Kleinburg, ON) where visitors in Southern Ontario will be able to see this powerful and engaging collection of artwork until January 2021.