The Gardiner Museum in downtown Toronto, which launched in 1984 and focuses on ceramic artwork, reopened on 6 November after a big makeover of its floor flooring, which now features a new gallery dedicated to Indigenous artwork. It took round 15 months and C$15.5m ($11m) for the renovation to be realised, with a C$9m ($6.4m) reward from the Radlett Basis offering the lion’s share of help.
“To see it take form has been magical,” says chief curator and deputy director Sequoia Miller. “Clay embodies what it means to be human, grounding and connecting us to the earth and to one another.”
Set up view of Linda Sormin: Unsure Floor on the Gardiner Museum Photograph: Toni Hafkenscheid
The upstairs galleries have been given over to the Thai Canadian artist Linda Rotua Sormin’s exhibition Unsure Floor(till 12 April 2026). It’s Sormin’s first solo museum present, showcasing round 20 years of her work exploring her household’s roots in Indonesia (the artist is now primarily based in New York). Commissioned by the Gardiner, it attracts on Batak (an Austronesian ethnic group) mythology and contains sculpture, video, sound, hand-cut watercolour portray and digital fabrication, depicting roosters, tigers, dragons, holy books and extra. She even integrated supplies from the Gardiner’s reconstruction into her set up.
“There’s loads of pleasure across the reopening, actually inside our personal group but additionally within the wider ceramics group and town of Toronto, the place the Gardiner is a beloved cultural gem and artistic hub,” Miller tells The Artwork Newspaper. “Folks shall be blown away by how dynamic the area is. Inaugurating a gallery of Indigenous ceramics was central to the mission from the start. It felt vital to obviously floor our work on this area and to deepen and broaden relationships with Indigenous artists and communities.”
Set up view of Femme Fatale: The Artwork of Jeannot Blackburn (till 11 January 2026), one other of the inaugural reveals on the renovated Gardiner Museum Photograph: Toni Hafkenscheid
The brand new gallery has been named “Indigenous Immemorial: Ceramics of the Nice Lakes Area”, referencing an space that takes in Manitoulin Island, Six Nations of the Grand River and Curve Lake. The show additionally features a Latin American element, fostering connections between ceramicists in North and South America. Serving to make it occur was the museum’s Indigenous advisory circle, assembled by the famend artist Kent Monkman and together with Mary Anne Barkhouse, Bonnie Devine, Andre Morriseau, Duke Redbird, Frank Shebageget and Tekaronhiáhkhwa/Santee Smith. The Gardiner’s first curator of Indigenous ceramics, Franchesca Hebert-Spence (a member of the Sagkeeng First Nation), who beforehand served on the Nationwide Gallery of Canada, took it from there.
The Indigenous ceramics gallery was designed by the Oneida architect Chris Cornelius. “Chris has interpreted the standard construction of the folks that inhabited the area: a body with bark shingled cladding,” Miller says.
Partial view of the brand new William B.G. Humphries Assortment Galleries on the Gardiner Museum Photograph: George Pimentel Images
Welcoming guests to the constructing is a specifically commissioned set up by the 2014 Sobey Artwork Award-winner Nadia Myre, an artist from Montréal and an Algonquin member of Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg First Nation. The set up is usual from handmade ceramic beads and clay pipe stems that Myre collects alongside the River Thames (the one in southwestern Ontario).
“Nadia makes use of the fabric richness of ceramics to broaden our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the earth and the way we bought to the place we’re,” Miller says. “She is without doubt one of the most compelling artists working within the medium right this moment, in Canada and internationally.”
A view of the Gardiner Museum’s new studio area Photograph: Salina Kassam
Different sights on the overhauled Gardiner embrace a completely geared up clay studio that may enable guests to strive their palms at ceramic artwork making, and a group studying centre which goals to draw upwards of 200 college teams yearly. In the meantime the William B.G. Humphries Assortment Galleries (named for the Radlett Basis’s late founder) show ceramics from the Gardiner’s assortment of greater than 5,000 objects, spanning eons previous to the current day, organised by geography, tradition, interval and method. Miller notes that, following the renovation, the museum is ready to have round 40% of its assortment on show, a rarity amongst accumulating establishments.
Gabrielle Peacock, the Gardiner Museum’s government director and chief government, provides: “With this transformation, we’ve created vibrant areas the place individuals can discover surprise and inspiration, faucet into their creativity and have interaction in vital conversations.”
