2025 summer visual arts preview: Canada is going ‘elbows up’ with a strong showing of homegrown talent

Maybe it’s “elbows up” or maybe it’s just coincidence. Or maybe it’s just another sign that Canadian museums can no longer afford the international touring blockbuster. Whatever the cause, the summer’s visual art lineup is heavily weighted toward Canadian artists.

Museum after museum, gallery upon gallery are offering work by homegrown artists, whether living or historic. (The one notable exception is a show of Golden Age Flemish art that visited the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts last summer and now stops at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.) Otherwise, it’s all maple syrup all the time. Here’s a cross-Canada selection of what’s on offer.

Newfoundland and Labrador

The Rooms in St. John’s, which serves as both an art gallery and a history museum, is celebrating 20 years with Grounding, an exhibition devoted to art about the landscapes and architecture of Newfoundland and Labrador. The images include everything from a classic 1910 view of St. John’s on a foggy day by Maurice Cullen to views of Newfoundland by members of the Group of Seven to contemporary photography by artists such as Katelyn Jacque and Ned Pratt. To Oct. 19.

Unusual Lawren Harris painting showing in Nova Scotia to mark William Davis centenary

New Brunswick

This one is no coincidence: The Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton responded to the 51st state nonsense with a show devoted to New Brunswick artists, building on a campaign that began by showcasing a different New Brunswick work from the permanent collection every week. Made in NB includes art by such key Canadian figures as Molly Lamb Bobak, Thaddeus Holownia, the ceramicist Léopold Foulem, Alex Colville, who lived in Sackville, N.B., before moving to Nova Scotia, and the Fredericton photographer Gary Weekes, who has the distinction of being the first Black New Brunswicker to show at the Beaverbrook. To July 13.

Quebec

One of the highlights of Quebec’s summer calendar is the exhibition devoted to expat artist Alan Glass (1932-2023) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Born in Montreal, Glass spent most of his career in Mexico, where he made assemblages of found objects mounted in display boxes. A list of the objects – eggs, shoes, old tools, postcards of historic art, buttons, false eyelashes – might seem random but dreamlike themes emerge from these surreal pieces. The show also includes his early automatic drawings made in the 1950s with the newly invented ballpoint pen and later, luminescent watercolours. To Sept. 28.

Ontario

The National Gallery of Canada features the work of two Indigenous women this summer. Nadia Myre, the Algonquin artist from Montreal whose sculptural installations often make poignant use of beading, considers identity and nationhood in a retrospective of 20 years’ work that also includes new pieces recently made in France. The Haudenosaunee artist Skawennati is known for her digital work of Indigenous futurism, using animated avatars to imagine mythic tales of progress and resilience. To Sept. 1.

The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa revisits the conceptual art that Tom Dean made in the 1970s in Montreal. He began his career by hanging a large sequined sign outside his studio window – it said GOOD-BYE – and went on to consider ways of cataloguing and measuring spaces, actions and moments, bringing laser focus to seemingly mundane systems. One piece features 11 photographs of a clock, each taken one second apart; another (rather beautiful) piece maps the utilities running underneath St. Catherine Street. The artist is still active in Toronto but this exhibition is a blast from an artistic past that was somehow both rigorous and indulgent. To Sept. 7.

Heart On, the Joyce Weiland retrospective that launched at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in February, opens June 18 at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

Worlds on Paper: Drawings from Kinngait continues at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection to Aug. 24.

The Art Gallery of Hamilton is hosting an exhibition devoted to the intriguing Canadian impressionist Helen McNicoll who, in a career cut short by diabetes in her 30s, had already mastered the trick of painting sunlight filtered through trees or cloth. Originally organized by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and relying on paintings from the Pierre Lassonde collection seldom shown in Ontario, the show features delicious beach, garden and farming scenes where women and children work and play in dappled light. It also includes a section investigating The Bean Harvest, a painting recently reattributed to McNicoll by the BBC television program Fake or Fortune and not shown in Canada since 1913. To Aug. 31.

Manitoba

Qaumajuq at the Winnipeg Art Gallery has mounted a retrospective of work by the celebrated Inuit carver Abraham Anghik Ruben that examines how both mythic content and the artist’s contemporary realities influenced his work from the 1970s to the present. To May 31, 2026.

Saskatchewan

Contemporary Inuit Artist Tarralik Duffy presents both digital drawings and soft sculptures in Klik My Heels, a solo exhibition at Remai Modern in Saskatoon. Humorously reproducing the everyday staples and consumer goods, such as flour or luncheon meat, so crucial to life in the North, she traces her personal journey south from Nunavut to Saskatoon, where she now lives. To Oct. 12.

Alberta

The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff presents The Ancestors are Talking, a retrospective of 77 works by the so-called Indian Group of Seven. More properly the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., the group was formed in the 1970s and featured the best-known Indigenous artists of the day, including Norval Morrisseau, Alex Janvier, Daphne Odjig and Carl Ray. The only surviving member is Joseph M. Sánchez, the Colorado artist and Indigenous activist of European and Puebloan ancestry who lived in Canada in 1970s before returning to the U.S. under the amnesty for draft evaders. To Oct. 19.

British Columbia

The Vancouver Art Gallery is showing the Jean-Paul Riopelle retrospective that originated at the National Gallery of Canada in 2023. To Sept. 1.

The Audain Art Museum in Whistler is showing Edward Burtynsky’s large-scale photographs of B.C.’s mountains. The Coast Mountains speaks to both incredible natural beauty and the worrying retreat of glaciers. To Sept. 15.