Launched in 2016, the Community Arts Space promotes experimentation and socially-engaged art through a full summer of free public projects, including exhibitions, hands-on workshops, talks, and performances that inspire conversation and social action.
This year’s theme, “What we long for,” explores the ways in which justice and pleasure can co-exist as counterpoints to calling out, gaslighting, exhaustion, and burnout. The four public projects engage with community healing, survival tools, the gaps between community and institutional memory, and how craft creates opportunities for acknowledgment and action.

On February 28, Ai Weiwei: Unbroken will open at the Gardiner Museum, featuring iconic ceramic works, including Sunflower Seeds and Coca Cola Vase, recent works in blue-and-white porcelain depicting the global refugee crisis, and objects in other media, including wood and marble, that playfully subvert notions of traditional craftsmanship and Chinese cultural identity with pointedly political imagery. The exhibition also marks the international debut of a new LEGO zodiac installation.

Ai Weiwei, one of the world’s most influential artists and activists, and one of China’s most formidable critics, has released a statement through the Gardiner Museum in response to heightened diplomatic tensions between China and Canada since the arrest of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou and the detainment of two Canadian citizens on suspicion of endangering state security.

The Gardiner Museum’s annual 12 Trees exhibition has become New + Now, a celebration of national and international ceramics in support of the Museum’s clay education and outreach programs. The highlight of this year’s inaugural New + Now event is a dramatic celestial installation commissioned from Toronto-born artist David R. Harper.

The Gardiner Museum has revealed a new monumental ceramic sculpture by acclaimed Toronto-based artist Shary Boyle. The 9-foot-tall sculpture, Cracked Wheat, now sits in front of the Museum on Queen’s Park—a voluptuous cartoon figure to compliment the squat silhouette of the Jun Kaneko “head”, a fixture on the Gardiner Plaza since 2013.

The Gardiner Museum has partnered with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum, and private collectors to reunite for the first time what survives of the collection of Sir William Van Horne, the American-born builder of the Canadian Pacific Railway who became one of Canada’s foremost art collectors.

An exhibition of major ceramic works by Ai Weiwei, one of the world’s most influential living artists and human rights activists, will debut at the Gardiner Museum in February 2019.

The Gardiner Museum is pleased to announce the appointment of Sequoia Miller to the role of Chief Curator. Miller worked as a full-time studio potter before re-entering academia as a doctoral candidate in the History of Art at Yale.

The Gardiner Museum’s annual 12 Trees exhibition, presented by Nordstrom, returns this year with contemporary holiday installations inspired by the theme Let There Be Light. Co-curated by Canadian author and visual artist Douglas Coupland and Vice President of Public Art Management Ben Mills, the exhibition celebrates light as a potent symbol of hope and unity that many cultures share during the holiday season.

Read the full article in NOW Magazine.