Exhibitions

Kwaata-nihtaawakihk – A Hard Birth will prompt you to reflect on the Métis nation’s role in Manitoba’s creation and consider the significance of the events of 1869-70 in relation to our current times.

The first impressions of the enormous works in Wanda Koop’s View from Here are starkness and intensity. The evocative paintings feature prominent landscapes composed within the bald outline of a face, erasing the comfortable familiarity we have with both landscape and portrait.

During summer months, the WAG’s Rooftop Sculpture Garden is open for all to enjoy! A striking selection of 20th and 21st century bronze, steel, and stone sculptures by Canadian and European artists will keep you company.

To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat is a celebration of diversity and an urgent call to action around issues of racial marginalization. Artist Esmaa Mohamoud explores the ways in which Black bodies at once appear—and yet are rendered metaphorically invisible—within the spaces they navigate.

In many communities and nations, Indigenous cultural practices have been pushed underground by colonizing forces. Kakiniit Hivonighijotaa: Inuit Embodied Practices and Meanings highlights the strength and resilience of Inuit culture in the face of intense suppression.

Transmissions is an exhibition exploring the production and passing on of knowledge through embodied processes. Embodied knowledge is learned and shared through actions and practices, and recognizes the material experiences related to the body. Each of us holds embodied knowledge that we access through life experience. It may show up as emotional or bodily responses, or as connections to the world around us that are hard to describe.

INUA is the inaugural exhibition of Qaumajuq, the new Inuit art centre at the WAG. See work by over 90 Inuit artists working across Inuit Nunangat and beyond.

Your permanent collection is back on view! Revisit old favourites from our European & Canadian collections, plus a few lesser-seen works.

Visitors to WAG-Qaumajuq can experience art before coming inside! Check out the sculptures outside Qaumajuq and the WAG – see works by Goota Ashoona, Abraham Anghik Ruben, and Ivan Eyre, all for free!

At first glance, landscape paintings tend to conduct themselves as transparent historical documents, showing us a clear image of the environments upon which our contemporary lives were built. This exhibition explores the landscapes of western Canada through the aestheticized lenses of Walter J. Phillips and a selection of his contemporaries.

The sketches, drawings, studies, repeated images, and unfinished works of Ivan Eyre allow us a glimpse into the artist’s process. Produced with a freer hand, using economical, malleable materials like paper, board, ink pens, graphite, and coloured pencils, drawing allowed for what Eyre described as “fewer distractions” for ideas to emerge.