The Globe and Mail published the first part of this essay as an opinion piece in their 23 May 2026 issue (I wrote the rest of it after I'd submitted it to them). Some interesting comments were posted online this weekend--including about the Vancouver Art Galley, which I was pleased to hear has just opened a new exhibition of works from its permanent collection. I will echo hazlit64's comment: "Finally. Indeed, it is about the best thing the VAG has done in ages."The MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina has a far more impressive permanent collection than do the public art galleries in many cities its size. As you’d expect, the collection has a range of pieces by Ronald Bloore and other members of the “Regina Five” from the 1960s, and significant paintings by the outstanding Saskatchewan landscape artist Dorothy Knowles. But the collection also includes work by a wide range of outstanding Canadian artists from all eras: Takao Tanabe is included, as are Alex Colville, Joyce Wieland, David Milne, Prudence Heward, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, Lawren Harris, and mid-twentieth century abstract artists Jack Bush, Jack Shadbolt, and Agnes Martin. Some of the finest paintings by early Canadian landscape artist Homer Watson are part of the collection. And that’s just the Canadian side of things. Works by Andrea del Sarto, Irene Parenti Duclos, Eugene Delacroix, Pierre Bonnard, Edgar Dégas, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol are all part of the collection too.*
And how many of those works were on display when I visited in early March? None. Other than a special exhibition of works (“Death Boat and other Stories: The Kampelmacher Memorial Collection of Indigenous Art”), there was nothing whatsoever on display from the permanent collection. The rest of the space was devoted to two large special exhibitions: a selection of photographic and conceptual art by Plains Cree artist Joi T. Arcand, and a selection of work (again, primarily photographic and conceptual) by recipients of the 2025 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.
I have no desire to criticize anything in the three exhibits on display. The background to the Arcand exhibit is interesting, and so are some of the pieces; particularly striking is an installation piece of a wooden chair inside a field of wheat inside the bare wooden frame of a farm building. Jin-me Yoon’s images of herself in front of iconic Canadian landscapes (part of the Governor General’s Awards winners exhibition) are striking too and, in the “Death Boat” exhibition of Indigenous art, Ananaisie Alikatuktuk’s 1976 stonecut of the Inuit sea goddess Taleelayu and her family is quite wonderful. The Joe Fafard cows in the outdoor sculpture garden are quite wonderful too. There are good things on display at the Mackenzie.
But a public gallery with a large permanent collection should surely be making an effort to represent the full range of our artistic heritage—and a full range of genres. Like many other public galleries across Canada, the MacKenzie has chosen not to do that. Canada’s Indigenous heritage is of vital importance, and it should always find expression in our public galleries. But so too is our heritage of European art and of art influenced by the traditions the European settlers brought with them. Implicitly, the MacKenzie suggests that the only heritage of great value in Canada is that of Canada’s Indigenous peoples.
Implicitly, too, the MacKenzie suggests that there is little value to the genres that for centuries were accorded pride of place in our heritage: painting (and in particular, oil painting), works on paper (whether watercolors or prints), and sculpture. Photographic art and video art, together with installations and other forms of conceptual art, now dominate much of the art scene. They should surely be represented in any public gallery, but they are not everything. Bonnard, Gauguin, Munch, Picasso, David Milne, A.Y. Jackson, Dorothy Knowles—to have all that wealth hidden away in your vaults and not show any of it? It’s an extraordinary imbalance.
It’s not as if the MacKenzie is short of exhibition space; a visitor can’t help but be struck by the amount of empty wall space in the foyer, the hallways, and so on. It would be easy to display a modest selection of works from the permanent collection without reducing one bit the amount of exhibition space devoted to the other exhibitions.
I’ve had very similar experiences elsewhere; in public galleries across Canada, our artistic heritage (with the notable exception of Indigenous art) is often all tucked away in the vaults; modern photographic art, video art, and installation and conceptual art are what’s on display. There are some in the art world who might suggest that there is a hint of the philistine, or even of the reactionary in anyone who still wants to see work by the Impressionists, or Alex Colville, or the Group of Seven, or Andrea del Sarto. But most of us who would like to see a broader representation of our art heritage on display do not want to push out the contemporary art and the Indigenous art; we would like to see it on display together with Indigenous works, and together with various sorts of contemporary art.
You can, of course, find work by artists such as Lawren Harris and Arthur Lismer and A.Y. Jackson in the MacKenzie Art Gallery, in the same part of the gallery in which they are to be found in every gallery across Canada: reproduced on postcards and teacups in the gallery shop. It seems crazy, but people still buy this stuff, in whatever form. It would be great if they could see the real thing as well as the postcards and the teacups.
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Some may feel (and understandably so) that many of the artists represented in these permanent collections don’t deserve any more time in the limelight, that the Tom Thomsons and David Milnes and Paul Gauguins of the world—the white males who dominated for so long—have had their time in the sun, and deserve now to spend a good long time in the vaults. But it’s not just the long-dead white males that are being hidden away in the vaults; its living artists too, very much including women artists and non-white artists. Check out the galleries that provide information on what’s in their permanent collection and you’ll find a vast store of works by Canada’s finest living artists—Angela Grossmans, Takao Tanabes, John Hartmans, and many more.
Not every gallery takes the same sort of approach that the MacKenzie does, of course. The National Art Gallery, The Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, and the Art Gallery of Ontario are notable exceptions among our largest public galleries, as is the Beaverbrook in Fredericton, which boasts on its website that its “permanent collection’s core … has remained on view for most of the gallery’s 60-plus year history.” The Glenbow in Calgary promises to again be an exception when it reopens in 2027. And several others are at least partial exceptions; the Art Gallery of Victoria, for example, displays works from its permanent collection in at least two of the gallery’s seven exhibition spaces.** But take a look online at what’s on at the main public galleries in St. John’s, Halifax, Trois Rivières, Kingston, Peterborough, Guelph, London, Windsor, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Kamloops, Kelowna, Vancouver, Nanaimo. Many of these galleries hold excellent permanent collections. Few if any make available much space to show the works in those permanent collections to the public.
Why not? Gallery curators have a ready answer; they just don’t have enough space.*** And it is indeed true that many galleries across Canada are short both of exhibition space and of storage space—in some cases critically so. But the assumption seems always to be that new, temporary exhibitions must take priority. Is there any good reason for that assumption? Why not look at things the other way round? If you have a truly outstanding permanent collection, why not give priority to that? However large or small your available exhibition space may be, why not devote at least one third of that available space to a permanent display of certain of the most important works from your permanent collection?**** Another third might be devoted to rotating displays of other works in the permanent collection. That still leaves a third for temporary exhibitions. In the United States the majority of public galleries seem to devote over 70% of their exhibition space to works from their permanent collection; in Cleveland and Portland, it’s 90%; in Minneapolis it’s 93%. In Winnipeg, on the other hand, it’s estimated to be less than 60%; in Quebec City, less than 50%. In Victoria, it’s 45%; in Vancouver it’s often less than 10%. In Peterborough, Lethbridge, Nanaimo, and various other Canadian cities, it’s often 0%.
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In closing, I’d like to return to the T.C. Douglas Building in Regina, in which the MacKenzie Gallery is housed. Arguably the most interesting pieces of art on display in the entire building are Miki Mappin’s nine wonderfully evocative sculptures of human figures. They’re on permanent display, positioned on benches in the building’s atrium, which you pass through before you enter the gallery, and again when you leave. Reminiscent of the white plaster sculptures of George Segal, these figures are made of dark concrete; they have apparently been popular among visitors to the building ever since they were installed in 1982. There’s nothing there to identify the sculptor, but an extraordinarily informative attendant at the information desk provided me with a good deal of background information—including a photocopied article from the 18 November 1982 issue of Western People about the installation of the sculptures.
“Thanks so much for the information,” I said to her before I left. “These are really quite extraordinary—better, perhaps, than anything else on display in the gallery.”
“Oh, but these aren’t the gallery’s sculptures,” she said. “They were commissioned by the Ministry of Health.” She pointed to the other side of the atrium. “The Health Ministry occupies that half of the building—nothing to do with the MacKenzie Gallery.”
*A nicely produced 2013 book edited by Timothy Long & Stephen King, The Vaults: Art from the MacKenzie Art Gallery and the University of Regina Collections, provides a wealth of information on what’s hidden from view at the MacKenzie.
**Also on display in Victoria at the moment is an exhibition advertised in the 14 March issue of the Globe and Mail with a detail from Mary Pratt’s Cut Cake: “Historic and Post-War Canadian Art.” But that’s an exhibition at the Madrona Gallery, an outstanding commercial gallery; the works are all for sale. It’s an interesting commentary on the current art world in this part of British Columbia that, when it comes to nineteenth and twentieth-century Canadian painting, there are often far more important works to be seen at commercial galleries and auction houses—Heffel Fine Art in Vancouver as well as Madrona—than there is at any of the public galleries. One of the many ironies of the current art world is that many works of art that have been donated to public galleries in the expectation that they will be thereby be enjoyed by more people than if the works were sold off at auction, end up being seen by no one at all other than the gallery staff.
***A growing number of galleries are nowadays attempting to address their space issues by adopting a “visible storage” approach for much of their permanent collection, and a growing number too are digitizing much or all of their permanent collection. These are both real steps forward—but they are no substitute for having a significant part of one’s permanent collection displayed in proper exhibition galleries.
****Having too few works from their permanent collection permanently on display is a failing of more than a few public galleries. When space is allocated to works from the permanent collection, it’s often only on a temporary basis. That’s fine for most works in most permanent collections, but truly iconic works should always be on display—just as the Glenbow used to always have on display, Frances Anne Hopkins’s Canoes in Fog, Lake Superior and just as the National Gallery always has on display certain works by Monet, Brymer, Carr, Thomson, Wyle, LeMieux, Colville, Borduas, Riopelle, and Mary Pratt.
