Art Gallery of Alberta

Strongest in Canadian art since 1950, in Alberta and western Canadian painting and sculpture, and in two deep specialist holdings that sit outside that regional mandate: more than 1,500 photographic works acquired since 1977, and more than 850 eighteenth-century engraved prints by Thomas Bewick. Historical Canadian painting before 1950, including the gallery's Emily Carr and Group of Seven-associated material, rests almost entirely on the single 1976 gift of nearly 100 works from the Ernest E. Poole Foundation.

The Art Gallery of Alberta traces its founding to 1924, when it opened as the Edmonton Museum of Arts under founding director Maud Bowman, with the backing of the Edmonton Art Club and local business figures. Its first exhibition was a loan show of 24 works borrowed from the National Gallery of Canada, hung in the Hotel Macdonald because the young institution had no building of its own. It moved through a series of temporary homes over the following decades, including the Edmonton Public Library, the Civic Block and the Edmonton Motors Building, before settling in 1952 into the Richard Secord House, a historic riverside mansion, and taking the name Edmonton Art Gallery in 1956.

The gallery's first purpose-built home opened in 1969 on Sir Winston Churchill Square, designed by the Edmonton architects Donald G. Bittorf and B. James Wensley and funded by a bequest of about 600,000 dollars from Abigail (Mrs A. E.) Condell. That modernist building was well suited to the abstract and contemporary Canadian work the gallery was collecting, and an east-wing addition followed in 1977 or 1978 as the collection kept growing. By the early 2000s the 1969 structure had aged out of the job: its mechanical systems and climate control could no longer meet the standards international lenders required, and storage for a collection that had passed 6,000 objects was inadequate. In 2005, the same year it renamed itself the Art Gallery of Alberta to reflect a provincial rather than purely civic mandate, the institution ran an international design competition for a replacement.

Los Angeles architect Randall Stout, who had spent seven years working alongside Frank Gehry before opening his own practice, won the competition in 2005 by presenting his design in person and tying it explicitly to Edmonton's own geography: the North Saskatchewan River, which loops through the city's gridded downtown, and the aurora borealis, visible from Edmonton on clear winter nights. The resulting building, built between 2007 and January 2010 at a cost Wikipedia's own account puts at roughly 88 million Canadian dollars, wraps a winding, 190-metre stainless-steel and patinated-zinc ribbon around and through the retained shell of the 1969 structure, of which about two-thirds survives inside the new envelope. The finished building measures close to 8,000 square metres over five levels, with about 3,000 square metres of climate-controlled gallery space, and it reopened to the public on 31 January 2010.

The design was controversial before a single wall went up. Architecture critics, including Lisa Rochon writing in The Globe and Mail at the time of the 2005 competition result, called the winning scheme derivative of Gehry's own titanium-clad buildings and mocked Stout's stated inspirations as an overworked metaphor. Reviewing the finished building in February 2010, the critic Diana Sherlock in Canadian Art repeated the Gehry comparison but also praised the soaring, top-lit Ernest Manning Hall atrium and the clarity with which Stout had separated the building's different functions, while warning that a building built partly to attract visitors risked turning the museum experience into a consumable spectacle rather than a place for looking closely at art. Whatever critics made of the metaphor, the building gave Edmonton its first major purpose-built visual-arts landmark in decades and remains the most visually recognisable structure on Churchill Square.

The AGA's permanent collection runs to more than 6,000 works, the great majority acquired since 1970 and dating from after 1950, with a stated emphasis on Canadian abstract painting and sculpture read in both a regional Alberta and a national context. Its historical depth comes chiefly from a single gift: in 1976 the Ernest E. Poole Foundation donated close to 100 Canadian paintings and sculptures, bringing in Cornelius Krieghoff, Paul Peel, James Wilson Morrice and Emily Carr, along with material connected to the Group of Seven. Alongside the paintings the gallery holds two large and less publicly visible collections: more than 1,500 photographic works acquired since 1977, and more than 850 eighteenth-century wood-engraved prints by the English engraver Thomas Bewick, an unusual holding for an institution whose primary mandate is regional Canadian art.

The contemporary collection includes work by nationally recognised Canadian artists such as Brian Jungen and Janet Cardiff, and by Alberta-based Indigenous artists including Jane Ash Poitras, Alex Janvier and George Littlechild; the gallery has continued to deepen its Indigenous, Inuit and Metis contemporary holdings in recent years. What the AGA does not do, by design, is keep most of this on permanent view: it runs a programme of rotating temporary exhibitions rather than a fixed permanent-collection hang, which is the single most repeated observation in visitor reviews: the building can be seen in an afternoon, and what a visitor finds inside on any given week depends on the current show rather than a standing display of the collection's depth.

The public heart of the building is the Ernest Manning Hall, a five-storey glazed atrium that rises through the centre of the plan and gives visitors their first view of Stout's zinc ribbon from indoors. Zinc, the gallery's licensed restaurant, opens directly off the hall, and shopAGA, the retail shop, sits near the main entrance. Roughly 3,000 square metres of climate-controlled gallery space is spread over three levels for the changing exhibition programme. The Singhmar Centre for Art Education, added in the 2010 rebuild, houses studio space for the gallery's school, family and community programmes and a dedicated 150-seat theatre used for lectures, artist talks and film screenings tied to current shows. An upper-level function space, the Borealis Room, takes its name from the same aurora reference as the exterior ribbon and is used for private and members' events, its cantilevered form giving it the sense of floating above Churchill Square.

The AGA is open Wednesday through Sunday, closed Monday and Tuesday, with extended hours to 7pm on Thursday; admission is accepted up to thirty minutes before closing. Adult admission is 17 Canadian dollars plus tax, with reduced rates for seniors and students, free entry for anyone 17 or under, and free entry for everyone on the last Thursday of the month between 4pm and 7pm. The building sits directly on the Churchill LRT station, at the centre of Edmonton's downtown civic square alongside the Stanley A. Milner Library and City Hall, and it has no dedicated on-site parking of its own. Visitor reviews describe the gallery as a popular wedding and event venue as well as an exhibition space, reflecting the deliberate mix of gallery, restaurant, theatre and rentable hall space that was part of Stout's brief from the outset, and the same mix that architecture critics argued gave over too much of the building to hospitality at the expense of gallery square footage.

Visitors consistently single out the building itself, designed by Randall Stout and opened in 2010, as the gallery's most striking feature and a genuine Edmonton landmark, and rate the rotating exhibition programme as generally worth the visit. The most repeated complaint is that the AGA does not keep a large permanent collection on permanent display, so a visit is short and its content depends entirely on which temporary shows happen to be up; some visitors have also noted the absence of Alberta Indigenous or textile work in particular exhibitions they saw.