Winnipeg Art Gallery

WAG-Qaumajuq holds more than 27,000 to 28,000 works across two connected buildings. Its defining strength, by its own account and by scale, is Inuit art: the largest public collection in the world, built from its own holdings of more than 12,000 objects plus a long-term loan of roughly 7,000 more from the Government of Nunavut. Around that sits a smaller but genuinely significant collection of Flemish and German Renaissance painting from a single 1970 gift, a Canadian collection strongest where it documents Manitoba's own artists, and a decorative arts collection whose English ceramics and Art Nouveau and Art Deco glass are considered among the best in the country.

The Winnipeg Art Gallery traces itself to a museum that opened in the Industrial Bureau Exposition Building at Main and Water Streets on 16 December 1912, one of Canada's earliest civic art museums. It passed through several names and shared premises for decades, including a period as the Winnipeg Gallery and School of Art, before it was formally incorporated under its current name in 1963.

The gallery did not get a purpose-built home until 1971. Architect Gustavo da Roza's design, built between 1969 and 1971 on Memorial Boulevard, is a late-modernist wedge clad in Tyndall stone quarried in southern Manitoba, its sloping walls and near-total absence of street-level windows giving the building its long-standing local nickname, the iceberg. Inside, roughly 11,000 square metres hold the WAG's Galleries 1, 2 and 4, where the permanent collection of European and Canadian painting, sculpture, furniture and decorative arts is periodically reinstalled. For close to fifty years this single building, plus a rooftop sculpture garden added later, was the whole of the Winnipeg Art Gallery. It still is the address most visitors think of first, even though it is now only one half of a two-building institution.

The other half opened on 27 March 2021 as the world's first museum building dedicated exclusively to Inuit art. Selected through an international competition, Los Angeles-based Michael Maltzan Architecture, working with local associate Cibinel Architecture, designed a 40,000-square-foot addition whose undulating white Bethel granite facade was informed by a research trip the design team made to Nunavut communities and artists' studios. The building was originally referred to simply as the Inuit Art Centre; in the weeks before it opened, a circle of Indigenous language keepers led by Dr. Julie Nagam and Dr. Heather Igloliorte, co-chairs of the WAG's Indigenous advisory circle, gave it the Inuktitut name Qaumajuq, meaning 'it is bright, it is lit,' a reference to the light that floods the glass-fronted lobby. The same group gave the original 1971 building an Anishinaabemowin name, Biindigin Biwaasaeyaah, 'come on in, the dawn of light is here,' so that Indigenous languages are now built into how both structures are named, even though the gallery as a whole is still called the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

At the centre of Qaumajuq is Ilavut, 'our relatives,' the three-storey glass vault that is the first thing most visitors see: several thousand stone carvings, displayed so visitors can walk around and be surrounded by them, with gallery conservators and curators sometimes visible working inside the vault itself. Above it, the gallery Qilak, 'sky,' gives the collection an 8,000-square-foot dedicated exhibition space lit by skylights. The whole ground floor, including the vault, is free to enter at any time the building is open, a deliberate choice the WAG frames as widening access to a collection it holds in trust rather than simply owns.

Before Qaumajuq, the WAG's reputation rested on a different kind of surprise: a Winnipeg museum holding one of the finest collections of Flemish and German Renaissance painting in western Canada. That collection exists largely because of a single 1970 donation from relatives of Standish Vereker, the 7th Viscount Gort, an Anglo-Irish peer. It brought panels by the Master of the Holy Kinship, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Bartholomaeus Bruyn the Younger and Wolfgang Katzheimer the Elder into a prairie gallery that, on paper, had no obvious reason to hold them. The same American and European collection extends to British painting from John Everett Millais to Barbara Hepworth, 19th and 20th century French art including Corot and Chagall, one of the most comprehensive public collections anywhere of German Expressionist Walter Gramatte, and 20th century American work.

The Canadian collection is built on different ground: artists with a direct connection to Winnipeg and Manitoba, among them Peter Rindisbacher, W.J. Phillips, L.L. FitzGerald, Bertram Brooker, William Kurelek and Ivan Eyre, alongside national figures such as Tom Thomson, Emily Carr and the Group of Seven. Brooker's 1928 painting Sounds Assembling, an early Canadian venture into pure abstraction, is the single work the WAG chooses to represent this entire side of its holdings online, a fair measure of how the gallery sees its own strength: not encyclopaedic, but genuinely important in specific, well-chosen places.

Nearly half of everything the WAG holds, more than 12,000 objects, is Inuit work: carvings, drawings, prints and textiles by artists including Kiugak Ashoona, Oviloo Tunnillie and Abraham Anghik Ruben. A further roughly 7,000 to 7,500 pieces are held on long-term loan from the Government of Nunavut's own fine arts collection, dating from the late 1800s to the present. The scale is not simply a curatorial choice; it reflects Winnipeg's position, since the mid-20th century, as a principal Canadian marketplace and institutional home for art coming out of the eastern Arctic, a role few visitors from outside the Prairies expect a Manitoba museum to hold.

What Qaumajuq changed was how that collection is shown. Where earlier generations of the WAG stored the bulk of its Inuit holdings out of public view, the Visible Vault puts several thousand carvings on permanent open display, and the Qilak gallery gives changing exhibitions, such as the long-running Abraham Anghik Ruben retrospective and Ningiukulu Teevee's graphic art, the scale a national collection deserves. The WAG is explicit that it is Inuit-led wherever it can be: Qaumajuq's opening exhibition, INUA, was curated entirely by an Inuit team, and the gallery has continued to develop training and knowledge-exchange partnerships with arts workers based in Nunavut.

The WAG's own history includes material the gallery has had to answer for rather than only celebrate. In November, the magazine The Walrus published researcher Conrad Sweatman's findings, building on earlier work by German historian Andreas Zeising, that Ferdinand Eckhardt, the gallery's influential mid-20th-century director and a formative figure in prairie modernism, had written for Nazi cultural publications and signed a pledge of loyalty to Hitler while working in Germany in the early 1930s, before he arrived in Canada in 1953. In the Winnipeg Free Press's write-up of that reporting, the WAG's current director and chief executive, Stephen Borys, was reported as characterising Eckhardt's involvement as limited to one article he could not get published elsewhere, a response Sweatman said undersold documented later activity including Eckhardt's role as lead art critic for the Nazi-controlled Reich Chamber of Culture. The WAG removed Eckhardt's name from its entrance hall in 2023 following the renewed scrutiny.

Separately, in June 2024, Thunder Bay police informed the WAG that a painting in its collection, Astral Plain Scouts, attributed to the celebrated Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau, was a forgery connected to the fraud operation of David Voss, who had pleaded guilty earlier that month. The gallery, which had acquired the work through a 2000 donation from a private collector, placed the painting in storage, said it was 'deeply concerned and disappointed,' and stated it had cooperated with the police investigation for more than three years. Fraud investigator Jonathan Sommer has warned that thousands of fake Morrisseau works likely remain undetected across Canadian institutions, a caution that applies to any collection of the artist's scale and not to the WAG alone.

The two buildings function as one gallery with a single admissions desk, located between them inside Qaumajuq. The ground floor, the Visible Vault, ShopWAG and Katita Cafe are free to everyone whenever the doors are open; a paid ticket is needed for the upper-floor galleries in both buildings, with youth under 18 and Indigenous visitors admitted free at all times, and free general admission every Wednesday evening and on the second Sunday of each month. Large bags are not allowed in the galleries but can be checked free at the front desk, personal non-flash photography is welcome throughout except where a gallery says otherwise, and the Rooftop Sculpture Garden opens seasonally as a free outdoor extension of the collection. For a first visit, the WAG's own recommendation is simple: start at the Visible Vault, because nothing else in the building prepares a visitor for what several thousand carvings look like seen all at once.

Visitors consistently name the Inuit art collection, and especially the Visible Vault and the Qaumajuq galleries built around it, as the reason to come; many call it worth the admission price on its own. The historical building is repeatedly described as manageable rather than overwhelming, with well-curated rotating exhibitions and a small on-site cafe. The two recurring complaints are structural rather than curatorial: some of the vault's higher carvings are hard to see or catch glare from the glass, and a few visitors find the route between the old building and Qaumajuq confusing to navigate. A smaller number of reviewers consider the adult admission price high for the time it takes to see the collection.