It's Toronto - May/June 2017

ARTS & CULTURE
The first major Georgia
O’Keeffe retrospective in
Canada
By Kim Biggar
While the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)
opened more than 100 years ago, it remains
a modern, vibrant space in the core
of Toronto. Now one of the largest art museums in North
America, the AGO has over 4,000 works from its enormous
collection available to view in its 110 galleries. And, through
the current Look:Forward project, it’s undertaking a gallerywide
reinstallation of that collection, adding art to all of its
public spaces to enable the display of more of its best pieces.
(That process will be completed in 2018.)
The Ontario Society of Artists opened its first gallery in
1913 in The Grange, a Georgian manor house that is still
part of the AGO, calling it the Art Museum of Toronto.
Construction on a new building began in 1916. Numerous
expansions and renovations – along with a couple of name
changes – since then have created the current 583,000-squarefoot
AGO facility.
Home to works by such famous and diverse artists as
Cornelius Krieghoff, Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven,
Emily Carr, David Milne, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas,
Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and General
Idea, the gallery also features one of the largest Inuit art collections
in the world, the world’s largest public collection of
works by sculptor Henry Moore, a vast collection of photographs
by 19th- and 20th-century photographers and African
and Oceanic collections. Paintings, photos and sculpture share
space with projection art, installation art, a collection of antique
ship models, sacred Medieval and Renaissance objects,
Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities and so much more.
MAY/JUNE 2017 • 21