Start your 2026 with a healthy dose of artistic inspiration! This time of year, you’ll find all manner of a-muse-ing events across Metro Vancouver and Whistler. Openings, events, and exhibitions; the local art scene has no plan to hibernate through winter. The month ahead is an excellent time to explore newly opened shows and catch up on some of the art you may have missed in the past year.
On Vancouver’s North Shore, you can delve into the often hostile world of the world’s smallest ecosystems. Meanwhile, in Surrey, you’re invited to take a symphonic journey through the retelling of legends surrounding some of history’s most storied women. Through every creative medium, you’ll find unique expressions happening around you. You just have to know where to look. (Right here!)
The Structure of Smoke | Vancouver
Jan 9 – Apr 12, 2026
Through the lens of contemporary artists’ engagement with the metaphorical and literal processes of fire and the spaces it creates and displaces, The Structure of Smoke includes works that problematize the poetic, structural and political aspects of fire. These works complicate the inherent contradictions of wildness and domestication, technological progress and social control, colonial conditions, rebirth and death. Holding a smoked mirror to contemporary society, the works in this exhibition offer ways to undo the familiar in how we approach our uncertain future
Fei Disbrow: The Familiar Unfamiliar | Vancouver’s North Shore
Jan 14 – Feb 28, 2026
To turn down the noise of daily life, Fei Disbrow seeks out-of-the-way places where she can find small, unusual organisms. It is in these places where she observes and records unfamiliar, miniature lifeforms which are integral to this body of Disbrow’s work. Her research focuses on cryptogams, resilient and ancient organisms that cover 30% of earth’s soil surface and play a foundational role in ecosystems around the globe. Found in the Arctic, the desert, forests and cities, they are global extremophiles thriving in hostile habitats, capable of surviving death-like desiccation. This exhibition explores the rich, often-overlooked world of cryptogams (mosses, lichens, and algae) through Disbrow’s sculptural work.
Contacting Image Worlds | Vancouver
Jan 16 – 24, 2026
Western Front presents a performance by Nina Davies in the form of an open rehearsal by the fictional Image Syncers. The performance extends Davies’ exhibition, which centres on a new video narrated through an episode of an invented podcast What’s Sizzlin’. In the episode, investigative journalist Teagan Carroll recounts her first encounter with an Image Syncer community at the Trio Comms Hall; a moment the live performance restages.
Paradisum by Recirquel (Hungary) | Vancouver
Jan 21 – 24, 2026
The stage as a living being: ineffable, transcendent is the atmosphere of Paradisum.
Hungary’s cirque dance company Recirquel, under the direction of the company’s artistic director and choreographer Bence Vági, brings intellectual rigour to traditional circus acts, braiding together vertiginous risk with a profound emotional core. Alive with a spiritual intelligence, Paradisum transfigures feats of strength and agility into iconographic images.
PuSh Festival | Vancouver
Jan 22 – Feb 8, 2026
The 2026 PuSh Festival is an invitation to the culturally fearless to those ready to step into fresh futurities and the expansive possibilities of live performance. In a time when dominant ways of knowing and being are collapsing into the polycrisis they have created, the artists gathered here embody ancestral and emergent ways of living, understanding, relating and dreaming.
Advance Theatre Festival | Burnaby
Jan 26 – 30, 2026
The Advance Theatre Festival 2026, produced by Ruby Slippers Theatre in association with the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts and Playwrights Guild of Canada, is curated by Zahida Rahemtulla. The Festival showcases new works written and directed by female identifying and gender non conforming artists who also identify as IBPOC.
Gloria Estefanell – Live Art Performance & Meet & Greet | Whistler
Jan 31, 2026
Get ready for a special, one-night only event filled with creativity, energy, and artistic discovery! Artist Gloria Estefanell will be joining Whistler Contemporary Gallery for an intimate evening where guests can explore her newest works, learn about her process, and experience a live performance featuring one of her sculptural pieces: a captivating extension of her iconic skier paintings.
Embodied Conversations: The Lillian and Billy Mauer Collection | Vancouver’s North Shore
Jan 31 – May 10, 2026
An exhibition of approximately 40 works from the collection of Montreal collectors, Lillian and Billy Mauer. Including photography, paintings and sculptures from this impressive international collection by artists such as Carrie May Weems, Lorraine O’Grady, John Baldessari, Rosemarie Trockel, Doug Aitken, Tatiana Trouvé, Huma Bhabha, Frank Bowling, Betty Goodwin, and Annette Messager. Often drawn to politically and socially engaged art, the exhibition will present a selection of works which represent the breadth of the collection.
ONGOING
Otani Workshop: Monsters in My Head | Vancouver
Until Jan 4, 2026
In his first North American solo, Japanese artist Otani Workshop turns the Alvin Balkind Gallery into a maze of earthen mounds, tree stumps, and stone, from which raw, endearing creatures—boys, bears, antlered spirits—are born simultaneously of the artist’s imagination and somehow, our memory. Much of the installation is built with materials foraged locally, and several works nod to the Pacific Northwest, shaped during Otani’s Deer Lake residency at Burnaby’s Shadbolt Centre.
Heather Woolley | Rammed Earth | Vancouver’s North Shore
Until Jan 14, 2026
Heather Woolley, an environmental designer and artist, finds inspiration in the West Coast’s landscapes. Her work fosters a dialogue between humanity and nature, emphasizing sustainability and community engagement.
Central to Heather’s practice is her passion project on rammed earth, where she explores the intersection of material technique, construction art, and sustainability. Through this endeavor, Heather aims to create enduring structures that harmonize with the environment while advocating for responsible building practices. Her goal is to inspire stewardship and sustainability in her viewers, promoting a deeper connection with the natural world.
Marika Echachis Swan ƛ̓upinup: A Circle Strong Enough to Hold Both Sides | Burnaby
Until Jan 25, 2026
Burnaby Art Gallery presents the first solo-exhibition by Marika Swan, in A Circle Strong Enough to Carry Both Sides. An artist of mixed Tla-o-qui-aht, Scottish, and Irish descent, Swan projects an unique emotional visual language onto her woodblock printmaking to depict the truth about the human experience through playful imaginings of spiritual realities, interpreting anew the traditional aesthetic of her Nuu-chah-nulth lineage.
Charles Atlas: Hail the New Puritan | Vancouver
Until Jan 25, 2026
Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery brings a cult landmark to the Alvin Balkind Gallery: Charles Atlas’s 1985–86 “docufantasy” film which follows Scottish choreographer Michael Clark through a day of rehearsals for his 1984 work New Puritan and into the nightlife in cutting style: part faux-cinéma vérité, part dance film, all post-punk London attitude. There’s cameos and music from The Fall and members of Wire, with Atlas bringing performance and portraiture together into one kinetic wave. Admission is free.
NDN Giver | Vancouver
Until Feb 22, 2026
NDN Giver explores the layered meanings within both everyday and extraordinary gifts that circulate through the potlatch. Blankets, coppers, canoes, prints, mugs, trade beads and devil’s club strung into necklaces all become carriers of law, memory, and relation to one another.
The title NDN Giver reclaims a phrase rooted in colonialism that mocked Indigenous generosity. In reality, the practice of giving upheld in the potlatch reflects the complexity of responsibilities in Indigenous governance and exchange. To give is to strengthen ties, and to receive is to take on the responsibility of carrying them forward.
Lee Miller: A Photographer At Work (1932—1945) | Vancouver’s North Shore
Until Feb 1, 2026
Famed American photographer Lee Miller was renowned for her work across a wide range of subject matter, from shooting perfume and cosmetics ads to reporting from war zones for the British edition of Vogue. The scope of her work may have been broad, but her vision was marked by a dedication to her craft, regardless of the subject. This exhibition tells the story of how she pivoted between dramatically different tones without sacrificing her creative voice.
What Bodies Know | Surrey
Until Feb 1, 2026
Reflecting on the lived experiences and social conditions of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, What Bodies Know explores how art can serve as a tool for community connection and transformative dialogue. Created by the artist group WePress, the exhibition presents their findings from leading community workshops centring on immunocompromised and disabled participants.
Geoffrey Farmer: Phantom Scripts | Whistler
Until Feb 2, 2026
From Vancouver-born, by way of Kaua’i, Hawai’i, artist Geoffrey Farmer, comes Phantom Scripts, a revisit to three works from the Audain Art Museum’s Permanent Collection — Vampire Archive, November 22, 1974 (2010 – 2025), The Politics of Appearing (2012 – 2025), and The Good Sweeper (2017 – 2025). The combined exhibition presents these sculptures and installations with new timely scripts, annotations and didactic texts from Farmer himself, reframing his works in light of ever-changing awareness and attention on colonial entanglements and queer disidentification. It’s a fascinating look at how time can transform not just the artist, but the art he creates as well.
Edge Effects | Burnaby
Until Feb 15, 2026
Ecologists use the term “edge effect” to describe the conditions created when two adjacent ecological communities meet. Edge conditions might be narrow and severe, like those of a forest meeting farmed land, or porous and deep, like the brackish water of a river estuary. The edge effects in such zones captivate scientists because they can support a uniquely abundant array of animal and plant life, allowing for rich and complex co-existence between species that would otherwise never interact.
The inaugural exhibit at The Gibson Art Museum at SFU’s Burnaby Mountain campus, Edge Effects features a collection of fifteen artists from various backgrounds and mediums. Ecologists use the term “edge effect” to describe the conditions created when two adjacent ecological communities meet. Edge conditions might be narrow and severe, like those of a forest meeting farmed land, or porous and deep, like the brackish water of a river estuary. The edge effects in such zones captivate scientists because they can support a uniquely abundant array of animal and plant life, allowing for rich and complex co-existence between species that would otherwise never interact.
Enemy Alien: Tamio Wakayama | Vancouver
Until Feb 22, 2025
The first major solo exhibition and retrospective of works by documentary photographer Tamio Wakayama, Enemy Alien spans over fifty years of images. Beginning with the civil rights movement in the southern US, Wakayama’s work became instrumental in documenting social justice movements and countercultures of the 1960s and 70s.
From Sea to Sky – The Art of British Columbia | Whistler
Until May 18, 2026
An extended presentation of the Audain’s made-from-BC holdings, featuring masks, paintings and photography, tracks the story of West Coast art from the 18th century to now. Discover one of the world’s preeminent collection of Northwest Coast First Nations masks, alongside important paintings by Emily Carr, and the dramatic photography of Jeff Wall, amongst others to get an in depth look at the cultural differences that continue to shape BC’s identity.
