November 2025 Arts & Culture Events

The penultimate month of 2025 is here, and with it, a healthy offering of late fall/early winter artful events. From dialogue-inducing dance to gallery collections that celebrate what it means to live on the West Coast of Canada, there are many ways to feel a part of the artistic community throughout Metro Vancouver and Whistler! In case you’re itching to break out your holiday sweater, there are even a couple of festive, family-friendly outings before December comes.

 

Edges | Vancouver’s North Shore

Oct 24 – Nov 15, 2025

CityScape Community ArtSpace gathers five women artists—a painter, photographer, potter, sculptor, and poet/dancer—whose practices converge on the Gulf Islands’ tafoni sandstone, a land honeycombed, weather-carved, and increasingly fragile. A multidisciplinary weave of images, clay, form, and movement borne of the West Coast warn us to never take our home for granted.

 

 

You Used to Call Me Marie | Burnaby

Nov 5 – 6, 2025

Arts Club on Tour brings a Savage Society and NAC Indigenous Theatre production of Tai Amy Grauman’s epic love story to the Shadbolt for three exclusive shows. Eight intertwined stories trace one Alberta Métis woman’s lineage across the plains. Scored with live music, from French fiddle to contemporary country, and era-spanning dance, Marie’s story tells of the Métis resilience through the fur trade and political uprisings in the 1930s to the present day.

 

 

Ocean Film Festival Canada 2025 | Vancouver’s North Shore

Nov 6, 2025

The renowned international film festival celebrating the beauty and vital importance of our oceans is back for another year at the Centennial Theatre on November 6. Equal parts educating and beautiful, a spate of films about divers, surfers, oceanographers and marine life in waters all over the world make for a profound evening of cinema at the Centennial Theatre.

 

 

TRILOGY | Vancouver

Nov 6 – 8, 2025

The season opener from Ballet BC is a TRILOGY of electric dance performances. Italian choreographer Sofia Nappi presents the world premiere of New Nappi, her first creation for Canadian audiences. Then Ballet BC Artistic Director Medhi Walerski returns with his work for seven dancers that imbues the language of movement with elegance and nuance in SWAY. Finally, BOLERO X is back by popular demand. Shahar Binyamini’s 50-dancer epic is a pure celebration of dance set to composer Maurice Ravel’s 1928 masterpiece, Bolero.

 

 

We who have known tides: Indigenous Art from the Collection | Vancouver

Nov 6 – Apr 12, 2026

This new exhibition takes pieces predominantly from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s permanent collection and asks what it means to live at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Tides shape the land but also the work of Indigenous artists, as they process their relation to territory and the community. Curator Camille Georgeson-Usher invites us to take a closer look at place and change, from shoreline to open sea.

 

 

Within the mould; Against the Grain | Surrey

Nov 7 – Feb 21, 2026

At The Black Arts Centre, co-curators Vanessa Fajemisin and Olumoroti Soji-George gather lens-based works, schematics, and sonic installations by Tati au Miel, Odartey Aryee, Isabel Okoro, and DeForrest Brown Jr in an exhibition inspired by Brown Jr’s  Assembling a Black Counter-Culture and other writing on Black popular culture and identity. This intimate show combines image, sound, and theory into a living study of how Black culture is made, named, and resisted.

 

 

Holiday Craft Market | Burnaby

Nov 8 – 9, 2025

Get a jump on your Christmas shopping at Confederation Seniors’ Centre, where 35+ local artisans peddle their pottery, textiles, jewelry, candles, and small-batch treats. It’s a vibe, with some festive low-stress browsing amongst some seriously unique stocking-stuffing.

 

 

The Chutzpah! Festival | Vancouver

Nov 12 – 23, 2025

One of the Metro Vancouver’s most lively and distinctive events returns to Vancouver with another calendar of unforgettable performances. Spread over 11 days, the festival mixes theatre, dance, comedy, and storytelling to create something that can only be summed up as Chutzpah!

 

 

Lumiere 2025 | Vancouver

Nov 13 – 15, 2025

A series of interactive art installations light up Vancouver this November! Scattered throughout Downtown from the West End to Gastown, light installations in public spaces will brighten the parks and plazas and bring wonder to the winter during the early dark night of winter.

 

 

From Sea to Sky – The Art of British Columbia | Whistler

Nov 13 – 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.

 

 

Marika Echachis Swan ƛ̓upinup: A Circle Strong Enough to Hold Both Sides | Burnaby

Nov 14 – 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.

 

 

Katria Phothong-McKinnon | Vancouver

Nov 17 – 19, 2025

The Tri-City Ballroom Project brings Queer Thai-Canadian artist Katria Phothong-McKinnon’s tech-meets-movement installation event to the Scotiabank Dance Centre. Two 16-square foot LED matrix cubes are the stars of Impetus in which traditional Thai dance, Voguing and w*acking explore identity, digital existence and cultural preservation on a 10-minute, visually arresting, interdisciplinary loop.

 

 

Eastside Culture Crawl | Vancouver

Nov 20 – 23, 2025

Each November, artists in Vancouver’s Eastside open their studios to the public as part of the Eastside Culture Crawl Visual Arts, Design & Craft Festival. Step inside the creative spaces of painters, jewelers, sculptors, furniture makers, weavers, potters, printmakers, photographers, glassblowers!

 

 

Ancestral Echoes Dance Symposium | Surrey

Nov 22, 2025

Join the Surrey Art Gallery for an afternoon of dance and dialogue on how movement carries memory across generations at Ancestral Echoes. The program begins with Toronto-based artist Brandy Leary’s sculptural installation Ephemeral Artifacts, followed by Justine A. Chambers and Simran Sachar’s Today is the evening to strike lightning / Aaj To Bijiliyan Girane Ki Shaam, a powerful invocation of dancing mothers and bodily reclamation. All are invited then to stay for a conversation around the themes of the day.

 

 

The Clayton Coffee House | Surrey

Nov 28, 2026

Come out and support local aspiring and established poets, spoken-word artists, novelists, musicians, improvisers and comedians at The Clayton Coffee House, an all new community-driven performance space! If you’re an artist interested in performing, sign up before November 27.

 

 

Edmonds Festival of Lights | Burnaby

Nov 29, 2025

Swing into the Christmas season with a festive and free family event in and around the Edmond’s Community Centre!Make holiday crafts with the kids, and get an early one-on-one with the Big Man himself.

 

 

Ongoing Events

 

Abbas Akhavan: One Hundred Years – Vancouver

Until Dec 7, 2025

Examining how time is represented in narrative spaces, One Hundred Years uses site-specific installations, video and sculpture to explore meaning in various forms of reality. From stage to set to gallery, Abbas Akhavan finds a natural duality in each piece, whether it be hospitality and hostility, or institutional and domestic.

 

 

Potlatch Gifts – Vancouver

Until Jan 25, 2026

Centred on the act of gift-giving within potlatch traditions, this exhibition explores how the concept of reciprocity has evolved over time. As the first solo curatorial show from the Bill Reid Gallery’s Assistant Curator, Amelia Rea (Haida), Potlatch Gifts features multiple artists and numerous thoughtfully crafted items which have been gifted to others. Shown within the context of historical photos, this is an excellent chance to learn about tradition, craftsmanship, and the art of creating a gesture.

 

 

Christos Dikeakos: The Collectors – Vancouver’s North Shore

Until Dec 14, 2025

Showcasing portraits of art collectors from around BC and the world, this photo series presents a community whose love for art goes beyond passion. Sitting alongside their art collections, you can get a glimpse into the psyche of people on a journey of inspiration that can span a lifetime.

 

 

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.

 

 

Charles Atlas: Hail the New Puritan – Vancouver

Oct 3 – 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.

 

 

Geoffrey Farmer: Phantom Scripts – Whistler

Oct 2, 2025 – 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.