More than 200 works. Over 100 artists. One exhibition.

Permanent collection exhibitions are vital to a collecting institution, offering insight into both a visual history of place and the values that define the museum today.

Highlights from the Collection is drawn entirely from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s permanent collection and will be presented over a three-year period, with scheduled rotations of works on paper and photography.

This exhibition traces the evolving history of the Gallery’s collection through the environments in which art has lived, circulated and gathered meaning. From historical paintings to contemporary installations, artworks are presented in groupings that reflect the cultural and aesthetic contexts in which they were originally shown, including the formal arrangements of a salon-style installation, the domestic space of a modernist home, the experimental spaces of artist-run centres and the white cube galleries of the twenty-first-century museum.

Featuring art from this region while situating it within a wider global context, Highlights from the Collection considers how local developments connect to international movements. Ultimately, it tells a story—through the shifting of values, voices and aesthetic visions—of how art is shaped by place, and how place, in turn, is shaped by art.

Step inside a 360° experience set within some of British Columbia’s last remaining ancient forests, offering both an adventure for the senses and an ecological awakening.

Presented as part of the exhibition Future Geographies: Art in the Century of Climate Change, SANCTUARY: The Ancient Forest Experience is an immersive installation created by artist, ethnobotanist, educator and activist Dr. T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss in collaboration with filmmakers Damien Gillis and Olivier Leroux.

At the heart of the exhibition is a life-sized replica of an 1,800-year-old red cedar. Inside, visitors enter a geodesic dome where a stunning 360° film transports them deep into some of British Columbia’s last remaining ancient forests—places rarely seen, increasingly threatened and profoundly sacred.

SANCTUARY features the Inland Temperate Rainforest in BC’s Kootenay region and the Dakota Bear Ancient Forest, known to the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) People as Stal’Kaya (Home of the Sea Wolves) and located on the Sunshine Coast in the unceded territory of the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation). These rich, intact forests, which have evolved since the last Ice Age, are set in stark contrast with nearby clear-cuts and tree plantations.

Narrated by Dr. Wyss, this multi-sensory work is accompanied by a layered soundscape of birdsong, flowing streams and waterfalls. It also highlights the flora and fauna of these ecosystems, including culturally modified trees, living evidence of the Squamish Nation’s long-term care and use of Stal’Kaya. Red and yellow cedars, traditionally used to make canoes, paddles, baskets and other vital cultural objects, feature prominently in the film, with a selection of works displayed in the gallery.

In 2021, following more than a decade of advocacy to halt logging in Stal’Kaya, the Squamish Nation and the Government of British Columbia reached an agreement to protect the forest. The film also explores ongoing efforts by the Valhalla Wilderness Society to protect the Inland Temperate Rainforest. While the creation of the Incomappleux Ancient Forest Conservancy in 2023 marked an important step forward, many ancient forests in the Kootenays remain unprotected—an increasingly critical pursuit in the era of climate change.

As the environmental crisis accelerates, artists around the world are responding with urgency, insight and vision. Future Geographies: Art in the Century of Climate Change is the first major exhibition in Canada to examine the intersection of the climate crisis and contemporary art on a global scale.

Featuring works from the past 25 years, this exhibition underscores the urgency and relevance of sustainability and the environment as defining issues of our time. More than 35 works across a range of media—from large-scale video installations to living sculptures—invite viewers to confront pressing questions about our shared future on this planet.

Presented across multiple floors, Future Geographies includes a newly commissioned work by Jeffrey Gibson and marks the first time several artists are exhibiting in Vancouver, including Teresita Fernández, Josh Kline, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Jean Shin and Clarissa Tossin. The exhibition also features major works by BC–based artists such as Brian Jungen, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun, connecting global issues with local specificity. Together, the works in this exhibition invite dialogue and create space for imagining.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Vancouver Art Gallery is partnering with the University of British Columbia Climate Action Lab to create unique platforms for cross disciplinary dialogue. After its presentation at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Future Geographies will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Future Geographies will continue on the Gallery’s 4th Floor with the immersive installation SANCTUARY: The Ancient Forest Experience, by Dr. T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss, Damien Gillis and Olivier Leroux, and a presentation of cedar works by local artists, curated by Dr. Wyss.

A public artwork by Cannupa Hanska Luger will be featured on a billboard on 1611 E Hastings Street (near Commercial Drive) and is a collaboration with Capture Photography Festival.

Becoming: The Art of Gu Xiong traces the evolution of Gu Xiong’s artistic practice and the major influences that defined it. Gu has exhibited in Canada, China, Italy and the USA in more than 40 solo shows and three public art commissions, but Becoming is the most comprehensive display of his work. Highlighting landmark pieces from his 50-year career, the exhibition showcases the pivotal moments that shaped his creative vision—serving as a roadmap of his artistic evolution from the 1970s to the present day and beyond.

Born in Chongqing, China and based in Vancouver, BC, Gu spent time as a labourer during the Cultural Revolution, faced challenges as a Canadian immigrant, built an academic career as a professor at UBC, and explored global migration—all the while committing to his artistic practice.

An internationally recognized multidisciplinary artist, Gu works across mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, video, and site-specific installations. His work redefines how we understand migration, hybridity, and globalization. Highlights include Enclosures (1989-2026), an installation not seen since the 1989 China/Avant-Garde Exhibition; the Crushed Cans painting and silkscreen print series (1991-93), an embodiment of Gu’s experience with culture shock; and Yellow Cargo (2016-26) a large-scale installation that explores globalization through the lens of migrant workers in Canada.

Emily Hermant is the inaugural artist in our new Vancouver Now! exhibition series, highlighting artists whose work is both timely and closely tied to this city.

Since arriving in Vancouver in 2016, Hermant has steadily built a reputation as an artist to watch. The exhibition will highlight her weavings, which are laboriously crafted from the wires and data cables of the technologies that envelop us, thoughtfully shifting the speed and focus of our attention. They invite viewers to move from the frenetic virtual experiences that increasingly characterize our daily lives to an unhurried and surprisingly aesthetically satisfying consideration of the material basis of that simulated world.

Although the works are beautiful in reproduction, their full effect can be experienced only in person. As they are approached, each work, which initially appears like an abstract or highly stylized painting or textile, transforms to reveal its materiality as a structure of coloured, insulated wires and data cables.

History Paintings features the works of renowned painters Gordon Hookey (Waanyi people) and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun (Cowichan, Hul’q’umi’num’ Coast Salish; and Okanagan, Syilx). Set within the artists’ respective homelands of Australia and Canada, their works offer vivid and powerful reinterpretations of a painting genre typically associated with mythological and classical narratives. Hookey and Yuxweluptun embrace the monumental, confronting colonial histories from an Indigenous perspective with canvases as rich as they are expansive.

One of the most distinguished Australian artists of his generation, Hookey creates paintings that re-envision significant moments in his home country’s history. In MURRILAND! 2, key figures and events from pre-colonization to the present day are amalgamated into one continuous narrative, offering a radical revisioning of language, national identity, and cultural value. Hookey’s tableaus collapse seemingly disparate concepts, combining satire and mourning, violence and beauty, and resistance with love. 

Yuxweluptun’s work similarly confronts the construction of national histories, drawing on the visual language of landscape painting to expose the ongoing effects of environmental exploitation. Working in direct opposition to Canada’s Group of Seven, whose paintings helped to construct an image of the country as untouched wilderness, Yuxweluptun’s remarkable Global Warming: Wildfire Storms—the artist’s largest painting to date—reveals the contradictions embedded within these prevailing nationalistic and cultural narratives and compels us to look directly at the environmental devastation we have wrought. 

Jana Sterbak has had a significant impact on contemporary art, artists and audiences for close to fifty years. This exhibition presents a selective overview of Sterbak’s practice, celebrating her pivotal contributions to art history and offering a rare opportunity to experience her work firsthand. Dimensions of Intimacy features innovative early work that pushes material and sculptural norms, wearable structures that merge object with performance, significant video and film work, as well as rarely exhibited artist editions, photographs and drawings from Sterbak’s own collection.

Western Front is pleased to present a solo exhibition by artist and filmmaker Saodat Ismailova. Bringing together two films Melted Into the Sun (2024) and To the Throat of the Sun (2026) in a site-specific installation, the exhibition explores light as a political and spiritual force through which history, memory, and myth are continually remade.

Rooted in the layered histories of Central Asia, Ismailova’s films draw on oral traditions and cosmologies to trace ancestral knowledge that persists despite political and environmental upheavals. Raised in post-Soviet Uzbekistan, her engagement with the region’s histories and cinematic traditions shapes a practice attuned to spiritual longing, ecological transformation, and fractured relationships to the land. Moving between past, present, and future, her works bring the forgotten, silenced, or erased into dialogue with the present, where memory is carried through ritual, landscape, and relations between the human, more-than-human, and mystical.

Installed alongside kurpachas—traditional Central Asian quilted mattresses that accompany life from birth to death—the films unfold around the enigmatic al-Muqannaʿ (The Veiled One), an eighth-century spiritual and political leader. After leading a revolutionary movement, al-Muqannaʿ became a mythical figure, and legend holds that he wore a veil to conceal a radiant light emanating from his face. Through his story, Ismailova explores tensions between revelation and concealment, spiritual knowledge and political authority, and how visions of collective emancipation remain entangled with violence and sacrifice.

Bringing together ancient Iranian and Islamic philosophies, archival material, and filmed landscapes, Melted Into the Sun is guided by light as myth, revelation, and cinematic material, reflecting on the afterlives of revolution and the environmental legacy of Soviet nuclear testing in Central Asia. Rather than presenting the past as fixed or linear, Ismailova approaches it as cyclical, continually rewritten as memory moves through bodies, places, and systems of belief. The film traces the entanglement of revolution, cosmology, and land, suggesting each shapes the others.

Cradled Origins is a selection of artworks that features eight emerging and mid-career First Nations artists working in a variety of mediums. Through carvings, weavings, paintings and beadwork, each artist honours the cultural knowledge that they carry and hold while expanding the boundaries of their individual practices. Demonstrated in this exhibition are examples of those connections and the understanding of the weight and importance of teachings that have been passed down from generation to generation.

Co-curated by the Bill Reid Gallery curators Aliya Boubard and Carmen Redunante, this exhibition features the work of Chase Gray, Chico Seitcher, Delphine Campbell, Grace Edwards, James Kwaksistala, Kashka Clellamin, Randi Ball and Serena Steel.

Resonant Bodies explores the intersections of displacement, reconnection, and the inherent animacy of more-than-human beings. Naomi Watkins is from the Secwépemc nation, from BC’s southern interior. Their work challenges anthropocentric perspectives on belonging, aiming to spark critical dialogue regarding identity, revealing that our sense of place is a collaborative experience shaped by both human history and the living landscapes we inhabit.

To encounter the contemporary Indigenous experience through the lens of a two-spirit Secwépemc artist raised away from unceded homelands is to confront the geography of proximal displacement. In this exhibition, spatial dislocation is not merely charted along the asphalt highway connecting the urban sprawl of Vancouver to the inland rivers of Kamloops; it resides in the subtle, enduring friction between presence and absence, ancestral memory and diaspora.

Watkins reflects, “While working with these cedar beings, I became more and more attentive to the offcuts and natural forms that emerged from carving, noticing that they seemed to speak for themselves when I worked alongside them rather than carving something representational. This became part of a larger process of figuring myself out and returning to the stories and relationships that shaped me while growing up away from my nation. Through these gestures, I have found an intimate threshold that I want to linger within–a space where I can consider proximity, displacement and belonging while being generative and careful.

These works are an attempt to remain open to that learning and to the ancestral stories resting within cedar grain, moving through green-hued lakes and carried across each limb of sand. In this way, Resonant Bodies offers a continued gesture outward: a call to keep listening, keep learning and keep returning to the relationships that make this connection and care possible.”

Equinox Gallery is pleased to present You Are Here, an exhibition of photographs taken by German-Canadian photographer Fred Herzog during the 1950s and 60s. Although Herzog photographed neighbourhoods throughout Vancouver for over 50 years, this exhibition presents a selection of images taken within a five-square kilometer radius of the Fairmont Pacific Rim, offering a glimpse into the city’s history through the eyes of a pioneering figure in early colour street photography.

This is an off-site exhibition, located at the Fairmont Pacific Rim:
The Pacific Gallery
Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel
1038 Canada Place
Vancouver BC

Making its Canadian premiere at the Chinese Canadian Museum, Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form is the most comprehensive exhibition ever assembled on the rich history and global influence of Asian comics.

Organized by Barbican Centre and curated by renowned comics historian, journalist, and writer Paul Gravett, the exhibition features more than 400 original artworks, rare publications, and multimedia installations from across Asia. From early graphic traditions to contemporary digital innovations, the exhibition reveals how comics have chronicled history, reimagined mythology, challenged censorship, inspired popular culture, and transformed the global language of visual storytelling.

Presented exclusively at the Chinese Canadian Museum, the Vancouver presentation includes a new exhibition section curated by Olivia Chow, Director of Curatorial Programs. Expanding the internationally touring exhibition, it spotlights the work of Chinese Canadian artists and authors whose stories invite visitors to consider the many ways diaspora shapes identity, memory, family, and belonging. Journeying from reclaimed histories and personal narratives to coming-of-age stories and explorations of inheritance, resistance, and self-discovery, these works demonstrate how comics preserve memory, challenge inherited narratives, and create space for identity, belonging, and self-expression across generations.

Together, the exhibition reveals the extraordinary power of comics to connect histories, cultures, and communities across Asia and its diasporas.

We are excited to present Portals, a new exhibition and special project with Sierra Barber. Barber is a Mohawk/Mixed-European artist from Port Dover, Ontario, registered at Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. Working primarily with oil paint and glass seed beads, she brings together two materials with very different histories to explore memory, cultural continuity, transformation, and connection.

Her paintings draw on the beaded souvenirs and ‘whimsies’ that Mohawk and Tuscarora communities made for tourists around Niagara Falls in the nineteenth century, objects that carried Haudenosaunee knowledge and symbolism beneath their Victorian-inspired decoration. Using both vintage and contemporary beads, Barber retraces and transforms these historic forms, bringing in recurring motifs like the strawberry, a symbol of life and ancestry that also reflects her hometown’s agricultural landscape. Her beaded frames, inspired by the whimsy picture frame, become thresholds and vessels for memory, speaking to how cultural knowledge, love, and inheritance are carried through the body across generations.

Equinox Gallery is pleased to present PSYOP, an exhibition of new paintings by Heiltsuk artist Shawn Hunt.

In PSYOP, Hunt pushes his painting practice into new territory, using a striking black-and-white and neon green palette to explore defining modern anxieties: artificial intelligence, surveillance, and algorithmic control. By favouring bold contours and dramatic contrasts, these works transform Hunt’s Neoformline style into complex, interlocking visual narratives. Traditional motifs take on unexpected contemporary meanings: an ovoid suggests a server node, a U-form becomes an enclosure, and a crest figure converts into a motherboard. This exhibition demonstrates Hunt’s continuing capacity to evolve while remaining connected to his cultural foundations. Hunt’s paintings bring an ancient and living visual language into an encounter with the extraordinary pressures of the twenty-first century.

Nour Mobarak (b. 1985, Cairo, Egypt) lives and works between Bainbridge Island, WA and Athens, Greece. Her recent presentations include the 2026 Whitney Biennial, New York; the 2026 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Saudi Arabia; WIELS, Brussels (2025); Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2025); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2024-25); Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Art Contemporanea, Turin (2024), Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2023); California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2024); and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2022). Her performances have been staged at venues such as the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2022), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2020), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019), LAXART, Los Angeles (2019), Stadslimeit, Antwerp (2016), and Cambridge University, UK (2010), amongst many others.

Leslie Thornton (b. 1951, Tennessee) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions and screenings include the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Lightcone, Paris; MoMA, New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Tate Modern, London; Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nürnberg; Malmö Konsthall, Malmö and Secession, Vienna. Her work is held in numerous public collections, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Harvard University, Cambridge; Museum of Modern Art, New York; School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. Thornton trained at MIT (1976) and at Harvard University (1974). She holds an MFA from The Hartford Art School (1976), a BFA from SUNY Buffalo, (1973), and was a mathematics major at Tufts University (1969–1971).