May 11 – December 31, 2024
Harbourfront Centre
The Harbourfront Centre in Toronto is known for its diverse range of visual arts and craft & design exhibitions, particularly vibrant during the summer months.
It’s a season of new (and free!) Visual Arts installations, like Alex McLeod’s sprawling surrealist work Liquid – Gold, the conceptual and quirky Micah Adams: Reworking, delightful perspectives on jewellery’s most storied piece, Thirty-Six Brooches (supported by The RBC Foundation), and a look at the dire cost of consumption in Human Made Stuff.
Visual Arts Exhibitions
Harbourfront Centre’s visual arts exhibitions often feature contemporary artists from various backgrounds, showcasing a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, photography, and mixed media. The summer exhibitions usually emphasize themes relevant to current societal issues, cultural identity, and innovative artistic practices.
Craft & Design Exhibitions
The Craft & Design exhibitions at Harbourfront Centre highlight the work of emerging and established designers and artisans. These exhibitions typically feature textiles, ceramics, glass, and metalwork. They often explore the intersection of traditional craftsmanship and modern design, emphasizing sustainability, functionality, and aesthetic innovation.
2024 Summer Exhibitions
June 28 – July 22 | Not From Around Here, Alexa Samuels
Exhibition ONTARIO
Not From Around Here is Alexa Samuels’ love letter to her hometown of Toronto and other places she’s visited. Her art celebrates urban streetscapes by shining unconventional light on hidden corners, back alleys, architectural underbellies and everyday landscapes’ seeming mundaneness. Her art turns iconic landmarks on their heads and rejoices in unsung street art. What begins as panoramic landscape photographs, Samuels’ images twist and turn, transforming into visuals that surprise, baffle and yet feel reassuringly familiar.
June 1 – September 2 | Performative Painting: LOOK PAINT REPEAT + International Passport Paintings
Exhibition NETHERLANDS, CANADA
The exhibition covers a range of works from the last five years, addressing the world’s many challenges, particularly in the United States, where Wittenbols currently resides. During the pandemic, Wittenbols situated her own artworks in her garden or studio and painted them from observation. She views these “paintings of paintings” as a memento mori or vanitas. This summer, she will work at Harbourfront Centre and continue the LOOK PAINT REPEAT from her art and installations on display. Wittenbols will also experiment with new directions in her practice, leaving them on view and in progress, giving us a glimpse into her migrating studio.
For her multi-city International Passport Paintings, a project about freedom and identity, visitors are invited to participate in her artistic process. She will produce eight passport paintings per day, inspired by the days of analog photography. Wittenbols, as passport painting officer, creates a swift portrait at her migration desk with water-soluble oil paint on archival paper.
Visitors must register for an appointment. Appointments will be scheduled at 30-minute intervals. The actual portrait will take approximately 15 minutes or less. Appointments can also be made in person at our Information Desk. Each passport portrait will accumulate in a large grid installation until the end of the exhibition. Individual portraits will then be mailed to each participant in a special sleeve.
May 11 – September 2 | Micah Adams: Reworking
Exhibition ONTARIO
A past Artist-in-Residence at Harbourfront Centre’s Craft & Design Studio, Micah Adams’s conceptual practice is beautifully executed and consists of sculpture, jewellery and drawings, playing with the appealing aspects of scale and using his favourite tool-du-jour, the laser welder. While rescuing the forgotten and unwanted detritus of human activity – coins are a particular preoccupation – Adams gives them value through his reworking and puttering, creating new works that are at once lovely and peculiar.
May 11 – September 2 | Human Made Stuff
Exhibition ONTARIO
Award-winning artists Suzanne Carlsen and Noah Rosen present Human Made Stuff, a retrospective look at the immensity of human-made “stuff” produced on Earth since the Industrial Revolution. What is the cost of such excess on our mental and social well-being? As small business owners and makers, Suzanne and Noah explore the possibilities of what happens when we commit to producing less with more intention.
May 11 – December 31 | Liquid, Gold
Exhibition ONTARIO
While a photo-based artist, Toronto-based Alex McLeod has collaborated with fashion and music artists in new media, like Gord Downie, Nelly Furtado, Nike and Condé Nast. In this latest exhibition of new work, images of abstract island oases are conjured by creating delicate structures inspired by the concepts of resilience and adaptation. Viewers are beckoned to immerse themselves in the embrace of coral, flora, precious metal, water and gems, meant to reflect nature’s bounty as a testament to the fluidity of existence, renewal and transformation.
May 10 – September 2 | Thirty-Six Brooches
Exhibition ONTARIO
Curated by Melanie Egan, the Director of Harbourfront Centre’s Craft & Design Studio, this new jewellery exhibition features 36 hand-selected brooches designed by some of Canada’s most talented contemporary jewellers. The exhibition explores the story and symbolism behind one of jewellery’s most storied pieces and how brooches communicate messages of love, social critique, politics, status and wealth.
To September 2 | Woven Into Refinement
Exhibition
For centuries, the island nation of Taiwan has sustained the growing habitats of bamboo, bulrush and banana throughout the country due to its humid, subtropical climate. Woven into Refinement: A Sampling of Contemporary Fibre Works from Taiwan uses the fibre found in these plant species. This exhibition, in collaboration with four weaving design studios, takes time-honoured techniques
To December 31 | Clouds of Colour - Amanda McCavour
Exhibition
This piece, commissioned for Harbourfront Centre’s main entrance foyer is conceived as both drawing and sculpture. Hundreds of units hang from single points creating a tactile setting filled with line, colour and movement that activates this passageway and gathering place.
About Harbourfront Centre
Harbourfront Centre is an international centre for contemporary arts, culture and ideas, and a registered, charitable not-for-profit cultural organization operating a 10-acre campus on Toronto’s central waterfront. Harbourfront Centre provides year-round programming 52 weeks a year, seven days a week, supporting a wide range of artists and communities.
