Attractions Ontario Events

In 1991, during his tenure as Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, the Honourable Henry N. R. Jackman donated his historic collection of toy soldiers to the Royal Ontario Museum.

While there are a few of these collectables currently on display in the J.F. Driscoll Family Stair of Wonders, this new installation will showcase almost all of the Hal Jackman Toy Soldier Collection, which traces the historic life span of Britains Ltd., one of the world’s pioneers in the manufacturing of toy soldiers. Visitors are invited to enjoy the artistry and detail of this outstanding collection, and learn about the legacy of Britains Ltd.’s years of lead toy production from 1893-1966.

Made with novel cotton, vivid colours and exuberant design, the painted and printed cottons of India changed human history; they revolutionized art, fashion and science wherever they went around the globe. Featuring pieces from the Museum’s world-renowned collection, this ROM original exhibition explores how over thousands of years India’s artisans have created, perfected and innovated these printed and painted multicoloured cotton fabrics to fashion the body, honour divinities, and beautify palaces and homes.

Presenting the fascinating stories behind the people who made, commissioned, shipped, sold and ultimately used these pieces, TheCloth that Changed the World considers India’s textile innovations and their influences on art, trade and industry around the world in places as far as Cairo, Japan, Sumatra, London, and Montreal. They were the luxury fabric of their day, coveted by all, and one of the great inventions that drew foreigners to India’s shores hungry for more. Discover how through trade-routes, encounters, and exchange, these cloths connected cultures and, quite literally, changed the world.

Photo Detail from Indian ‘chintz’ hanging (palampore). 18th century. ROM 934.4.13. Gift of Mrs. Harry Wearne.

Mummies have captured our imagination throughout time. Uncover the secrets of six mummified individuals from ancient Egypt in this compelling exhibition from the British Museum. Using the latest technology explore how these people lived along the Nile and what happened to them after they died.

Egyptian Mummies: Ancient Lives. New Discoveries. presents unique insights into six mummies spanning 900 BCE to CE 180 including a priest’s daughter, a temple singer and a young child. Combining CT scans, digital visualizations and the latest research, this exhibition offers a fascinating glimpse into these ancient lives. Each mummy has a story to tell.

Image: Inner coffin of Nestawedjat, 25th Dynasty, about 700-680 BC, EA 22812a. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Acts of Erasure brings the two distinct artistic practices of Fatma Bucak and Krista Belle Stewart into dialogue. This pairing opens space for conversations around political identity concerning land and heritage, methodologies of historical repression and interpretation, and the act and effects of erasure. The exhibition is organized in partnership with Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.

Bucak was born in eastern Turkey and identifies as both Kurdish and Turkish, an identity inherently tied to the social realities of border landscapes. Her work expresses a negotiation and interrogation of the ideological and conceptual conditions of these liminal spaces. Stewart is a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Syilx (Okanagan) Nation in British Columbia. Her practice draws out personal and political narratives inherent in archival materials, while questioning their articulation in institutional histories.

The photographic emphasis in Bucak’s work is realized through sculptural forms. For this exhibition, she has reconfigured an earlier artwork, Remains of what has not been said (2016). The updated version embraces the gallery space to serve as a record of opposition to censorship, in the context of an absence of wider structural resistance. Bucak has produced several works in which she washes the newsprint from daily papers to represent incidents of suppression within the media. In Remains of what has not been said, stained water from the ink of 84 newspapers, printed on different days, has been bottled and held for all to witness. Each jar bears a note dating its contents, beginning with February 7, 2016—the day referred to as the “basement massacre,” when over 150 civilians were killed by Turkish security forces in Cizre, a Kurdish town close to the Syrian border. Each of Bucak’s photographs in this expansive series differs only slightly and becomes part of a chain that suggests how propaganda spreads and infiltrates society.

Another of her works, A Study of Eight Landscapes (2012–16), confronts the contingency of border spaces and the tenuous interdependency that resides within them. To produce these still-life photographs, Bucak worked collaboratively with people living and working near and across borderlands. The composed objects collected from these sites explore mental and material realities of spaces where conditions of life are highly dependent on the entities on either side of a border. The photographs present a stark view of transitional landscapes, such as those between the United States and Mexico, Turkey and Armenia, and Syria and Turkey.

Stewart’s work featured in this exhibition examines a contentious subculture in Germany. In 2006, she began researching and documenting the “Indianer”: a group of hobbyists who dress up and role-play based on depictions of North American Indigenous peoples in the books of 19th-century author Karl May. Stewart initially visited two towns in the east of the country to meet with “Indianer” members, and more recently, in 2019, she attended one of their annual summer gatherings. This period of research, which she describes as a form of “reverse anthropology,” has resulted in the mixed-media installation Truth to Material (2019–ongoing). The project thus far comprises a series of large photographic images taken in 2006, 2007, and 2019; a video; and two costume artifacts made by the “Indianers.” Through her work, Stewart exposes the complexity and absurdity of her presence and her interest in this community. Her receipt of faux relics by means of a pseudo-Indigenous custom is reflected in the way she exhibits them as museum-display objects. Similarly, by installing photographic evidence of the “Indianers’” activities as vinyl prints on the floor, Stewart both occupies a section of the gallery and forces us to walk upon and scuff the “Indianers’” acts of appropriation.

Despite their very different personal heritages and experiences, both Bucak and Stewart interrogate perceptions of cultural identity, indigeneity, and the notion of the nation-state. Through collaborative, research-focused art practices they probe shared historical constructions and fallacies. Their resulting works present encounters with truths that are both revealing and oftentimes unsettling.

Uprising: The Power of Mother Earth, co-produced by the Thunder Bay Art Gallery and Carleton University Art Gallery, is the first retrospective of Christi Belcourt’s work, and spans more than twenty-five years of her art-making career. The exhibition traces her practice from its beginnings in the early 1990s to the present, and concludes with recent works made collaboratively with Isaac Murdoch, an Anishinaabe knowledge keeper and emerging visual artist. Uprising: The Power of Mother Earth brings together more than thirty major Belcourt paintings on loan from numerous private and public collections including National Gallery of Canada, Wabano Centre for Aboriginal Health, Art Gallery of Ontario, Canadian Museum of History, Thunder Bay Art Gallery, and Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada. The exhibition also includes a selection of Murdoch’s iconic works, which have been featured prominently on the front lines of the Indigenous resistance movement against resource extraction. Together, these two artists produce powerful images that champion the restoration of balance between all living beings and the natural world, reflecting the deep traditions of Indigenous culture.

Remastered opens new windows on the Museum’s world-class collection of Persian, Turkish, and Mughal Indian manuscript paintings. Anchoring the exhibition will be a selection of 11 resplendent masterworks that rarely go on display.

Digital interactives developed in collaboration with Ryerson University Library will allow visitors to explore 40 additional pieces from the Collection and get immersed in heroic stories from the manuscripts.

Typically, only a small selection of the Museum’s manuscript paintings are on display at a given time. The intact manuscripts can only be left open to one 2-page spread, while individual folios, like other works on paper, can only be exhibited for so long before they sustain light-related damage.

To achieve this effect, the Exhibitions team partnered with Ryerson University Library to create 11 interactive hubs. These include: digital restorations of damaged works in the Collection, illustrating how a painting might have looked when it was originally completed; engaging interpretive animations of scenes depicted in the manuscripts; and lightboxes with 3-D visualizations of paintings from the Collection.

In addition, by scanning QR codes planted throughout the gallery, visitors can activate interactives on their smartphones, allowing them to delve into the history behind the masterworks and make connections to other objects in the Collection.

MOCA is working with Argentina-born, New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg to present three of her most recent film installations along with a number of sculptural works. This will be the first time that Rottenberg’s work is exhibited in Toronto. MOCA partnered with the New Museum, NYC back in 2017, to co-commission Rottenberg’s latest work, Spaghetti Blockchain, 2019. The exhibition at MOCA will feature this inspiring work alongside installations No Nose Knows, 2015 and Cosmic Generator, 2017.

The video Spaghetti Blockchain brings together seemingly irreconcilable worlds—Tuvan throat singers, filmed on the steppes of Siberia and Mongolia; surreal interiors of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva; the mechanical harvesting of a massive potato farm; ASMR-video-style scenarios with tingly overdubs of jiggling and sizzling—and places them in a kind of superfluous factory of her devising, whose primary product seems to be imagery that’s simultaneously pleasurable and queasily troubling.

Rottenberg is devoted to a rigorous practice that combines film, architectural installation, and sculpture to explore ideas of labor and the production of value in our contemporary hyper-capitalist world. The overall exhibition design is being planned with Rottenberg, who is developing her spatial practice to include a sustainable angle using unfinished/reusable materials.

Rottenberg has exhibited extensively internationally and has recently had solo exhibitions at the Sprengel Museum Hannover; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. In 2019 her work was included in the 16th Istanbul Biennial and the same year she was awarded the Kurt Schwitters Prize, a biennial award that recognizes artists who have made a significant contribution to contemporary art.

The exhibition is presented in partnership with Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal where it will be on view in 2021.

From its beginnings, the McMichael has had a long and proud history of collecting Indigenous art, now with more than 1,500 works ranging from eighteenth-century ceremonial regalia, through to items made for trade with settlers, to works by the vanguard of artists coming of age in the ’60s, 70s and 80s — among them Robert Houle, Carl Beam, Norval Morrisseau, Alex Janvier, Greg Staats, Faye HeavyShield and Shelly Niro — and onward to leading contemporary artists like Kent Monkman, Meryl McMaster and Rebecca Belmore. The McMichael also holds the West Baffin Eskimo Co-op’s landmark collection of original drawings from Cape Dorset (Kinngait) dating back to the 1950s, to be displayed alongside our deep holdings in Inuit drawings, prints, textiles, and sculpture. Early Days: Indigenous Art at the McMichael will gather the remarkable artworks together, and the stories that go with them, in an eight-month celebration of these powerful legacies. The show will also include recent acquisitions reflecting the diversity and vitality of Indigenous art in Canada today.

All-new photographs from around the world reveal striking wildlife, breathtaking landscapes, and the remarkable beauty of our natural world.

The longest-running and most prestigious nature photography competition in the world returns to the ROM for the eighth year in a row.

Whether you’re a nature lover, aspiring photographer, or simply love a perfectly captured moment, you will appreciate the talent and technical expertise required to photograph such rare and surprising glimpses of the diverse life on this planet.

Image: Blackwater light trails © Songda Cai. Featured in Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2019.

The Holiday Light Tour experience features a dazzling themed lighting display throughout the historic tunnels and gardens of the historic Casa Loma castle. Designed as a self-guided outdoor walk, guests may stroll through the property’s grounds at their own pace while enjoying the spectacular decorations and outdoor displays, including Ebenezer Scrooge’s Mansion from beloved seasonal classic, A Christmas Carol where the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future will thrill visitors of all ages.
Casa Loma’s Holiday Light Tour tickets are dated, timed and ticketed separately from General Admission at $35 per person, beginning from 4 PM onwards. Tickets for the Holiday Light Tour go on sale November 18th and are available online at casaloma.ca. Tickets for the Holiday Light Tour do not include admission to tour inside Casa Loma, guests can still purchase General Admission tickets to tour inside Casa Loma during the daytime from 9.30 AM – 5 PM. General Admission tickets are also available online at casaloma.ca