Time and Place: Highlights from the Collection

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. Time and Place: 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, Time and Place 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.