Galleries defining Toronto’s diverse art scene

Toronto may have Canada’s largest concentration of major art institutions, but it’s the city’s experimental spirit that sets the creative tempo. Great works often get shown outside of the commercial gallery system, in non-profit or artist-run spaces, untethered from market pressures.

You’ll find art in unusual places: laneway garages, alleyway basements, whisky distilleries, or mounted on the exteriors of buildings. And as one of the most multicultural cities in the world, its art reflects this rich vibrancy; a tangle of Indigenous and diasporic narratives that together tell the unofficial, authentic story of this now-glassy, vertiginous Toronto.

Art Gallery of Ontario

Best for: A Frank Gehry-designed institution with a vast collection
Address: 317 Dundas Street West, Toronto, ON M5T 1G4
Price: 30 CAD entry

At the turn of the 20th century, Sir Edmund Walker, the art-loving banker and philanthropist, warned that the fate of a nation without a home for its culture was doomed. Thus, he and a like-minded group founded the Art Museum of Toronto. When aristocrat Harriet Boulton Smith donated her family manor to house its collection ten years later, it became one of the largest art institutions in North America. It was later redesigned by Frank Gehry, turning the building itself into a work of art.

Today, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) spans a 120,000-work collection: Napoleonic prisoner-of-war ship models, mystical landscapes by the Group of Seven, several European masterpieces (Rembrandt, Reubens) and a sizable collection of Inuit art. Maybe you’ll get a show on Diane Arbus, or a multidisciplinary exhibition that tells the Canadian story of hip-hop. Or maybe you’ll go for Friday night drag bingo.

Cooper Cole

Best for: Sharp, globally minded contemporary art
Address: 1134 Dupont Street and, 1136 Dupont Street, Toronto ON M6H 2A2
Price: Free entry

A discipline-agnostic, light-filled haven for emerging and mid-career contemporary artists. Founder Simon Cole has described it more as an art gallery in Canada than a Canadian art gallery. The result is a programme of snappy, thoughtful group shows featuring artists such as the buzzy German-Korean photographer Heji Shin or the Vancouver-born Guggenheim fellow Sarah Cwynar. There’s also a strong roster of emerging local artists too, across a breadth of mediums. It’s a small operations team that balances sensuous pleasure with intellectual rigour.

Corkin Gallery

Best for: Fine photography and contemporary art in a former whisky tank house
Address: 7 Tank House Lane, Toronto, ON M5A 3C4
Price: Free entry

The most important thing is, of course, the art. But it’s still impressive to walk into a former whisky tank house and find a gorgeous 10,000 square-foot gallery. Original hardwood floors from the 1950s, soaring Douglas fir beams and 18-foot ceilings provide the backdrop for contemporary art curated by Jane Corkin. She was among the first in Canada’s art world to take photography seriously and her gallery, founded in 1979, houses one of the largest collections in North America. It has been instrumental in exposing Toronto audiences to 20th century masters: Robert Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn, Nan Golden, Diane Arbus. She also has a great eye for colourful, abstract works that play with texture and materiality.

Daniel Faria Gallery

Best for: Playful, discerning contemporary works
Location: 188 St Helens Avenue, Toronto, ON M6H 4A1
Price: Free entry

There wasn’t much on this industrial west end strip when Daniel Faria founded his gallery in a converted auto body shop back in 2011. Its arrival helped inaugurate a dense creative enclave in the Junction Triangle, making for an excellent art crawl from Gallery TPW to Clint Roenisch Gallery next door, before continuing on to Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto and a scattering of nearby warehouse galleries.

Past exhibitions have included lush abstract paintings by Kristin Moran, which deform and reconstitute the Georgian Bay landscape; a solo exhibit by local legend June Clark; and an absurd, playful collection of sculptures from Douglas Coupland, the Canadian novelist and art world heavyweight. There’s a discerning but playful eye at work here.

Hunt Gallery & The Plumb

Best for: Artist-run space for eclectic, emerging talent
Address: 1278 St. Clair Ave W, Unit 8, Toronto, ON M6E 1B9; 1655 Dufferin Street, Toronto, ON M6H 3L9
Price: Free entry

Daniel Hunt conceives of his galleries as a treatise on “the beauty and challenge of looking.” He was an artist before he was a gallerist – hence the phenomenological artspeak – and has a clear commitment to showcasing emerging and perhaps overlooked local artists. The ethos at Hunt, tucked on the upper level of an unassuming multi-business block on St. Clair West is often eclectic and playful.

The Plumb, a 2,000-foot basement in an alleyway a few blocks away, is also co-managed by Hunt but run by artists, leaning more whacky and experimental. It provides a vital and inclusive space for all mediums. They’ve even made the bar in the main lobby into wall space, so artists can apply to have their work — even sculpture — shown there, stipend included.

Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art

Best for: Boundary-pushing sculpture, sound and video art
Address: 1286 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON M6H 1N9
Price: Free entry

In 1979, 12 “diehard formalists” paid 1,500 CAD each and leased a building on Mercer Street as a space dedicated to contemporary artists who were not being shown in private or commercial galleries. The project later moved to a former cinema on Bloor Street in 2008, where it has since evolved into an artist-run centre and testing ground for risky, experimental sculptural, sound and video-based work that would be unlikely to find support within larger institutions. Past exhibits, for example, have included Danielle Dean’s sci-fi inspired anti-colonial portrait of her hometown Hemel Hempstead.

On its east-facing wall, a public billboard commissions site-specific installations by artists including Lotus Laurie Kang and Alize Zorlutuna.

Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)

Best for: Imposing works in a soaring gallery setting
Address: 158 Sterling Road #100, Toronto, ON M6R 2B7
Price: 14 CND entry

Back when this was the Tower Automotive Building, it was one of the tallest structures in Toronto: ten storeys of soaring ceilings, concrete mushroom pillars, and natural light. This industrial scale (55,000 square feet, spread across five floors), allows MOCA to stage large-scale sculptures and photographs, from Jeff Wall’s gargantuan light box photographs to British artist Phyllida Barlow’s teetering stacked sculptures. Rather than maintaining a permanent collection, the museum focuses on temporary, rotating exhibitions spanning multiple mediums, often foregrounding Canadian artists alongside international names. Dancing in the Light, for example, spotlighted portraiture from the Toronto-based Wedge Collection, one of the largest holdings of Black visual art in the country. Look out for live performances on the first Friday of each month, when admission is free between 5 and 9pm.

Patel Brown Gallery

Best for: Tactile craft and an exploration of culture and identity
Address: 21 Wade Avenue, Unit 2, Toronto, ON M6H 4H7
Price: Free entry

Patel Brown is a small, unpretentious gallery that packs a big punch. It’s a bit hidden away, which suits its reputational focus on “alternative perspectives”, particularly through exhibitions that explore themes of diaspora and tradition. Its 50th-anniversary show celebrated artists that have helped to define the gallery, including Rajni Perera, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Native Art Department International and Marigold Santos.

There is a real celebration of craft here, too, from Nep Sidhu’s suspended textile works to Sergio Suárez’s cosmic, carved woodblock scenes. Also on their roster: artists such as Kim Dorland, known for his neon landscapes and abstract impasto portraits, and Shary Boyle, who represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. The gallery also has an address in Montreal.

The Power Plant Contemporary Gallery

Best for: A converted powerhouse housing environmental and political themes
Address: 231 Queens Quay W, Toronto, ON M5J 2G8
Price: Free entry

The name isn’t just decorative: the Power Plant was initially established as the Art Gallery at Harbourfront in 1976, housed in a former industrial powerhouse. You can still see the red-brick smokestack, but the interior has been renovated and divided into a series of smaller gallery spaces.

A highly inventive programme leans towards environmentalism, land, technology, and social histories. You might find lush gardenscape paintings, algae sculptures or illustrative sculptures, which all represent its mix of ecological and political narratives.

401 Richmond

Best for: A warren of galleries, studios and cultural activations
Address: 401 Richmond St W Studio 111, Toronto, ON M5V 3A8
Price: Free entry

401 Richmond is like a self-contained neighbourhood unto itself. This 1890s lithography factory was restored and saved from redevelopment to serve as a permanent, heritage-designated home for nearly 150 galleries, artist studios, microenterprises and cultural organisations. Initiatives such as ImagineNATIVE and the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival are also headquartered here.

Because it functions as a hub for arts and culture, there is always something to see or do, whether it’s a show at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography or the annual “Art Hunt” which sends visitors through the building in search of hand-made wooden eggs. At the top, the rooftop garden offers one of the best views in the city: a lush courtyard of pollinator-friendly planting, with the skyline rising and falling around it.