Winner, Toronto Book Awards

Moving the Museum documents the reopening of the J.S. McLean Centre for Indigenous & Canadian Art with a renewed focus on the AGO’s Indigenous art collection. The volume reflects the nation-to-nation treaty relationship that is the foundation of Canada, asking questions, discovering truths, and leading conversations that address the weight of history and colonialism.

Lavishly illustrated with more than 100 reproductions, Moving the Museum: Indigenous + Canadian Art at the AGO features the work of First Nations artists — including Carl Beam, Rebecca Belmore, and Kent Monkman — along with work by Inuit artists like Shuvinai Ashoona and Annie Pootoogook. Canadian artists include Lawren Harris, Kazuo Nakamura, Joyce Wieland, and many others. Drawing from stories about our origins and identities, the featured artists and essayists invite readers to engage with issues of land, water, transformation, and sovereignty and to contemplate the historic and future representation of Indigenous and Canadian art in museums.

Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe image and word warrior, curator, and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation. She is currently a guest curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario and touring her exhibition The Fifth World. Nanibush has a master's degree in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto and has taught doctoral courses on Indigenous history and politics at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. She has published in many places including the books Women in a Globalizing World and This is an Honour Song, as well as catalogue essays on Jeff Thomas, Adrian Stimson, Rebecca Belmore and more. She has organized round-dances, candle light marches, concerts, and teach-ins as part of an Idle No More group in Toronto. She continues to work in defense of women, children, land and water.

Wanda Nanibush's profile page

Georgiana Uhlyarik is the curator of Jinny Yu: AT ONCE (2024). She is Fredrik S. Eaton Curator, Canadian Art, and co-lead of the Indigenous + Canadian Art Department, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada. She works collaboratively with artists and curators from across the Americas and Europe. Projects include: Moving the Museum: Indigenous + Canadian Art at the AGO (2023); Magnetic North: Imagining Canada in Painting 1910-1940 (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2021); Tunirrusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak (2018); Rita Letendre: Fire & Light (2017); Georgia O’Keeffe (Tate Modern, 2017); and Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry (Jewish Museum, NY, 2017). Uhlyarik is adjunct faculty in Art History at York University and University of Toronto.

Georgiana Uhlyarik est la commissaire de l’exposition JINNY YU : AT ONCE (2024). Elle est conservatrice Fredrik S. Eaton pour l’art canadien et codirectrice du département de l’art autochtone et canadien au Musée des beaux-arts de l’Ontario, à Toronto. Elle travaille en collaboration avec des artistes et commissaires de l’Amérique et de l’Europe. Ses projets incluent : Moving the Museum : Indigenous + Canadian Art at the AGO (2023) ; Magnetic North: Imagining Canada in Painting 1910-1940 (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2021) ; Tunirrusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak (2018) ; Rita Letendre: Fire & Light (2017) ; Georgia O’Keeffe (Tate Modern, 2017) ; Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry (Musée juif de New York, 2017). Uhlyarik est professeure adjointe en Histoire de l’Art à l’Université York et à l’Université de Toronto.

Georgiana Uhlyarik's profile page

• Winner, Toronto Book Awards

“Moving the Museum is a timely and important book.”

<i>Galleries West</i>

“Moving the Museum is revelatory. The book challenges and provokes readers to question and re-establish their relationships with Indigenous art by presenting new ways for museums to present and interact with Indigenous communities and artists. This book kicks the colonial gaze to the curb, insisting instead that museums and galleries radically shift what they’ve been doing and offers page after page enacting the potential of Indigenous art to empower, inspire, and create community. Wanda Nanibush has taken up her role as a steward of Indigenous art at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario and uses it here to present deeply grounded and transformative Indigenous knowledge in an accessible way, while Georgiana Uhlyarik, and other AGO colleagues, offer support essential to enacting real change. Moving the Museum is an art book that is practical, radical, and necessary.”

Jury citation, Toronto Book Award