Our transformative expansion project is a combination of renovation and new construction. This includes a fully accessible renovation of the historic Etherington House into a community facing, interdisciplinary cultural hub, artist’s project space and live-in artist residency. We honour Agnes Etherington’s bequest of her home to Queen’s to make Agnes an art centre that “furthers the cause of art and community,” as we ground our vision in the concept of the home and hospitality. Centring the social impact and civic role of art and enlivening participation in visual culture, new construction supports a 200% increase in exhibition and public programming spaces for engaged curatorial experimentation across our impressive collections and contemporary art commissions as well as our first-ever Indigenous self-determination spaces for proper ceremony, care and access by Indigenous communities of their ancestors and cultural belongings currently residing at Agnes. I look forward to meeting you in our new welcome centre, complete with a 250-person capacity event space, or hanging out on the porch at our new café and inviting you to make art in our newly renovated Biéler studio or to engage intimately with our collections in our new study centre. But maybe you will come instead to simply relax on our second-floor terrace!?

Building for the future of museum practice is not the only thing on the top of our accomplishment list this past year. I am mega proud to also announce our recent sweep of the Galleries Ontario Art Awards at the Ted Rogers Hot Docs theatre in downtown Toronto. As the only annual juried awards of its kind, these Awards celebrate the outstanding achievement, artistic merit, and excellence of arts institutions and professionals in the public art gallery sector, recognizing the wide range of our work in exhibitions, design, publications, programs, and community partnerships. Agnes took home five of these awards—two for our 2021–2022 exhibitions, one in curatorial writing, and two in design!

Indeed, we have worked really hard to build trust with communities and reimagine our social, civic and pedagogical role. Over the past two years, we have been learning how exhibitions—not just artworks—can be “curated” into reciprocal conversation. It is in-between these exhibitions—at their “vibrating edges” as I like to call them—where new connections have been ignited across Agnes’s collections, commissions, and communities.

Working in a non-hierarchical way has prompted us to take up our own history in new ways, too. And while 2022 saw Agnes caringly carry forward the past—as evidenced in these final exhibitions—we’ve also been making plans for our move off site, our further integration into the wider Kingston art communities, and the deepening of our relationships across all disciplines at Queen’s. We are making big plans for the next couple of years and while our facility might be closed, we certainly won’t be absent. Keep your eye on upcoming Agnes Stories as we take you through some of our recent successes and shed light on what lies ahead.

—Emelie Chhangur, Director and Curator