After an international call for design architects, in early 2022, we announced the award-winning, Toronto-based firm KPMB Architects, led by architect Bruce Kuwabara and Indigenous Affairs consultant Georgina Riel as our collaborators on Agnes Reimagined, a bold new vision for the 21st century university museum.

Together with KPMB’s diverse and integrated design team, throughout 2022, we undertook a community-engaged design process to further an approach to design that mirrors the ethos of our project. This inclusive design strategy is slow and intentional, ensuring that Agnes’s future architecture is a proposition for new ideas, not a container for old systems.

Two architectural renderings have emerged from our first year of talking and sharing circles (continuing throughout 2023) and close architect-client collaboration to give speculative form to our vision. An exterior view from University Avenue depicts a new curvilinear addition in dialogue with the historic Etherington House, the latter to be transformed into a live-in artist residency and community-facing cultural hub. Our building will be a dynamic and relational ecosystem that connects Agnes’s past, present and future.

This new three-floor configuration supports: a 200% increase in exhibition and alternative programming spaces for curatorial experimentation and public engagement across our impressive collections and contemporary art commissions; the first-ever Indigenous self-determination spaces for the appropriate care, ceremony and access by Indigenous communities of their ancestors and cultural belongings currently residing at Agnes; and new art study spaces—all of which reimagine the entangled civic, social and pedagogical role of a 21st-century university museum. With curated adjacencies and thoughtfully conceived security perimeters, the new Agnes is poised to transform museum practice as well as its future protagonists. A live-in residence inside the museum not only ensures that artists’ practices are at the centre of our work, it also provides opportunities for extended stay by Indigenous community members visiting at Agnes. These adjacencies change the temporality of the museum’s activities as we deepen relationships and establish trust as a core institutional practice. Agnes Reimagined dreams new kinds of museum futurities, driven by principles of multiplicity and decolonization and practices of collaboration and community wellbeing.

The combined renovation and construction project returns the art center to its origins as a home and simultaneously prepares and propels the museum into the future, igniting a paradigm shift in global museology, where Indigenous and western world views live side-by-side as equals.

Agnes Reimagined is a place where people can gather: