The word museum sounds awfully like mausoleum — a place where artifacts go to die. Fortunately, Ontario’s great museums are anything but, having been revitalized into living temples of knowledge where one can interact with, discover, and journey to far-off places, without ever leaving the building.
Let’s begin our brief guided tour in Ottawa, home to a half-dozen national museums, where locals and visitors learn all about Canada and beyond. We start in the National Gallery, the brainchild of renowned Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, housing the country’s largest collection of Canadian art. The Great Hall is entered into via a long ramp, designed to put visitors in the right frame of mind to experience the art to come. The Great Hall uses windows and skylights to create an exceptionally light space, cleverly avoiding direct contact with the art itself while offering famous views of the Parliament Buildings. Safdie was inspired by the Library of Parliament, so much so that the Great Hall has a volume identical to that of Parliament’s stone library, which lies across the Rideau Canal. Besides iconic works from Canadian greats throughout history, the museum also features works by Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Matisse, Monet, Picasso, Warhol, and Pollock. You can’t miss the gallery’s distinctive glass entrance, or Louise Bourgeois’s creepy spider outside.
We then walk across the Ottawa River along the Alexandra Bridge and into Gatineau, Quebec. It takes just 20 minutes to reach the beautifully designed Canadian Museum of History, the most-visited museum in the country. We enter through the Grand Hall, with its view of the river and Parliament Hill, under towering totem poles (the largest display in the world), to Haida artist Bill Reid’s original plaster of his masterpiece Spirit of Haida Gwaii. It’s a fitting introduction to the first level, the First People’s Hall, tracing 20,000 years of Aboriginal history in Canada. With a recent renovation, the former Canada Hall, Canadian Personalities Hall, and Canadian Postal Museum have been combined to create the largest exhibition of Canadian history ever assembled. Inside the Canadian Children’s Museum, kids continue to embed themselves in new worlds, literally getting passports as they learn how people live around the world.
Ottawa’s other national museums are well worth investigating: the Museum of Nature, the Canadian Agriculture Museum, the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum, the Canadian Science and Technology Museum, and the haunting Canadian War Museum, with its jarring structural angles and captivating human stories.
Still in Ontario, let’s Porter (verb: to fly affordably) to Toronto and take a gander at T-Dot’s prized museums. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is the largest cultural and natural history museum in Canada, and the most popular and most visited museum in the city. Star architect Daniel Libeskind’s futuristic Crystal looks as if a Transformer crashed into a heritage building — which works to attract more than one million visitors annually to the museum’s 40 galleries. With over six million items, the ROM has something for everybody, and plenty left over. I love the Dinosaur Gallery, the giant totem pole, and the creepy Gallery of Birds, forever flying nowhere.
Not far away, on Dundas Street, is the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), one of the largest gallery spaces in North America, with a collection of over 80,000 works from the first century to the present. Residing in its Georgian manor premises since 1910, the AGO continues to host some of the world’s most important art exhibitions, introducing visitors to the Old Masters and King Tut and the pharaohs, along with priceless works from the Hermitage and India’s Royal Courts.
Yes, Ontario’s great museums are very much alive, treasured by anyone interested in culture, history, art, and science. Prized and appreciated, therefore, by anyone ticking off the Great Canadian Bucket List.
START HERE: canadianbucketlist.com/museums