2025 Winter Exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Guelph

AGG’s Winter 2025 season highlights three compelling exhibitions: Entrelazados: Justin Favela, Do You Remember Love, and Recent Acquisitions: Contemporary Indigenous Artists at AGG, creating a dynamic dialogue about how cultural practices, art, and identity are negotiated and redefined. Together, they explore themes of connection and cultural resilience, emphasizing the enduring influence of the past on the present.

Entrelazados: Justin Favela

September 5, 2024 – May 4, 2025
Curated by Shauna McCabe

In Entrelazados, Guatemalan-Mexican-American artist Justin Favela explores notions of identity, place, and authenticity through his signature remixes of popular culture and Latinx experience. At the core of his art practice is an investigation of traditional Mexican or Latin American craft, particularly cartoneria or piñata making, as a way to probe the interwoven influences on personal and collective memory. Creating sculptures and installations that fuse references to contemporary culture, lived traditions, and art history, Favela adapts familiar materials like cardboard, paper, tape and glue to transform elements of everyday life, effectively reimagining spectacle as a hybrid space that transcends genres and forms, time and space, and collapses any semblance of high and low cultures. read more >

Organized by the Art Gallery of Guelph in partnership with Musagetes. Presented with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario, and Guelph Community Foundation’s Musagetes Fund, as well as promotional assistance from the Embassy of Mexico in Canada and Mexican Consulate General in Toronto.

Do You Remember Love

September 12, 2024 – May 4, 2025
Curated by Native Art Department International

Do You Remember Love brings together artist Susan Mogul’s 1997 video I Stare at You and Dream with a collection of quillboxes from the Tower Hill Museum in Parry Sound. Juxtaposing these disparate forms of expression, the installation draws out themes across the two bodies of work, including women’s identity, family, relationships, and the quest for home. Filmed in Mogul’s Highland Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles, the film offers an intimate, intertwined narrative that is rooted in shared history and enduring relationships, as is the collection of quillboxes. Posing the question “do you remember love”, the exhibition positions the handmade quill and birchbark boxes as not only expressions of love but as acts of love for self, place, and one another that are to be recalled, enacted, and remembered. read more >

Organized and presented by the Art Gallery of Guelph with the support of the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario, through the Curatorial Projects: Indigenous and Culturally Diverse program.

Recent Acquisitions: Contemporary Indigenous Artists at AGG

January 16 – May 4, 2025

KC Adams • Shuvinai Ashoona • Sonny Assu • Michael Belmore • Tarralik Duffy • Maria Hupfield • Ikseetaujuk • Jason Lujan • Norval Morrisseau • Native Art Department International • Pudlo Pudlat • Don Russell • Padloo Samayualie • Jutai Toonoo

Highlighting new acquisitions that enrich the Art Gallery of Guelph’s collection and deepen the communities it represents, this exhibition features works by First Nations, Métis, and Inuit artists that bridge innovation and tradition. Together, these pieces offer a profound reflection of this cultural moment, emphasizing intergenerational dialogue and storytelling. Firmly rooted in relationality, the artworks embody practices shaped with and through the land, reflecting the enduring connections to place and environment central to Indigenous ways of knowing. Diverse in materials, techniques, and narratives, they collectively nurture reciprocal relationships that sustain and shape cultures and communities as inclusive, dynamic, and evolving. read more >

Organized and presented by the Art Gallery of Guelph with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Image credits: Justin Favela, Valle de México Tomado en las Cimas de Tepeyac, After José María Velasco I (detail), 2024, paper and glue on canvas. Collection of the artist; Do You Remember Love (installation view): Susan Mogul, I Stare at You and Dream, video, 1997, video, 56:40 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; selected quillboxes from the Museum on Tower Hill collection (signed quillboxes by Rose Rice and Jane Pegahmagabow; unsigned quillboxes by Anishinaabe Great Lakes artists), 2oth c., porcupine quills, birchbark, and sweetgrass. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid; Shuvinai Ashoona, Inside the Mountain (detail), 2020-2021, hand-coloured lithograph. Purchase, 2023. Art Gallery of Guelph Collection.

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