Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, ON

AGNES OFF-SITE returns home (sort of)!

Since construction closure in May 2024, AGNES has operated as a nomadic entity, responding to two questions posed four years ago: What does an art centre centre? and How does Agnes attend to community?

In 2024, AGNES partnered with a range of organizations to produce commissions, programs, residencies, performances and exhibitions across Ontario.

In 2025, AGNES’s closure program moves closer to home with a temporary exhibition space and public art projects in the City of Kingston.

Taking over the Rideau Building, an industrial space located at 207 Stuart Street on the outskirts of Queen’s campus, AGNES’s new, temporary abode is a community-driven “arts ecosystem.” Within a set up to prototype spaces designed for Agnes Reimagined, experimental programs and organizational change puts into practice the ethos of hospitality that prepares AGNES to officially reopen in fall 2026.

AGNES launches the Rideau exhibition space and a series of public art projects in spring/summer 2025. Check them out!

Kinnomics
Iman Datoo

May 30 – June 19, 2025
Rideau Building, 207 Stuart Street, Kingston
Curated by Paula Antonakos-Boswell, Maeva Baldassarra, Baiqing Audrey Chen, Sasza Hinton, Seymour Irons, Sana Kazemirashid, Nicola Koroknay, Murphy Liu, Andrea Malus, Andy O’Neil, Sam Sunwoo, Andrei Pora, and Haofan Wang with coordinating curator Sunny Kerr, through Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies 830.

Following extended time spent on the shores of Lake Opinicon at Queen’s University Biological Station (QUBS) as Agnes’s Stonecroft Artist-in-Residence, UK-based artist Iman Datoo’s Kinnomics inaugurates Agnes’s temporary exhibition space. The exhibition brings together botany, cartography and storytelling to consider forces of agency, liveness and animacy between plants, soils and people. Iman proposes—and invents—the term “kinnomics” to name a broad set of trans-disciplinary approaches that move between ecologies and differing value systems and signal a shift from matters of economics (management of the house, oikonomikos) to methods of making kin.

Co-presented with Kingston’s Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA). FOLDA is on June 4 – 7, 2025.

Xenolithic
Nicholas Crombach

June 26 – August 31, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 26, 6:30pm
Rideau Building, 207 Stuart Street, Kingston
Curated by Sunny Kerr.

Kingston-based artist Nicholas Crombach invites us to peel back layers of time, material and memory in Xenolithic, an exhibition of a new series of large sculptural works that blend imagination and concepts of archeology and myth to question what lies beneath the surface.

Each piece is structured by a system of intricate scaffoldings—evoking futuristic museum dioramas—within which slices of everyday artifacts, textures and colours converge. Evolving from Crombach’s previous sculptures of stone-like structures with embedded materials, these latest works appear as though suspended mid-air.

Judith Brown (Blur #6)
Sandra Brewster

July 11, 2025 – July 10, 2026
Public Art Installation, 68 Brock Street, Downtown Kingston
In honour of Judith Brown (1943–2024).
Curated by Emelie Chhangur, Tianna Edwards and Sunny Kerr.

In a powerful act of public memory, Toronto artist Sandra Brewster remounts Judith Brown (Blur #6)—a monumental portrait of Kingston’s beloved mentor, leader, community advocate and educator Judith Brown, who passed away in October 2024 at the age of 81. Paying tribute to the joy and enduring presence of Black people in Kingston, Brewster’s original 2019 portrait of Brown was part of an Agnes-commissioned series of Sandra’s signature “blur” portraits that feature several influential community members. This public artwork is produced with the loving support of Dr. Aba Mortley, community member and local business owner, and supported by awesome folks working at Cultural Services, City of Kingston.

Spirits of the Land
Jaylene Cardinal and Dakota Ward

June 20 – December 20, 2025
Stauffer Library Atrium, 101 Union Street, Kingston
Curated by Sebastian De Line.

Spirits of the Land features a new series of paintings by Kingston-based artistic duo and life partners, Jaylene Cardinal and Dakota Ward. These paintings are portals that connect the earthly world we inhabit and the world beyond – where our ancestors traverse veils of perception.

Cardinal and Ward are multidisciplinary creatives whose paintings and public murals transform spaces into powerful narratives that merge contemporary techniques with traditional Cree elements and cosmologies.

Produced in partnership with Stauffer Library, Queen’s University.

AGNES Etherington Art Centre
AGNES.queensu.ca

Facebook: @aeartcentre
Instagram: @aeartcentre
LinkedIn: @agnes-etherington-art-centre

Media inquiries: Liz Cooper, Communications and Marketing Coordinator at elizabeth.cooper@queensu.ca

Situated within territories of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat, AGNES is a curatorially-driven and research-intensive professional art centre proudly serving a dual mandate as an internationally recognized public art gallery and pedagogical resource at Queen’s. By commissioning, researching, collecting and stewarding works of art, and by exhibiting and interpreting visual culture through an intersectional lens, AGNES creates opportunities for participation and exchange across communities, cultures, histories and geographies.

AGNES is committed to anti-racism. We work to eradicate institutional biases and develop accountable programs that centre artistic expressions and lived experiences of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour. AGNES promotes 2SLGBTQIAP+ positive spaces.

Image credits:
1. Iman Datoo in her Kingston studio with sculptures, 2025. Photo: Liz Cooper
2. Nicholas Crombach, Cross section I (detail), 2024. Found objects and materials, steel, epoxy, construction adhesive. Courtesy of the artist.
3. Sandra Brewster, Judith Brown (Blur #6), 2019. Installation view Agnes Etherington Art Centre.
4. Agnes wordmark with heart.