Summer 2025 Exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Guelph

Season Launch: Thursday, May 22, at 6:30pm

Join us Thursday, May 22, at 6:30pm for the public launch of AGG’s Summer 2025 season, spotlighting two new exhibitions that explore the many ways art reflects and reimagines the world around us. While 155,578 maps the city through the perspectives of 55 artists living and working in the region, Fuzzy Thinking turns to the language of textiles to foreground the expressive and disruptive potential of softness and texture. Together, these exhibitions invite viewers to consider how artistic practices shape civic and cultural understanding – through place, material, and imagination.

155,578

May 22 – August 29, 2025
Curated by Erin Szikora and Shauna McCabe

Taking Guelph’s current estimated population as its title, 155,578 is both an exhibition and a map. Curated through an open call, artists from across the community were invited to share their work in a collective reflection of the city’s creative landscape. The title also speaks to Lucy Lippard’s “numbers shows” – a series of exhibitions in the late 1960s and early 1970s titled for the populations of the host cities. In this spirit, 155,578 brings together 55 artists living and working in the region, considering the ways art and ideas give form to civic life, while creating a platform for local dialogue and exchange.

Rooted in the belief that contemporary art reflects and refracts the lived experiences of its makers, 155,578 champions a vibrant cross-section of practices that range in medium, subject, and sensibility. As a first curatorial initiative by Erin Szikora in her role as Curator of Contemporary Art, the exhibition seeks to listen to the city – to the stories, questions, and creative gestures that define its present, while looking ahead at possibilities for its future.

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.

Fuzzy Thinking

May 22 – August 29, 2025
Curated by Shauna McCabe

Fuzzy Thinking brings together historical and contemporary textiles to explore softness, tactility, and material complexity as ways of seeing and understanding. From tapestries by artists Joyce Wieland, Michael Snow, William Kurelek, and Gordon Smith to Inuit wall hangings and First Nations beadwork, as well as works by Holly Chang, Grant Heaps, Roda Medhat, Jagdeep Raina, and Anna Torma, the exhibition draws from the Art Gallery of Guelph’s collections and beyond, embracing textiles as not simply a medium but as a method for experimentation, hybridity, and the slow accumulation of meaning.

Deeply connected to the everyday, the works blur the lines between the functional and the symbolic, carrying meaning through use as well as through form. Assembling varied approaches to textiles across time and place, Fuzzy Thinking considers how softness can unsettle fixed categories – between art and craft, narrative and abstraction – proposing a more tactile fluid logic grounded in the intimate, investigative language of the handmade.

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.

Visit the Art Gallery of Guelph

The Art Gallery of Guelph is open from 12 to 5pm, Tuesday through Sunday. All are welcome, and admission is free. Located at the edge of the University of Guelph campus, the gallery offers a dynamic space for visitors to engage with contemporary and historical artistic practices and creative research, explore diverse perspectives, and experience thought-provoking exhibitions. Through its commitment to fostering creative dialogue, AGG provides an accessible and inclusive environment where art connects communities and inspires new ways of seeing the world.

Art Gallery of Guelph
358 Gordon Street, Guelph, ON N1G 1Y1
Open Tuesday to Sunday, 12 – 5pm | Accessible
519-837-0010
artgalleryofguelph.ca
info@artgalleryofguelph.ca
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Image credits: Joyce Wieland, Untitled, 1976, acrylic fibre tapestry, 130.6 x 255.3 cm. Gift of Audrey Loeb, 1994. University of Guelph Collection at the Art Gallery of Guelph; (left to right): Grazyna Adamska-Jarecka, Malachite Water (detail), 2024, acrylic on canvas, 60.9 x 76.2 cm | Richelle Forsey, what we cannot see (stitches) (detail), 2025, archival inkjet print on photo rag paper, 54.6 x 40.9 cm | Lauren Wright Vartanian, Earth Glow (detail), 2024, cotton and thread on velveteen, 15.2 x 15.2 cm | Christine De Vuono, Prize Winner (Cookbooks as Portraits series) (detail), 2025, high resolution print, 83.8 x 55.8 cm | Ash Godley, By the River (Plants) (detail), 2025, oil on canvas, 40.6 x 30.4 cm; Jagdeep Raina, Final Days, 2019, hand embroidery on muslin, 25.4 x 30.5 cm. Art Gallery of Guelph collection.