The Art Gallery of Alberta opened its first show on 30 October 1924 in the Palm Room of the Hotel Macdonald in Edmonton. The gallery itself says it was the first art museum to open west of Winnipeg.
Back then it was the Edmonton Museum of Arts Association, started by Edmonton citizens who wanted more people to know and enjoy fine art. The exhibition then moved across the street to the old public library, which also housed the gallery’s first office. Later homes included Secord House, where the name became the Edmonton Art Gallery.
A building made for art
In 1969 the gallery moved into a Don Bittorf building on Sir Winston Churchill Square, its first home designed from scratch as a modern art museum. The early collection had works by A.Y. Jackson, Walter J. Phillips, Franklin Carmichael and George Reid. Emily Carr and Lawren Harris arrived in the 1970s and 1980s, along with photographs by Ansel Adams.
By the end of the century the collection had passed 6,000 works, and the building’s systems were showing their age.
A new name and a new shape
In 2005 the Los Angeles firm Randall Stout Architects was picked from 25 international submissions to redesign the building. The same year the Edmonton Art Gallery became the Art Gallery of Alberta, a name that honours a $15 million gift from the Province of Alberta to the capital campaign. The redesigned building opened on 31 January 2010, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia. The photo above, taken in December 2009, catches it a few weeks short of done.
Calgary has its own art school story if you want one, because AUArts began in 1926 as an art department, and Calgary’s art underground has a history of its own. Back in Edmonton, the Citadel Theatre opened in 1965, four years before the gallery got its purpose built home on the square. The Edmonton Symphony has a similar story of outgrowing its first space.
The gallery’s own site lists what’s on. See the building first, and the art after.
Quick answers
The Art Gallery of Alberta began in 1924 as the Edmonton Museum of Arts Association. Its first exhibition opened on 30 October 1924 in the Palm Room of the Hotel Macdonald in Edmonton.
The Edmonton Art Gallery was renamed the Art Gallery of Alberta in 2005. The name honours a $15 million gift from the Province of Alberta to the gallery’s capital campaign for its new building.
Randall Stout Architects of Los Angeles was chosen in 2005 from 25 international submissions to redesign the gallery. The Canadian Encyclopedia says the new building opened on 31 January 2010.
Sources: Art Gallery of Alberta, AGA History (PDF); Art Gallery of Alberta, 1924 Edmonton and the Beginnings of the AGA; The Canadian Encyclopedia, Art Gallery of Alberta.
