On Toronto’s Bloor Street, the front doors of the Royal Ontario Museum have been closed for almost three years in a bid to give the community better access to the museum.
Nicholas Bell, the new chief executive and director who must complete the $130-million project, reopening the doors and giving the public free admission to part of the building, knows all about the ironies of museum renovations.
Until July, he was director of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, which began a major overhaul in 2021 that promises free admission to its whole permanent collection once it reopens next year. Predictably, the renovation was slower than planned, running a year behind schedule, but the building is now complete; staff have moved back in to work on the new displays and exhibits.
The Glenbow, which ran a satellite gallery from 2022 to 2024, can hope the anticipation of reopening will win back both old friends and new visitors, after a long absence.
“Museums need buildings because they need a place for people to come to, but museums also need audiences … people to come and participate,” Bell said.
Fully closing a museum for renovations as the Glenbow did – so often over budget and behind schedule – means laying off staff and a loss of box office revenue. But worse, shutting the doors can break the museum habit for regulars just as institutions are recovering from the pandemic and trying to reach new audiences.
What follows can be trickier still: In an era that increasingly questions the social role of museum collections, those institutions must also consider how their displays will land with wider audiences when they reopen.
Overseeing OpenROM, as the project is called, may be the easier part of Bell’s new job. The museum, which covers both nature and culture, has remained open throughout using the old Queen’s Park doors, but currently has no Canadian or Japanese galleries, both lost to reconfiguring ground-floor space. Its South Asian gallery is closed for a redo and there are plans for a new gallery devoted to Sikh culture, although the ROM has few Sikh artifacts.
Meanwhile, staff acknowledge the First Peoples gallery is in immediate need of an update; less controversially, the European galleries are looking tired. On the science side, things have been updated more recently, including the Dawn of Life gallery, largely based on Canadian specimens, which opened in 2021.
On the Canadian file, the ROM and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection have hit on a mutually beneficial solution. The McMichael just shut its doors for a three-year renovation that will finally update its aging physical plant, and the ROM announced Friday it will host a two-year exhibition of the McMichael’s core collection, featuring work by Tom Thomson, the Group of Seven and their lesser-known female contemporaries.
A rendering of the McMichael Canadian Arts Collection building updates to the exterior.Hariri Pontarini Architects/Supplied
At least that one looks like a win for access, giving visitors in downtown Toronto the McMichael experience, which normally requires a trip to the picturesque village of Kleinburg, Ont., about 40 minutes north in suburban Vaughan.
At the McMichael, executive director and chief curator Sarah Milroy also knows about those ironies. She made the tough decision to close for three years to finally bring the museum that began life in a log house up to contemporary building standards. The McMichael was last renovated in the 1980s; the HVAC systems are at the end of their life and a two-year closure was already under consideration when she decided to add a third year to fully renovate.
The plans will increase exhibition space by 30 per cent, improve back-of-house space for conservation and framing, and add a revenue-generating event venue, but the $150-million project has required the McMichael to lay off about two-thirds of its small staff, mostly the people working front of house.
Sarah Milroy, director and chief curator with the McMichael Canadian Art Collection decided to close the museum for three years for a total renovation.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Milroy said it was far more efficient to hand an empty site to the construction company, rather than renovate in stages and try to stay open. “The existing site is already too small for us to get done the things we need to do. So to be functioning with half of that, it’s just dragging out the misery,” she said. “We just want to rip off the bandage and get it done.”
Both the Glenbow, which operated its satellite in a nearby office building, and the McMichael, with seven touring shows on the road and the ROM residency, have looked for creative ways not to be forgotten while completing construction.
“We are going to be making lots of noise while we are closed,” Milroy said.
In a much larger building, the ROM is able to stagger updates and only close a few areas, while rationalizing the 175,000-square-foot Crystal extension that added new galleries in 2007 but also some awkward transitions between the old and new wings, and a non-descript front door.
So far, the museum has only raised money for the first phase of OpenROM to be completed next spring. Future stages have yet to be finalized, but may include a restaurant and a large opening in the lobby ceiling, or oculus, that would provide views of the dinosaurs above. By closing off a multi-storey empty side lobby referred to as the Spirit House on the ground floor, it has already been able to enlarge the second-floor dinosaur gallery.
The rest of the current phase involves adding 6,000 more feet of gallery space, redoing the Bloor Street entrance to add a canopy and make the doors more visible, and adding a performance space in the lobby, where queues have become much shorter with online ticketing.
Perhaps the biggest goal of OpenROM, however, is to give the public access to a significant part of the museum without a ticket. Under its previous director Josh Basseches, who left last December, the museum began running pilot projects to test the logistics of moving the turnstile further into the building.
This fall, for the second year in a row, it is making the entire ground floor free for two months, giving the public easy access to a large installation tied to the Toronto Biennial of Art, as well as the Chinese and Korean galleries.
Bell, headhunted from Calgary, is a strong advocate for free admission and initiated the plan at the Glenbow for free entry when it reopens (with the exception of special exhibitions).
A rendering of Glenbow’s revitalized home, the JR Shaw Centre for Arts & Culture, from the corner of Stephen Avenue and 1 Street SE, Calgary.DIALOG/Supplied
Admission prices are continual source of discussion in the museum community, where most believe the public deserves easy access to public collections, and that expensive tickets stand in the way of diversifying audiences.
The ROM has found that its experiments with free admission to the ground floor encourage brief drop-in visits at lunch or at the end of the workday from people who wouldn’t bother if they had to pay about $30. The problem is how to fund open entry: Provincial and federal grants in Canada are not sufficient to allow museums to forgo box-office revenue.
At the Glenbow, the Shaw Family Foundation will underwrite admission with a $35-million donation; at the ROM, the Temerty Foundation has established a $30-million endowment to cover the free portion of the site. Both are notable departures from traditional bricks-and-mortar, name-on-the-building philanthropy, although OpenROM is being funded entirely by private donations.
Under Bell's leadership, the Glenbow initiated free entry for when it reopens.David Kerr/The Globe and Mail
Free admission is perhaps the simplest way of ensuring accessibility; at the ROM, it means making sure people from all walks of life see those doors on Bloor Street and know they are welcome. (Indigenous visitors are already granted free admission to the entire museum.) But what stories and objects people encounter inside is another important test for access.
Traditionally, museums saw their role as reaching the public with scholarship based on their collections. But the current drive to decolonize institutions that are often warehouses of colonial plunder involves fashioning new stories, directly addressing historical wrongs such as residential schools and slavery.
In the U.S., the Trump administration, with a view that museums should be exclusively celebratory, has pushed back against the Smithsonian Institution’s willingness to confront the darker side of American history, accusing the Washington museums of being “woke.”
The politics in Canada are gentler, although leadership at the National Gallery of Canada did get caught in several controversies surrounding its decolonizing policies in 2022, including the departure of an Indigenous curator. Bell treads carefully, positioning himself at the intersection of tradition and activism.
“We’re just looking for versions of truth that can help communities understand themselves and each other,” he said. “I don’t necessarily think of that as activism, but truths are sometimes difficult to confront.”
Bell pointed to the ROM’s 2025 show Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away as an example of the museum’s willingness to discuss difficult topics. He also praised curatorial staff for managing the sensitive task of installing galleries dedicated to the ancient Middle East, where contemporary politics might come into play.
A complete overhaul is being planned for the Royal Ontario Museum's First Peoples Gallery with no firm timeline.David Kerr/The Globe and Mail
Bell identified an immediate need to update the First Peoples gallery, which was abruptly “paused” in 2022, while Cree artist Kent Monkman was in residence at the museum. At the time, ROM management recognized that dioramas of Indigenous life had become an embarrassment, and the gallery was tweaked before it reopened with Indigenous interpreters on-site. A complete overhaul is being planned with no firm timeline.
“The Canadian audience is growing more sophisticated in terms of what it would consider to be a standard for intercultural dialogue around Indigenous spaces, and ROM should be at the front of that conversation,” Bell said.
Reopening the ROM’s Canadiana gallery is another priority. It was closed in 2022 and controversially, its space was filled with temporary exhibitions, including one devoted to the Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts. That leaves the ROM without a display of national icons at a time when Canadian sovereignty is in the headlines.
If closing the building risks breaking the museum habit, Bell points out that the excitement of reopening should bring in new audiences. Yet, the artifacts on display in the Canadiana gallery may seem fusty – or worse – to new museum-goers.
The Royal Ontario Museum exterior with entrance construction.David Kerr/The Globe and Mail
The old gallery included early examples of Canadian decorative arts, but also such sensitive historical material as Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe. The giant colonial painting of the 1759 battlefield on the Plains of Abraham depicts the British general who defeated New France as a beatific martyr, while a kneeling Indigenous warrior looks on. There were also several early 20th-century nationalistic illustrations of mighty moose, pristine forests and proud Indigenous people – stereotypes that might offend if not carefully placed in their historical context.
ROM promises enhanced interpretation as it welcomes the McMichael’s early 20th-century collection, remounting that gallery’s summertime show devoted to Thomson, the Group and their contemporaries. It will draw on the museum’s geological and botanical expertise to look at the landscape painting from new angles.
It will also make connections to Indigenous place names and stories that were originally omitted by the artists, perhaps reactivating a curatorial debate as to whether the Group was guilty of propagating the myth of the empty land, or painting a land from which Indigenous people had already been driven away.
Bell said the museum’s nature-and-culture mandate gives it a strong advantage in the global conversation about how we make sense of a changing planet.
“What are we doing here? Where do we go? What does it mean be Canadian? What does it mean to be on this land? In living through a complex world, there’s no better place to have those conversations than a place like the ROM.”