A rendering of Floating Pavilion by Mary Mattingly shows the garden on a barge in the Erie Canal that she is building for the Medina Triennial in New York State and the Toronto Biennial.Mary Mattingly/Supplied
When the fourth Toronto Biennial of Art launches next week, participants will be growing plants and harvesting vegetables along the Erie Canal in upstate New York, in the city of Detroit and on the Caribbean island of Martinique. The biennial aims for a North American reach this year, and the far-flung gardens and farms are the work of artists who are investigating the intersection of art and climate change.
“The projects are dealing with food insecurity, food sustainability, looking at the rupture of not having access to healthy food and proposing solutions,” said Allison Glenn, the American curator who picked Things Fall Apart as the title and theme for the 2026 exhibition.
The continental scope also fulfills the Toronto Biennial’s original ambition: to place Canadian art on the world stage. From its inception in the 2010s and its launch in 2019, the biennial has striven to bring global art to Toronto while showing the international art community what Canada can produce. By bringing in Glenn, after three iterations organized by Canadian teams, the exhibition is turning to the international model of hiring a prestigious outsider to curate a global gathering.
“We need a reoccurring international platform that can convene global and local voices, at scale,” said Patrizia Libralato, the biennial’s founding executive director. Back then, Canada was the only G7 country without an art biennial, to the clear disadvantage of Canadian artists, she said. “Successful biennials shape how a place sees itself and how it’s also seen globally.”
This year, one-third of the 34 participating artists are Canadian and, with a sense that the 12-week event must showcase the country’s senior talents, it features several well-known Indigenous artists – Kent Monkman, Bonnie Devine and Rebecca Belmore – who have not been included before.
After three iterations in borrowed spaces – 2019 featured an old car dealership on Lake Shore Boulevard and a former munitions factory in Mississauga, while the main venue for 2024 was a City of Toronto building in the Queen and Dovercourt neighbourhood – the biennial has entered into a partnership with the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, using its two galleries as the main venues.
Meanwhile, other institutions, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum and Mercer Union, are once again contributing programming to the lineup.
“We don’t have a permanent home or a permanent space like some other biennials, so it’s nice to change up the model,” Libralato said.
The collaboration with U of T, and the collaboration among institutions in general, she added, has been driven by the financial constraints of an art scene where many public galleries are still trying to recover from the closings imposed by the pandemic.
She looks with envy to Australia, where the government of New South Wales invested $100-million to renovate an old power plant that now houses the Biennale of Sydney. The possibility of showing huge installations – like those displayed in the old naval warehouses used by the Venice Biennale – is tempting, Libralato acknowledged.
But instead the Toronto Biennial is looking for geographic scale, especially across water.
Toronto Biennial participant Céline Semaan is the founder of the Slow Factory, which in 2025 collaborated on Heirlooms (shown here), turning a piece of forest in Nyack, N.Y. into a living outdoor art gallery and performance space.TODD S. JOHNSON/Supplied
The Notebook of Return is a collaboration between two artists brought together by Glenn, the biennial’s curator: Jean-Marc Bullet is an innovative designer who runs a market garden in Martinique and Céline Semaan is a Lebanese-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Nyack, N.Y., and founder of the Slow Factory, a foundation dedicated to culture and climate education. She is also contributing a rewilding project entitled Slow Forest.
For their joint project, Bullet and Semaan have distributed seeds and notebooks to various groups, including the Toronto Black Farmers and Food Growers Collective and multidisciplinary Detroit artist and Wayne State professor Allana Clarke, who runs an organic garden. Elsewhere, New York artist Mary Mattingly has mounted a floating garden on a repurposed barge in the Erie Canal (in a collaboration with the 2026 Medina Triennial in Medina, N.Y.). The students of Sumner High School in St. Louis, Mo., who tend the garden of the Antioch Baptist Church in a historic Black neighbourhood, are also participating (in a collaboration with Counterpublic, a triennial in their city). All the participants are to plant the seeds, share the harvest and record the season.
The Toronto Black Farmers and Food Growers Collective, whose greenhouse is shown here, are participating in a North American project about food security at the Toronto Biennial.Toronto Biennial/Supplied
The groups are all located along the Great Loop, a 9,700-kilometre navigable water route that covers the eastern United States and part of Ontario, and includes the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. The watery theme is no coincidence: Glenn grew up in Detroit, near Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River, and now lives in New York in sight of the East River. Toronto, meanwhile, is busy re-establishing its connection to Lake Ontario with development in the Port Lands.
“I sometimes gaze out over the East River and wonder if it’s connected to Detroit,” Glenn said. “And that really started me on this journey of thinking about international waterways, trade routes and voyages.
“I was keenly aware that the inaugural biennial looked at the geographies of Toronto, and so I wanted to be sure that I was honouring that work,” she added, referring to the 2019 exhibition that included several waterfront venues and addressed the Indigenous history of the lakefront as a meeting place.
Glenn, who focuses on special art projects, has a Canadian great-grandparent and remembers travelling to Toronto and Montreal as a child while living in Detroit and also Rochester, just across the lake from Toronto.
“I grew up on the border,” she said. “My whole life has been spent gazing up at Canada.”
Notebook of Return, by Céline Semaan and Jean-Marc Bullet, at the University of Toronto Art Centre as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art.Toronto Biennial/Supplied
Her theme of rupture or collapse – or resilience in the face of them – extends beyond water. The Art Museum at U of T will exhibit paintings by California artist Cameron Harvey, three of which will also be shown at the Anchorage Art Museum in Alaska. The paintings are based on chaparral, the fire-resistant shrubs native to Southern California, and were inspired by the artist’s evacuation from her home to her studio during the Eaton and Palisades fires of 2025.
Of course, all this planning around Great Lakes geography and climate change took place long before U.S. President Donald Trump complained about Canadian wildfire smoke or attempted to rename Lake Ontario. Today, Glenn’s emphasis on a shared continent seems prescient.
The Toronto Biennial takes places at multiple locations until Dec. 20. Admission is free at most sites.