Agnes Reimagined

Following an international call for architects in early 2022, KPMB, Indigenous affairs consultant Georgina Riel, and PFS Studio were selected for Agnes Reimagined, a bold new vision for the museum’s future.

The vision to reimagine the Agnes Etherington Art Centre emerges from a simple gesture: returning a house to a home. Central to this reimagining is a community engagement-led design process that prioritizes hospitality and aims to create an inclusive and equitable space that honours Indigenous experiences and worldviews. 

Returning a house to a home

For over six decades, the Agnes Etherington Centre – Agnes Etherington’s house bequeathed to Queen’s University in 1954 as a public art gallery – has welcomed visitors and students in for education and recreation. 

The reimagination of the house includes a new three-floor addition to support a major increase in exhibition and alternative programming spaces and continue Agnes’s work of “further[ing] the cause of art and community.” Spaces for curatorial experimentation and public engagement, including art study spaces, a makerspace, technical art history and art conservation labs, and the first-ever Indigenous self-determination spaces for the appropriate care, ceremony and access by Indigenous communities of their ancestors and cultural belongings. 

The historic house will be transformed into a community-facing cultural hub and live-in artist residency that will provide opportunities for extended stay by Indigenous community members visiting Agnes. 

Engaging the community

The community engagement-led design process for Agnes demonstrates how the redesigned building will capture the museum’s commitment to be a catalyst for positive change. Early engagement of First Nation communities and “Edge Users” shapes the new gallery’s goals of decolonization and Indigenization and the vision for hospitality as its new guiding ethos.  

During schematic design, sharing circles with community members focused on housing, caring, hospitality, landscape, and materiality to address the program’s needs. In design development, sharing circles focusing on more specific user needs, including Indigenous self-determination spaces and the relationship between art and the historic home. 

A new home for contemporary and fine art

Agnes’s collections — numbering over 17,000 works — include contemporary art and Canadian historical art, Indigenous art and historicized ancestors, and material culture, including the Collection of Canadian Dress and the Lang Collection of African Art. Art conservation labs will be located on the third floor and a new generation of art conservators from Queen’s Art Conservation program will be trained in both western and Indigenous care practices and cultural protocols.