Winter Count: Embracing the Cold

Winter Count: Embracing the Cold reflects on winter’s significant impact across diverse cultures and artistic expressions.

Featuring more than 150 works from the early 19th century to the present, this exhibition brings together Indigenous, Canadian settler and European perspectives on the subject.

Winter Count delves into concepts of tradition, identity and heritage as it explores how individual artists engage with winter motifs through objects, paintings, sculpture and works on paper. Historic Indigenous belongings are juxtaposed with works by contemporary artists like Inuit printmaker Pitseolak Ashoona and Cree artists Duane Linklater and Kent Monkman, highlighting ancestral knowledge, storytelling and contemporary critique. The exhibition then draws comparisons between Canadian painters such as Maurice Cullen and Clarence Gagnon and French Impressionists Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, focusing on their distinct approaches to capturing the effects of light on snow. Finally, it reveals a shared visual language among Canadian artists like J.E.H. MacDonald and Lawren S. Harris and their Canadian and Scandinavian counterparts through the lens of winter.

Named for the pictorial records used by Indigenous nations from the Plains like the Lakota, Winter Count reflects on themes of survival, adaptation and kinship, portraying winter as a transformative force that shapes human experience.

This exhibition is a collaboration between the departments of Indigenous Ways and Decolonization, Canadian Art and European, American and Asian art.