Vancouver Art Gallery finds room for Emily Carr

If you were a tourist visiting British Columbia this month and wanted to see work by the province’s most celebrated painter, you would stop by the Vancouver Art Gallery – of course.

And you would be rewarded with a smart little show featuring a new hanging of Emily Carr’s late forest landscapes. But you would have been the persistent gallery-goer, firmly dedicated to seeking out Carr’s work. This season, most of the VAG’s floor space has been given over to touring shows from American galleries.

On the ground floor, there is an excellent historical survey, mounted by the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis, Minn., documenting how Eastern European artists responded to censorship and surveillance before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The second floor is dedicated to a big splashy retrospective of Dominican-American artist Firelei Báez, organized by Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. And the third floor has been closed as the gallery installs the Jean-Paul Riopelle retrospective that has been touring Canada since 2024 and just opened at the VAG. Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape is tucked away in the one small gallery located on the fourth floor.

The VAG would like to build itself a new building, but it was forced to pause last year when construction costs rose out of sight. One of its most pressing needs is enough space to show more of the 13,000 British Columbian, Canadian and international works in its impressive but largely invisible collection. The VAG continually has to choose between the kind of exciting new shows that keep local audiences engaged and returning – and permanent installations of classic Canadian art that draw tourists, as well as families and school groups.

The focus has tended toward the former, programming the available space with temporary exhibitions. There simply isn’t room for a string of galleries tracing British Columbian art from Carr’s forest scenes, Lawren Harris’s landscapes and B.C. Binning’s semi-abstractions to the conceptual photography of Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham and Ken Lum.

But under CEO and executive director Anthony Kiendl and Canadian art curator Richard Hill, a rethink is in process as they look for new ways to include the permanent collection. It’s something many art museums are doing: The COVID pandemic underlined the expense (and the carbon footprint) of continually shipping art around the world for touring exhibitions. Meanwhile, in what is – or perhaps was – a pluralist age, curators have felt increasingly uncomfortable with the notion that the public only sees a tiny amount of the art that museums hold in public trust. Recent VAG forays into the vaults have produced Hill’s show of hard-edge modernist painting in 2023 and Diana Freundl’s 2024 show devoted to monochromatic art.

These are smart, highly focused exercises in curation. Hill’s concept for this Carr show is to concentrate on a single idea about her paintings. On one dark-green wall, he has orchestrated a tight salon hanging featuring 17 of her dense forest scenes of the 1930s. Most of them are vertical rather than horizontal; one could almost call them tree portraits. They face off against a solo painting on the opposing wall, and it’s one of the most famous in the VAG collection: Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky features a single spindly pine against a mass of vibrating clouds.

Hill points to the irony that it was only in a clear-cut forest that Carr could paint the sky. The European landscape tradition favoured a view and while Carr embraced British Columbia’s dense forests, there is also an anxiety or claustrophobia in those mighty late paintings of brown trunks and green canopy, filled with both heavy forms and undulating masses.

There is one totem pole among the forest paintings, and the show also delicately raises the question of Carr’s encounter with Indigenous art with two other paintings executed at abandoned villages. One shows a carved face so overgrown with vegetation it disappears into the forest; the other, painted at a Kwakwaka’wakw village in Quatsino Sound, features a wooden figure, who Carr mistakenly identified as the wild woman of the woods Zunoqua or Dzunukwa. The figure is surrounded by feral cats, their eyes glowing but their bodies also half hidden by the greenery.

These are romantic views of the Indigenous cultural material, equating it with the forest itself in the same way that Europeans saw Indigenous people as living, for good or for ill, in a “natural” state. And yet the Northwest Coast First Nations have always been settled and architectural cultures, people who made houses and furniture. There is lots there to unpack and no doubt more of these issues will be addressed when Hill mounts a larger Carr show in 2026.

It’s timed to coincide with the FIFA World Cup games in Vancouver: Tourists rejoice.

Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape continues to Jan. 4, 2026, at the Vancouver Art Gallery.