Opening Reception: Fall 2025 Exhibitions

A program of:
Earthwork
Dwelling Under Distant Suns

Wednesday, September 3, 2025
5pm–8pm

Locations: 
University of Toronto Art Centre and UC Quad
15 King’s College Circle

Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
7 Hart House Circle

Itinerary:
5pm – Doors open
5:30pm to 6:15pm – Miikaans Mobile Movement Lab Grass Dance performance at UC Quad
6:30pm – Opening remarks at the University of Toronto Art Centre
7pm – Opening remarks at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery

Join Mikinaak Migwans, Curator of Earthwork, Yantong Li, Curator of the MVS Curatorial Studies Graduating Exhibition Dwelling Under Distant Suns, and their featured artists in celebrating the public opening of the Art Museum’s Fall 2025 exhibitions.  

Earthwork turns away from the monumental, and toward the “work” done with and for Earth. Privileging Indigenous perspectives, this exhibition considers the life-giving potential of the land defense blockade, the controlled burn, and the medicine walk, together with contemporary artworks. 

Dwelling Under Distant Suns originates from the struggle to represent an increasingly precarious environment, a landscape of slow violence that occurs out of place and out of sight. The exhibition focuses on mythmaking and speculation as methods of inquiry into the entanglement of environmental discourses and human movements on the ground.  

During the event, the Miikaans Mobile Movement Lab will celebrate the opening of Earthwork with a special Grass Dance performance taking place outdoors at the University College Quad. Miikaans Mobile Movement Lab is an Anishinaabe collaborative research project that brings movement and dance practitioners together to co-create places of embodied knowledge creation and pedagogical praxis. Miikaans will bring grass dancers, John Waaseyaabin Hupfield (Anishinaabe, Wasauksing First Nation), Craig Isaac (Mi’kmaq, Listuguj First Nation), Dom Watson (Mvskoke, Pennsylvania), and singer Nathan Roy (Wiikwemkoong, Toronto) together for this knowledge creation session.