National Gallery of Canada offers free admission to Indigenous Peoples

OTTAWA — The National Gallery of Canada announced Monday that admission will be free for Indigenous Peoples when it reopens this week for the first time since April.

The gallery reopens Friday with four new exhibitions and installations, including one featuring Rembrandt’s “The Blinding of Samson,” a large-scale oil on canvas from the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, and another featuring work from Jamaican-Canadian artist Tau Lewis.

The gallery also announced that admission for a companion of a person with a disability is free. General admission for adults is $20.

The National Gallery of Canada says in a release it is home to “the largest contemporary Indigenous art collection in the world.” It also hosts a collection of historical and contemporary Canadian and European art from the 14th to 21st centuries.

But it’s not the first to offer free admission to Indigenous Peoples.

Several other large institutions have already established the practice, including the Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, and the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton.

COVID-19 guidelines remain in place for the National Gallery of Canada, including limiting the number of visitors in the venue at one time. 

The gallery was closed three times due to pandemic restrictions: from March 13 to July 17, 2020; Dec. 21, 2020 to Feb. 17, 2021 and again from April 2 to July 15.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 12, 2021.

The Canadian Press