Renovations promise to reimagine Calgary's Glenbow Museum
New design includes galleries on every floor, more behind the scenes visibility
For the past 3½ years, the doors of the Glenbow Museum have been shut to the public.
Although people haven't been able to visit the museum since August 2021, it doesn't mean it hasn't been busy inside. The space has been undergoing a significant transformation that promises to reinvent the museum.
"For the first time in our history, we'll be able to show people a lot of our back-of-house," said Nicholas Bell, president and CEO of the Glenbow.
Bell believes the renovations mean intentional transparency is being built into the museum — and that's because the plan is to get more art and artifacts in front of people, as opposed to just storing it away where it can't be seen by the public.
"We're really trying to demystify what it is the museum does," he said.
"These collections, in large part, belong to the people of Alberta, and we'd like people to understand what work is happening in their name."
Built in the 1970s, the eight-storey, 312,000-square-foot building sits at the corner of Ninth Avenue and First Street S.E. in the heart of Calgary's downtown.
The art collection it houses is the largest in Western Canada, according to the Glenbow, with over 33,000 sculptures, paintings and works on paper.
Bell says that because the museum's original storage space was built in the early '70s, most of the collections had been stored in plywood cabinets or racks, which is an outdated practice.
"It was kind of the best that we could do at the time, but those systems had fallen way behind what is considered best practice for museum storage today," he said, adding that all of the old storage has been demolished during the renovation process.
"What's remarkable is that our team of consultants and our staff have been able to compress the collections into different, sort of discrete areas of the building."
Now, construction teams have rebuilt storage that has been perfectly designed for the space, according to Bell. Those new storage systems involve rolling steel racks that are able to be moved around the museum to make way for new galleries and the collection of new artifacts as history continues to be made.
The total cost of the project is $205 million, which includes all renovations and the reimagining of the exhibitions and programming.
"Folks who remember coming to Glenbow before we closed, they probably remember … a four-storey experience. So you came into the lobby, you went up these sort of grand stairs all the way up to four. And that was kind of the limit of your experience unless you were doing research," Bell said.
"In fact, there's so much more space here. So what we've tried to do is really reverse the ratio of front-of-house and back-of-house. So the building's not getting any bigger, but the visitor experience is getting way bigger."
Bell says, upon reopening, the museum will have galleries on every floor and ample visibility into back-of-house spaces. The renovation will also include turning the roof into a public terrace.
The Glenbow is slated to reopen in late 2026, though a specific date has not yet been determined.
With files from Danielle Nerman and Jennifer Dorozio