Toronto: City of the Arts

Toronto, Ontario is an art lover’s dream. The city, the fifth-largest in North America, is home to several major galleries and museums.

The Royal Ontario Museum is the largest in Canada, with more than 40 galleries. The museum displays art works and natural history items and has the largest collection of avian and mammalian skeletons in the world. 

The ROM’s Far East Collection, the largest collection of far eastern artifacts outside of China, is anchored by the Ming Tomb, a complete 17^th-century warrior’s tomb and the only complete Chinese tomb in the West.

The Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art was, at one time, affiliated with ROM. This specialized museum is home to more than 2,000 pieces of ceramic art. Its collection features everything from pre-Columbian pottery to classic European porcelains of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Art Gallery of Toronto has strong collections of European and Canadian art. One of the main attractions of the gallery is its collection of Henry Moore sculptures, one of the largest in the world. Moore personally designed the exhibit space for this collection in 1974.

For more than 30 years, the Textile Museum of Canada has celebrated international fiber art. The museum’s permanent collection features more than 12,000 textiles, from pieces as much as 2,000 years old to modern designs, with samples from more than 200 regions of the world.

The Bata Shoe Museum is housed in a whimsical, shoebox-shaped building designed by architect Raymond Moriyama. The museum is home to a 4,500-piece, semi-permanent “History of Shoes” exhibit that highlights examples of footwear spanning time and the globe, from ancient Egyptian sandals to the sleekly sexy stilettos of 1990s. The Bata has three additional galleries that display special exhibits throughout the year.

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