Art Gallery of Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia's provincial art gallery on Hollis Street, home to Maud Lewis's painted house.
The gallery was founded in 1908 as the Nova Scotia Museum of Fine Arts and took its present name in 1975. Since 1988 it has occupied the former Dominion Building, a nineteenth-century sandstone government office on Hollis Street in downtown Halifax, and in 1998 it expanded into two floors of the adjacent Provincial Building, which are reached through a linking atrium. The permanent collection now numbers more than 18,000 works by artists from Nova Scotia, elsewhere in Canada and abroad.
The gallery is best known for its holdings of the folk artist Maud Lewis, who painted in a one-room house at Marshalltown in Digby County. The house itself, acquired by the province and conserved over many years, is displayed inside the Maud Lewis Gallery together with painted boards, cards and household objects. Other long-term displays cover Mi'kmaw and Indigenous art of Mi'kma'ki, Nova Scotian folk art, Inuit sculpture and prints, and historical and contemporary Canadian art. A western branch operates in Yarmouth.
Highlights
- Maud Lewis's painted one-room house, conserved and displayed indoors
- Ta'n A'sikatikl Sipu'l, a long-term display of Mi'kmaw and Indigenous art
- Collection of more than 18,000 works, strong in Nova Scotian folk art
- Two linked heritage government buildings on Hollis Street
