For Immediate Release / February 6, 2025

Exhibitions Unveiled: Arts and Heritage St. Albert Announce 2025-2026 Schedule

Did you know St. Albert once campaigned to be the site of a national park? 

Musée Héritage Museum curator Martin Bierens unearthed that curious fact while researching this year’s exhibitions. It’s one local anecdote among many that museum-goers will soon get to explore: the 2025 seasons of both the Museum and the Art Gallery of St. Albert reflect on heritage, showcasing exhibits and artists that celebrate their roots, community, and the journeys that brought them here. 

“Here in St. Albert, we have a wealth of different stories that we can tell and we can share, from thousands of years ago, all up until yesterday,” Bierens says. “We really try and get a variety with each show that touch on different aspects of community life.” 

At the museum, that means starting off with Warm N’ Wooly, a show examining the ways in which we’ve kept warm over the years. In March, Signs of the Times opens by digging into the history of beloved local businesses and institutions through displays of signage and iconography, including the St. Albert Library apple tree and the Bruin Inn sign. 

In July, Raising St Albert: Early Childhood, will tell the stories of local midwives, and how both Indigenous groups and settlers raised their children through the eras. In November, St. Albert and the Northwest Resistance: 140 Years Later will focus on St Albert’s role in the 1885 Northwest Resistance. And, as always, the museum is partnering with the African and African Descendants Friendship Club of St. Albert, this year to highlight the Neil and Wescomb families, and how they arrived here. 


This marks Bierens’ second year as museum curator, and he notes that the deeper he looks into its archives, the more he appreciates its depths. 

“I have yet to find something that hasn't been, in one way or another, absolutely fascinating,” he says. “Of course, I'm a bit of a history nerd, but there's just such a wealth of stories here in St. Albert that it's easy to find these stories that are just absolutely fascinating.” 

Over at the Art Gallery, 2025 begins with an immersive experience: Elsa Robinson’s The Garden, a show years in the making, draws on the artist’s Jamaican heritage to completely reimagine how an art gallery looks. 

“We're basically transforming the gallery space into a black-and-gold garden,” curator Emily Baker explains. “There's gonna be a tree that's at least eight feet tall… There's a cave that's completely quilted that you can go into. And then when you lie down in the cave, it looks like you're looking at the night sky, 'cause it's all black and gold.” 

Elsa Robinson, Cape, 2023. Mixed media soft sculpture

The Garden is one of 12 shows that will populate the space over the year, many of which see artists sharing personal and cultural stories with audiences. Sweet and Sour Memories will feature watercolours, sculpture and photography of artist Edith Chu, reflecting on growing up in her family’s restaurant. Anishinaabe-Ukrainian artist Speplól’s show, Fusion on Traditions, uses loom beaded tapestries as a way of reconnecting to heritage. Elsewhere in the season Nicholas Hertz’s A Mirror with No Reflection will use reflective surfaces to involve visitors in the art itself. 

Baker notes she typically receives more than 100 submissions from artists, and has space to program just a fraction of that amount. Having gone through so many submissions, she notes that currently artists seem particularly interested in sharing narratives through their visual work. 

“There's a lot of artists who are really interested in storytelling,” Baker says. “Whether that's telling and sharing their own experiences, creating spaces where stories can be shared, using older storytelling traditions to tell new stories that are rooted in our time … We have a lot of artists who want to create a space where people can feel through the experiences of others.  

“When you really take a step back, visual art is just visual storytelling,” she continues. “It's creating a space where we can kind of share these narratives or experiences or emotions, and be able to see directly from one heart into another.” 

Article Written by: Paul Blinov


 Full schedules for the Museum and Art Gallery can be found at artsandheritage.ca 

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Last edited: February 4, 2025