Burnaby Art Gallery

The Burnaby Art Gallery is dedicated to collecting, preserving, and presenting a contemporary and historical visual art program by local, national, and internationally recognized artists—a mission that began in 1967.

The Burnaby Art Gallery is the only public art museum in Canada dedicated to works of art on paper; representing a variety of techniques and practices from artists of diverse backgrounds. The gallery cares for and manages more than 6,500 works of art in the City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection, as well as the City of Burnaby Public Art Collection.

There’s so much to offer at the BAG, as it’s affectionately known—more than 100 programs presented by supportive, experienced instructors who work hard to balance skill development with personal expression and creative thinking in students of all ages. Past exhibitions span such names as Roy Henry Vickers, Diyan Achjadi, Ruth Beer, Neil Wedman, and Karin Jones.

Burnaby Art Gallery also offers tours, summer camps, family and adult workshops, and artist talks that accompany the exhibitions.

The historic building is situated on a scenic spot that was home to a strawberry farm on the north shore of Deer Lake. With its river rock veranda, beautiful hand-crafted woodwork, stained-glass and tile, it remains one of the finest examples of Edwardian architecture in the Lower Mainland. Completed in 1911, and called Fairacre, it ranked as one of Burnaby’s grandest residences, going on to become everything from a priory to a fraternity house before transforming into an art museum in the 1960s. Renovations in 2000 restored it to its original architectural grandeur.

Today the Burnaby Art Gallery shares the park with the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts and the Burnaby Village Museum, forming Burnaby’s thriving cultural centre.