Moments from National Art Gallery of Canada

The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa moved into its current home in 1988, a glass and granite building by the Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie whose soaring glass Great Hall deliberately echoes the roofline of the nearby Library of Parliament, a visual handshake between the country's art collection and its seat of government just across the street. Outside the entrance stands Maman, a roughly thirty-foot bronze and steel spider by Louise Bourgeois, one of several casts of the piece installed at major museums worldwide, and it has become the gallery's unofficial mascot, simultaneously unsettling and strangely protective in the way Bourgeois intended, a tribute to her own mother, a weaver.

The collection has built particular strength in Indigenous Canadian art and in the Group of Seven, the early-twentieth-century painters who defined a distinctly Canadian landscape tradition independent of European models, alongside a broad international modern collection. Walk the Great Hall itself slowly before heading into the galleries, the building's relationship to the Ottawa River and the Parliament buildings across the water was as deliberate a design statement as anything hanging inside.