Critically acclaimed Rita Letendre is one of the most eminent living abstract artists. Her painting career began in Montreal in the 1950s, when she associated with Quebec's Automatistes and Plasticiens. Often the sole female artist in their group shows, she broke away from their approach to painting. Seeking to express the full energy of life and harness in her powerful gestures an intense spiritual force, Letendre worked with oils, pastels, and acrylics, using her hands, palette knife, brushes and uniquely the airbrush.

Käthe Kollwitz is revered in her home country, Germany, and around the world for her drawings, prints, and sculptures. Over the course of a five decade career, which included two world wars, Kollwitz's subject matter focused on the lives and hardships of marginalized women. Given the turmoil and suffering of women and children around the world today, her powerful images resonate with an uncanny timeliness.

The field of photography has been described as one that exacerbates antagonisms, "a permanent hotbed of contradictions." This is also an apt description for the work of the artists who have participated in the Aimia | AGO Photography Prize in its first decade.

Exploring the experimental energy of an era, Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971-1989 brings together more than 100 works by 65 artists and collectives to highlight an innovative period in Toronto art history. Amidst the social and political upheavals of their time, the generation of artists that emerged in Toronto during the 1970s and 1980s pushed the boundaries of conventional painting, sculpture and photography, exploring new ways of art making including video, installation and performance.

From 1941 to 1944, the Polish Jewish photographer Henryk Ross (1910-1991) was a member of an official team documenting the implementation of Nazi policies in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland. Covertly, he captured on film scores of both quotidian and intimate moments of Jewish life. In 1944, he buried thousands of negatives in an attempt to save this secret record. After the war, Ross returned to Poland to retrieve them. Although some were destroyed by nature and time, many negatives survived.

Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, whose projects range from small-scale sculptures to ambitious urban interventions, investigates the transformative powers of art in this provocative book. As the force behind the much-acclaimed Stony Island Arts Bank, Gates responds creatively to the challenges of space, whether working in museums or in communities. In this instance, he explores notions of blackness, freedom, and the history of house music.

Kenojuak Ashevak shot to fame in 1970 when Canada Post printed The Enchanted Owl, a print of a black-and-red plumed nocturnal bird, on a postage stamp. She later became known as the magic-marker-wielding "grandmother of Inuit art," famous for her fluid graphic storytelling and her stunning depictions of wildlife. She was a defining figure in Inuit art and one of the first Indigenous artists to be embraced as a contemporary Canadian artist.

In a 2012 performance piece, Rebecca Belmore transformed an oak tree surrounded by monuments to colonialism in Toronto's Queens Park into a temporary "non-monument" to the Earth.

Mickalene Thomas: Femmes Noires upends and overturns familiar representations and monolithic notions of Black women today.  

This exhibition, developed in a creative partnership between the AGO and the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans, presents a bold new collection of Thomas’s vibrant, colourful and provocative paintings, silkscreens, photographs, time-based media and site-specific installations exploring how Black women are represented in art and popular culture.

Anthropocene is the latest book by Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nick de Pencier to chronicle the massive and irreversible impact of humans on the Earth - on a geological scale.

In photographs that are both stunning and disconcerting, Burtynsky, Baichwal, and de Pencier document species extinction (the burning of elephant tusks to disrupt the illegal trade of ivory), technofossils (swathes of discarded plastic forming geological layers), and terraforming (mines and industrial agriculture).