Agnes Etherington Art Centre

The Agnes Etherington Art Centre (AEAC) opened on the campus of Queen’s University in 1957. The origins of the institution date from the early 1950s, when local philanthropist Agnes McCausland Etherington donated her house to become an arts centre and cultural institution serving the Queen’s campus and the Kingston community.

In April 2020 Queen’s University asked Lord Cultural Resources and Moriyama and Teshima Architects to complete a comprehensive two-phase master planning study for a facility that would house both the art museum and the faculty of art history and art conservation. Known as “Agnes Reimagined”, the goals of the revitalization project were to create a facility that will house expanded, cutting-edge exhibition galleries featuring art from Agnes’s world class collections and beyond, program spaces for art making and art exploration and innovative education spaces that allow for object-based research and experiential learning. Creating connections across faculties and with the surrounding community was a higher-order goal of the project.

Phase 1 included a visioning exercise and extensive stakeholder engagement process intended to create a concept that would achieve all of these goals. Phase 2 included a detailed facility programming exercise to quantify the major program elements necessary to achieve the shared vision, a business operational plan for the museum component for the first three years of operation and a high-level concept design (completed by Moriyama and Teshima Architects).