Every day someone is having their own "day one" in Canada. Resurgo Place's newest exhibit, Canada: Day 1, is filled with photos, mementos, art, and personal stories from people who immigrated to Canada and New Brunswick to start new lives.

Years of planning and preparation were on display on Saturday, May 5 at the Nordic Heritage Museum’s grand opening. 77,000 items have been moved to the new space, including viking ship and a 100-year-old Finnish sauna.

“It’s really something we are celebrating, it’s unlike anywhere else in the world,” says Dagfinn Høybråten, Secretary General of the Nordic Council of Ministers.  “We are celebrating a 40-year long tradition of the Nordic Heritage Museum. It’s an important day for Nordics in the U.S. and for Nordic governments as a platform of communication and an exchange of ideas.”

The dream of a `snazzy` new land bridge in the city of Houston could become a reality sooner than expected, thanks to the Kinder Foundation. The proposed restoration of the 1,500-acre preserve, which lost more than 60 percent of its tree canopy after a major drought in 2012, is one of the nation’s largest and most visionary urban park projects. The Kinder Foundation has pledged $70 million to the project, which is the largest greenspace donation in the city’s history.

A new art prize that includes a cash reward, a catalog, and a solo exhibition has been created by contemporary art enthusiasts Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman and Contemporary Austin trustee Suzanne Deal Booth. “It seemed like a natural next step,” Mr. Fuhrman told the New York Times, “a way to learn about artists we may not even be familiar with.” Deal Booth and the Fuhrmans have committed to jointly fund four prizes biennially until 2026.

In the heart of Chicago, an area filled with stunning historic buildings, the Chicago Architecture Center (CAC) is being built; the area is currently experiencing a boom, with new openings scattered amongst old favorites like the Beaux-Arts skyscraper, London Guarantee Building (1923), and the Tribune Tower (1925), a Gothic Revival tower. 

Imagine Greater Louisville 2020 is an initiative developed by the Fund for the Arts that uses the arts to inact positive change in the city. After completing 35 of the 56 recommended actions in the plan, the project is ahead of schedule.

“The community is coming together to embrace our world-class arts and cultural assets and leverage them in a major way,” said Christen Boone, Fund for the Arts president & CEO. “Together, we are making great strides to ensure our region is more competitive, creative, educational, inclusive and compassionate.”

Tropical plants in a city that hits -40 degrees? 

The historic Assiniboine Park in Winnipeg is the site of a developing new attraction: Canada’s Diversity Gardens, a 35-acre biodome, already under construction. Set to open in the summer of 2020, the biodome will literally bring pieces of the world to the prairies. 

After three years in the making, the Toronto Botanical Garden (TBG) and the Edwards Gardens are combining resources to expand from four to thirty-five acres. This new plan was developed by TBG Executive Director, Harry Jongerden, and achieved through the design and consulting skills of Forrec Ltd., W. Gary Smith and Lord Cultural Resources.

Iceland’s iconic Perlan Museum has launched a spectacular, immersive new exhibition that explores the geological forces that make the country a wonder of the world. "Forces of Nature" allows guests to take a journey into the island’s volcanic center; shake along as an earthquake rattles the nation; dive deep into the ocean; and explore a 9-meter-tall reconstruction of one of the world’s most important bird-breeding grounds.  

Educational institutions are key instruments of soft power. Twenty-five higher education institutions from Guangxi Province, China have participated in an exhibition to showcase their facilities and programs to potential students in Sri Lanka. 

In 2017, 489,200 foreign students were studying in China, marking an increase of over 10% for the second consecutive year. This increase has made China the most popular destination for foreign students in Asia; low costs, sponsorships, and course availability are just some of the incentives to complete a higher education degree in China. 

For decades, Canadian Indigenous communities had very little say in how their cultural representations – artifacts and paintings, for example – were displayed in the country's museums. There has been a long history of artifacts being placed on display without permission or regard for accuracy; a practice that is slowly beginning to change, thanks to the efforts of activists and Indigenous curators.  

How can we use Soft Power to stimulate the creative economy? 

Malta is one of the world’s great island fortresses; yet, it's very name means 'refuge'.  As part of the celebration of Valletta’s Year as European Capital of Culture, Soft Power Destinations Award and Leading Cultural Destinations is hosting a workshop in London to explore how soft power is transforming these cities.

An Ottawa-based advocacy group is launching plans to create what would be Canada’s first museum dedicated to the history of gender and sexual minorities. Calla Barnett, president of The Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity, says: “We really want it to be a space that says: ‘This is our history. This is the reality of the LGBTQ2SIA people in this country. And these are our stories in terms of our rights, in terms of our continued fights for rights, in terms of inclusion.” 

It would be one of the few museums in the world dedicated to LGBTQ2+ history, after the Schwules Museum in Berlin and the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco. Other similar institutions are in the works in London and New York.

The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) is moving ahead with plans to transform this Beijing institution into a non-profit, tax-exempt charitable foundation. This could be a turning point for the country's fast-proliferating private museums. 

Audiences are hungry to address the issue of racism in cultural institutions; there is power in representation, and museums are responsible for selecting both their curators and the art on display.

The National Archaeological Museum of Athens marked its 150th anniversary with a one-of-a-kind addition to the display; they revived scents from antiquity to create a fully sensory experience in the Countless Aspects of Beauty exhibition. 

"When people ask me to pick out the skills most needed by museum directors today...I say agility, closely followed by bravery," says Kaywin Feldman, Nivin and Duncan MacMillan director and president of Minneapolis Institute of Art. "As long as the staff and trustees at American museums remain predominantly white, it will be difficult for museums to tackle the often painful but important contemporary issues that we must address." 

The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) and the Canada Council for the Arts announced the recipients of the Governor General’s Medals in Architecture. The biennial awards celebrate outstanding design in recently completed projects by Canadian architects. The 2018 winners include: 

• Maison de la littérature, Quebec City, QC, Chevalier Morales Architectes
• Audain Art Museum, Whistler, BC, Patkau Architects
• Parallelogram House, East St. Paul, MB, 5468796 Architecture

More than a dozen architects and designers from across North America have come together to create an unprecedented showcase of aboriginal architecture in Canada’s first ever indigenous-led entry to the Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibition, "Unceded: Voices of the Land", included multi-media artwork and tells the story of the land.  

“recasting”, a new installation by Alison Brooks Architects, is made up of four inhabitable spaces: threshold, inhabited edge, passage, and roofspace. Each space provides an emotional and sensory experience, revealing housing architecture’s meaningful civic role. The installation was a response to the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennele`s theme, freespace. 

At just 0.015 millimetres high, this tiny house is around half a million times smaller than a regular two-storey house. And it was created by a micro robot.

While the house would make inadequate shelter for any animal bigger than a micro-organism, its engineers from the Femto-ST Institute, a research organisation in Besançon, France, are celebrating the breakthrough in nano-robotic construction.

Digital technology has changed nearly everything about our society, from how we pay bills to how our brains are wired. Art is no exception.

New exhibits at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago show artists as early adopters of new technologies, whose work takes on new forms as they experiment. This raises a fundamental question that many institutions are still struggling to answer: how can museums keep up with this new technology?

“Something that is needed is advocacy and education,”  Francesca Casadio, Art Institute of Chicago, says. “For time-based media, conservation is not just about fixing. It’s making sure that, in a few years, you can still exhibit the piece, and you don’t have just an idea that you’re not able to show anymore because nobody asked the right questions.”

Perhaps one of the most recognizable paintings by the Group of Seven, Emily Carr’s painting of a white church deep in the rainforest has been given a new name. The gallery believes this new title removes an offensive term out of respect, and has opted to present information on the title-change next to the artwork to help facilitate open discussion. 

In this new exhibit, the work of 50 Indigenous female artists will be displayed on 167 billboards across the country. 

Appearing in inner cities and on highways, the images will bring First Nations, Inuit and Métis women to the forefront; women who have been literally and figuratively erased in the past. The artwork is all contemporary, exploring a variety of themes and mediums. 

“Eco-City” announced at Venice Architecture Biennale will include a museum, artists’ studios and an art park. The district will fill 400 hectares of Hebei`s Xinglong Valley, right outside Beijing. 

Construction is due to begin in near the end of 2018, jointly funded by Guangdong Yuegang and Shenzhen XL Culture Development.