Toronto’s Cultural Renaissance:

The Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies has taken on an engagement to publish a series of reports on the best practices of Toronto’s cultural institutions. To address the richness and diversity of Toronto’s museum culture, the Robarts Centre has established a working group of graduate students from political science and culture and communication to research and map the exciting transformations to the Royal Ontario Museum, the Hockey Hall of Fame, the McMichael Gallery and the Powerplant. These institutions, both popular and elite, highly commercialized and iconic, differ enormously in the size and complexity of their collections. Some are privately owned and others are public institutions. With hundreds of millions of dollars spent on modernizing and expanding the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum and other institutions, what are we to make of these dramatic changes to the way we understand Toronto’s public culture? Toronto’s cultural institutions are shaped by complex mandates driven by governance structures, commercial needs, educational outreach, and curatorial vision. Each institution is struggling to reach out to highly diverse publics, and this attempt to connect strategicall