Current Exhibits – Art Windsor-Essex, Gibson Gallery, Leamington Arts Centre & Museum Windsor

Christian Chapman, an Anishinaabe artist from Fort William First Nation in Ontario, has always cherished and attended to stories, admiring their depth, elusiveness, the ways they carry meaning, and how storytellers in his family — young and old — could uniquely animate their being. These stories warmly anchored him in Anishinaabe traditions from the north shore of Lake Superior, stretching back to times before his own. He would listen, carefully attentive, beaming with his own curiosity. For Chapman, these stories are treasures, sources of inspiration and influence that travel with him into the shifting imaginary of Anishinaabe storytelling.

Run to the Hills! spotlights Chapman’s gift as a storyteller who, like relatives before him, finds his own way of being in conversation with ancestral oral traditions. Using painting, printmaking, and other mixed media techniques, he forms a new graphic language for narrative expression that still carries old-timey sensibilities.

In his work, you’ll find elements of Anishinaabeg humour in the mundane and small moments of daily life, alongside the deeper political undercurrents that tug at its edges. This situates his practice in a new liminal zone where identities merge, and stories intersect—sometimes grounded in Anishinaabe Aki, other times wandering in from the magical world of Disney. He experiments with text, image, and visual juxtapositions, sometimes offering up pointed themes, other times leaving space for more to be imagined.

Through these playful encounters, he builds a new arbour for Indigenous audiences, a space where the subtle humour of Indigenous experience and familiar symbols of popular culture coexist seamlessly. Viewers are gently invited into this realm, which opens with sharp yet recognizable crossings, showing how the lines between these connected worlds are always changing.

Chapman draws on the styles of visual art icons, Woodland School, Mishomis Norval Morrisseau and the American Pop artist Andy Warhol, bending them through his own unique lens. With profound affection for Anishinaabe story forms from where the North Shore sleeps, his reinterpretations are brave, inventive and cheeky. Bounded perpetually to every storyteller in his family preceding him. By bringing in belly laughs, mischief, and critical analysis, Chapman keeps the Woodland style’s pull alive for the next wave of Anishinaabe makers.

The exhibit’s name, Run to the Hills! nods to Iron Maiden’s hit track and references Chapman’s 2017 print, Fight for Your Life. The song, widely known and belted outby Native uncles across Turtle Island, serves as a rallying cry for Indigenous empowerment and grit. Chapman harnesses these forces throughout his practice, honouring the timeless defiance that lives on across generations — much like old stories — while always leaving room for laughter to sneak in

The Exhibitionists is a fluidly organized collective of figurative woman artists. While individual exhibitionists move in and out of the group, their shared focus remains the same: how to authentically capture the contemporary experience of being a woman by disrupting and expanding the nude tradition.

Art Windsor Essex has a collection of roughly 4,000 works of art, but fewer than 20% of those works are made by women. The Exhibitionists, who mostly came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, are almost the same age as AWE, which began as the Willistead Art Gallery of Windsor in 1943. As the Exhibitionists studied art and began their careers, AWE’s holdings were growing alongside them. But here, as elsewhere, as these artists gained confidence and grew in their practices, AWE was still not seriously collecting women artists.

For The Exhibitionists, the female body is a contested site of power and celebration, of play and vulnerability. Chappus, Collins, Draisey and Renaud Fisher have selected work from AWE’s collection that reveals the institution’s strengths and gaps. They have placed their work and the work of other Exhibitionists alongside AWE’s collection to reveal what’s possible when we centre equity and bravery in our collecting choices.

Of the 1028 artists represented in the Art Windsor-Essex Collection, 7 identify as Black Artists. A total of 0.681% of the collection.

Of the approximately 4214 total works in the Art Windsor-Essex Collection, 10 works are by Black Artists. A total of 0.24% of the collection.

If we use the American auction market as a metric for understanding what artworks are currently being collected by private collectors, the statistics are bleak: art by women, for example, accounts for 3.3% of auction sales between 2008-2022, art by Black American artists only 2%, and art by Black women artists just 0.1%.

This exhibition, pulled from the Art Windsor Essex- Collection, seeks to locate and foreground Black within the institution; examining absence through presence. By interrogating Blackness as a medium, alike to the title Ink, Charcoal, & Jet – the colour Black is positioned as a central character: an active, contributing voice, speaking from the collection.

Through close looking, Black reveals itself through material and formal considerations; lithographic ink, asphalt, traces of shadow, ghosts, or the gestures of an artist’s hand. Black reveals itself as the foundational bedrock for where we make, and how we make, as artists – the material easily found, the initial sketches, the finished project, the process through to the end.

By excavating the collection, Ink, Charcoal & Jet asks: where does Blackness speak from within the institution, and how might listening to it reshape our understanding of presence, absence, and power?

They say the Gibson Gallery has a few permanent residents.

Long before it became an art gallery, the building served as a Michigan Central Railway station. Over the years, visitors and volunteers have shared stories of unexplained sounds, strange encounters, and things that simply can’t be explained. And in a town with a haunted reputation like Amherstburg, maybe that’s not so surprising.

This Halloween, we’re inviting artists to explore the darker side of imagination for The Haunted Station, an exhibition celebrating dark art, horror, the macabre, folklore, the supernatural, and everything deliciously unsettling. Whether the work is creepy, mysterious, gothic, surreal, or simply strange, we want to see what lurks in the shadows.

Opening Saturday, August 1, 2026. Curated by Hugh & Kathy Leal, this new temporary display explores the history of jazz concert promotion in the Windsor area.

Since the 1970s, Hugh & Kathy have been bringing jazz pioneers to Windsor and organizing concerts and recording sessions. This display features promotional material, advertisements, and historical photographs from over 50 years of concerts and recordings. Regular admission rates apply.

Developed by Exploration Exhibits, a new division of Research Casting International, Carnivorous Dinosaurs: Theropods showcases some of the world’s most iconic dinosaurs. Theropods are made up of various species of meat-eating dinosaurs. Tyrannosaurus Rex, Albertosaurus, and Velociraptor are some of the most well-known members of the theropod family. These two-legged creatures are the ancient ancestors of modern-day birds.

Discover how theropods ranged in size, from the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex and Spinosaurus to the little, yet agile Deinonychus and Velociraptor. Engage with 2 life-sized skeletons, and a range of different skulls of these dangerous, powerful creatures. and learn more about what makes these meat eating dinosaurs such enduring symbols of dominance

In 2026 the Royal Canadian Legion celebrates its 100th year as an organization. Founded by Veterans after the Great War, the Royal Canadian Legion has provided a space for Veteran commodity, Veteran employment, Veteran support and a century of memories held within the Legion’s walls.

From Poppy drives to Sunday meat auctions, to weddings, the Royal Canadian Legion has imprinted itself deeply in Canadian culture. Come to the Chimczuk to explore 100 years of the Royal Canadian Legion’s rich history.

As The Artists of Colour, we have established our mandate to celebrate, preserve and share perspectives of Black culture through the arts. This exhibition at Leamington Art Centre invites the viewer to discover the creative process of each artist.

As artists it is imperative that we tell our stories. The concepts in this body of work convey individual messages and thoughts relative to those stories. Our commission to share individual talents through personal experiences displaying visual art, literary art, and music is celebrated through this exhibition.

Tiffany April’s paintings and digital-based installations focus on mutually affective relationships between human and more-than-human beings – both digital and (im)material – to question categorizations of “Otherness”; an exploration rooted in her queer and neurodiverse experience.

“Ouroboros” visualizes neurodiverse burnout within the contemporary experience of heightened sensory and bodily connection to nebular digital spaces. Six site-responsive projections engage April’s fluid digital-body with the surrounding environment. Her refracted form becomes malleable, de-forming continuously in response to both the mirror surface and the physical surroundings. For April, the ancient Greek symbol of the ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail in an infinite cycle of self-destruction and renewal, reflects the cyclical experience of exhaustion from the chameleon-like behaviour of masking; an endless reforming of the ‘self’ in order to conform to social norms.

Stomping Grounds is a guest curated, cross-region and cross-selection exhibition of juried works. The exhibition’s focus is to bring together a broad and diverse collection and new scope of efficacious works to the Leamington Arts Centre.

About the Guest Curator: Jaclyn Meloche

Jaclyn Meloche holds three graduate degrees in the arts: a Master of Arts in Art History (Carleton University, Ottawa), a Master of Fine Arts, (School of Visual Arts, New York), and a PhD in Humanities (Fine Arts), (Concordia University, Montreal). Her practice spans curation, writing, and visual arts. Through drawing, photography, and sculpture, she is currently working to recover the contributions of women, racialized, and queer bodies in the automotive industry and car culture with the goal of diversifying its new era.

In June 2026, Parks Canada hosted six artists at Point Pelee National Park’s artist-in-residence program. Artists from all stages of their careers were invited to apply for this exciting five-day residency program. The park offered the artists an opportunity to connect with nature and to learn about its cultural and natural history. The artists stayed at Camp Henry in oTENTiks, Parks Canada’s unique blend of tent and A-frame cabin, and created Point Pelee-inspired works of art. This exhibit invites you to witness the natural beauty of the park through the artists’ individual experiences.

This exhibit features artists Sarah Blumel, Amber Dalgeish, Laura Fedynszn, Bridget George, Milo Egret LeFort and Alexandria Masse.