Exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery

We who have known tides: Indigenous Art from the Collection

November 6, 2025 - April 12, 2026

The Vancouver Art Gallery’s group exhibition, We who have known tides: Indigenous Art from the Collection, brings together significant works by Indigenous artists currently in the collection of the Gallery. It represents creative voices from across these lands, celebrating the depth, innovation, and continuity of practices. Within this exhibition, the Gallery unveils CLAN HAT (2025), a major multi-year commission from Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas.

Clan Hat (2021-2025), mixed media, permanent collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery

CLAN HAT marks the beginning of an expansive story cycle and a new narrative world. In this mural, Chapter One introduces a community bound to a towering pillar of stone, where scarcity, hierarchy, and the struggle for survival shape daily life. At its centre is Simjuaay, a young navigator determined to leave the pillar in search of the resources needed to forge a new future for her Clan, setting into motion a journey that others, unsettled by her vision, quietly move to obstruct.

From the Gallery:

We who have known tides begins from a poetic inquiry that seeks to understand what it means to exist at the edges of the Pacific Ocean. We who have known tides is an examination that unveils the ways in which the ocean and living in proximity to it has shaped the work of Indigenous artists, as well as their relation to territories across land and water, and their connections to communities that have witnessed the tides change for thousands of years. Drawn predominantly from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s permanent collection, this exhibition asks us to consider where we are on a deeper level, looking to the ocean as a way of understanding how this place is ever changing.