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Mission

To create the spaces where Canada can have the conversations it needs, about identity, culture, and where it's headed. With artists and the public shaping them together.

Vision

A Canada that comes to know itself through its art.

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The Institute
The Public Arts Institute of Canada is a new organization with a national ambition: to curate spaces where the country can hold the conversations it too often avoids. Canada is still reckoning with its past, and still learning the distances — and the common ground — between the people who share it. Those conversations are rarely easy, and art is one of the few places they can happen honestly: a forum for respectful public debate rather than a lecture. We treat this as a project of national importance. The question of what this country is, and what it could be, belongs to everyone in it.

The Series
Our flagship program is built around a single question: What does Canada mean to you? Each exhibition gathers artists across many disciplines and puts that question to them and to the public at once — visitors don't just look at the work, they answer back. Every show adds new voices, new work, and a growing public record of how the country responds. The goal is one million answers, gathered through at least one exhibition in every province and territory, shaped by a wide range of artists who each bring something the conversation would be poorer without.