The Kelowna Art Gallery is a Canadian public art gallery located in Kelowna, British Columbia founded in 1976. The gallery has become a leading public art gallery serving the central Okanagan region. The gallery was incorporated as a not-for-profit charitable society in 1977. The gallery’s permanent collection started with the acquisition of After the Rain by Okanagan resident Irvine Adams (1902–1992) in 1977. Since then, close to 500 objects have been acquired by the gallery through donation and purchase.
The Kelowna Art Gallery was originally housed in the Kelowna Centennial Museum. In 1996, a 15,758-square-foot (1,464.0 m2) facility meeting national standards for secure, climate-controlled storage and exhibition of artworks was constructed by the City of Kelowna and leased to the museum. On November 1, 2006, the Kelowna Art Gallery was granted “A” status by the Minister of Canadian Heritage.
The facility is divided into a number of galleries, including the Treadgold Bullock Gallery, the Reynolds Gallery and the outdoor Rotary Courtyard. Classes, community presentations, lectures, and other outreach programs are delivered in the Kiwanis-Hiram Walker front hall and Scotiabank Classroom.
The permanent collection of the Kelowna Art Gallery has just over 700 works of art as of 2010. The majority of pieces in the collection are by contemporary Canadian artists, with a small number of historical Canadian pieces. Most works have been offered to us as gifts, but there has been some modest purchasing, assisted by people’s donations of monies, and grants from the Central Okanagan Foundation and the Canada Council.
The Gallery has the goal of organizing an exhibition centered around the permanent collection every few years. The most recent of these was Constructions of Identity in the fall of 2010. A collecting priority statement was drawn up by the curator with approval by the Acquisitions Committee in 2008. Currently we are largely focused on improving our holdings of work by important local artists.
The Gallery is currently engaged in a project to digitize images of the permanent collection works, and mount the details on the collection onto a national research database hosted by the Canadian Heritage Information Network (a unit of the Department of Canadian Heritage). We would also like to have the collection accessible via our own website.