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Reflecting some 600 years of human creative endeavor, the gallery’s permanent collection contains more than 38,000 works in all media. The Canadian collection is particularly impressive (see Art Gallery of Ontario).

Canada’s foremost museum offers an excellent balance of art, archeology, science, and nature, and has more than six million artifacts in its collections (see Royal Ontario Museum).

Over 800 high-tech, interactive exhibits within 11 specially themed exhibition halls aim to make science fun and fascinating. Youthful visitors can navigate their way in a rocket chair, climb the rockwall, touch a tornado, and explore the hair-raising effects of electricity (see Ontario Science Centre).

The only museum in North America devoted solely to ceramics was founded in 1984 by private Canadian collectors George and Helen Gardiner to showcase their extraordinary collection of pre-Columbian American pottery and European porcelain. Recent additions include Asian ceramics and contemporary artwork (see Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art).

Located in the magnificent former Toronto Stock Exchange building, an Art Deco gem built in 1937, this center celebrates postwar Canadian design. Furniture, housewares, sportsgear, and medical equipment are among the items in the permanent collection and highlight the role of design in daily life. The center also hosts major national and international exhibitions. A gorgeous mural on the upstairs Trading Floor depicts Canadian industrial themes (see Design Exchange).

A permanent collection of over 10,000 fabrics, quilts, ceremonial cloths, and carpets from around the world are housed in this small but excellent museum. Temporary exhibitions round out the historical artifacts with contemporary works.

The outstanding Group of Seven collection is the treasure of this gallery. The Group endeavored, in the early 20th century, to express a distinctive national identity through their paintings of the Canadian wilderness (see McMichael Canadian Art Collection).

Known for its boundary-pushing exhibitions of contemporary Canadian and international art, this edgy, non-collecting gallery features rotating shows of consistently high quality. If the art sometimes mystifies visitors, at least the building is instantly recognizable: a brick smokestack tops the 1920s converted power station (see Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery).

As Inuit tool makers turned their skills to sculpting, the culture experienced a renaissance, this time in artistic achievement. Most of the 200 pieces in this gallery specializing in postwar Inuit sculpture are carved soapstone, each evocative of the landscape, culture, and legends of the indigenous people of Canada’s harsh Arctic region. The gallery’s design echoes that of the TD Bank Tower, by renowned modernist architect Mies van der Rohe (see Toronto Dominion Gallery of Inuit Art).

This unusual building, resembling a stylized shoebox, houses more than 10,000 shoes, covering 4,500 years of footwear history. Artifacts represent an unparalleled range, from Ancient Egyptian funerary shoes (1500 BC) to 19th-century Nigerian camel-riding boots to Marilyn Monroe’s red leather pumps (see Bata Shoe Museum).