Future North Vancouver museum gets $4 million from Michael Audain

The gallery is set to open in 2017.

A rendering of the future entrance.

The suburban gallery has hosted exhibitions by big name photographers like Andy Warhol.

An internal rendering.

Presentation House gallery has hosted exhibitions by local Vancouver school heavyweights like Stan Douglas.

The North Shore mountains behind Lonsdale Quay.

B.C.’s most generous donor to the arts strikes again

North Vancouver’s future waterfront art museum has moved one step closer to completion with a $4-million gift from developer Michael Audain. The glass-box gallery adjacent to Lonsdale Quay will don the title “The Polygon Gallery” (formerly Presentation House, after its current home in a Victorian off Lonsdale) once it opens in 2017.
 
Like distinguishing West Vancouver, the West End and West Side, the future mark of a Vancouverite might be the ability to differentiate the web of galleries and museums endowed by developer and philanthropist Michael Audain. Besides the Audain Gallery, tucked in the Woodward’s complex, and the Audain Arts Centre at UBC, the future Audain Art Museum—based in large part on a 2011 exhibition of his personal collection at the Vancouver Art Gallery—will open in Whistler next year.
 
The Polygon Gallery, to be housed in a 19,000-sq.-ft. space at the foot of Lonsdale, will offer a new home for the North Vancouver museum, which has developed an international reputation for contemporary photography and media art. Besides exhibitions by local heavyweights like Rodney Graham, Stan Douglas and Ian Wallace, the gallery has also hosted shows with works by Andy Warhol, Diane Arbus and Ansel Adams.
 
“The gift puts us more than half-way to our fundraising goal,” said Stuart McLaughlin, another donor and president of Grouse Mountain Resorts Ltd. With the donation from Audain Foundation and Polygon Homes Ltd., which has residential projects on the North Shore, the gallery is around halfway to its $15-million fundraising goal, which will cover construction costs. It will also make the future Polygon Gallery the most conceivable of the three proposals for an anchor museum at Lonsdale Quay (a proposed national maritime museum, funded by the feds, appears to be dead in water, while the North Vancouver Museum and Archives is still years away from moving into its future home, adjacent to the Polygon site).

The slideshow above shows renderings of the new gallery.