DIGITAL LIBRARY

When our eyes touch invites visitors to look again at Catharine and Peter Whyte’s portraits, relationships, and legacy. Through archival research, community engagement, and close attention to portraiture, the exhibition explores intimacy, agency, colonial context, and the humanity behind familiar stories of The Whyte’s founders.

Before you visit The Whyte this summer, here are five details worth slowing down for. From hidden stories and rare Rodin sculptures to archival photographs, portraits, and unexpected moments of recognition, Thick as Thieves and When Our Eyes Touch invite visitors to look closer at art, memory, power, and connection. Use this guide before you go, then step into the galleries and see what catches your eye.

Every summer, The Whyte’s Museum Interpreters bring Banff’s art, history and culture to life. Meet this year’s team and discover how their guided tours help visitors connect with the stories, people and places that shaped the Canadian Rockies. From the Heritage Gallery and Historic Homes to walking tours and summer exhibitions, each experience offers a fresh way to see Banff.

Thick as Thieves and When Our Eyes Touch run May 1 to November 8, 2026, at The Whyte in Banff AB. This exhibition explores connection, influence, and relationships that shape our world, inviting reflection on trust, power, and community. Presented alongside portrait paintings by founders Peter and Catharine Whyte, it opens a wider conversation about bonds that can be intimate, strategic, sustaining, and complicated. Organized and circulated by the MacKenzie Art Gallery, curat

Fourteen years later, the Fireside Chats at The Whyte remained a warm, community gathering. As Director of Archives and Special Collections Elizabeth Kundert-Cameron observed at the final event, familiar faces returned year after year, and Chic’s stories “evoked… the feeling of being at a family party.” What began as an open house in the Abegweit became a recorded oral history, preserved in The Whyte's Archives and Special Collections Library for future generations.