Thick as Thieves and When our eyes touch - Summer 2026 Exhibition Opening at The Whyte in Photos
- whytemuseum
- 19 hours ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 9 minutes ago
On May 1st, 2026, The Whyte’s summer exhibitions opened with a warm and enthusiastic celebration in Banff, bringing together artists, curators, members, partners, and community guests for an evening of art and conversation. The evening marked an exciting continuation of momentum for The Whyte, as the museum continues to broaden its contemporary art programming and connect with new generations looking for meaningful cultural exhibitions in the Bow Valley.
Opening night marked the official launch of Thick as Thieves in the Main Gallery and When our eyes touch in the Rummel Gallery. Together, the exhibitions invite visitors to consider themes of trust, intimacy, influence, representation, and the stories that shape how we see one another.
Gallery 1
The energy throughout the galleries reflected the spirit of the exhibitions themselves: connection, both with art and with one another. Guests moved through the galleries in conversation, pausing with the artworks, gathering and sharing in the excitement of a new season of exhibitions at The Whyte.
From evocative sculptures to tender portraiture sketches, opening night offered visitors the opportunity to experience two distinct but deeply resonant exhibitions. Each asks us to consider the relationships embedded in art, whether between artist and subject, object and institution, or viewer and story.
A Curator’s Talk with Crystal Mowry
As part of the opening weekend celebrations, visitors were invited to a Curator's Talk with Crystal Mowry, Curator of Thick as Thieves and Director of Programs at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. The talk was followed by a Q&A with Christina Cuthbertson, Chief Operating Officer and Curator at The Whyte.
Gallery 2
Rather than offering a traditional walkthrough presentation of the exhibition, Mowry spoke to the ideas orbiting the show: the stories museums hold, the relationships between artists and institutions, and the unexpected connections that emerge when works from a collection are brought into conversation.
Mowry described her curatorial practice as one shaped by curiosity, care, and a willingness to question the authority of museum narratives. In Thick as Thieves, artworks are not arranged simply by time period, medium, or theme. Instead, they form a web of relationships around loyalty, power, desire, secrecy, extraction, repair, and return.
Throughout the talk, Mowry reflected on museums' responsibilities to look closely at their own collections and the histories behind them. Some stories live in gallery labels, while others remain tucked away in archives, vaults, and institutional memory. Thick as Thieves draws those quieter histories closer to the surface, asking visitors to consider what is visible, what is withheld, and what new meanings emerge when artworks are allowed to speak across time.
The conversation also touched on restitution and the possibility of repair. Mowry framed this work not as a loss for institutions, but as an opportunity to create new relationships and more honest stories. In this way, Thick as Thieves asks visitors to sit with complexity while remaining open to connection, care, and transformation.
Together, the opening night and curator’s talk offered visitors several ways into the exhibitions, from the immediate experience of moving through the galleries to deeper conversations about the relationships that shape works of art over time.
Media Coverage
The Whyte’s summer exhibitions were also featured in local and regional media, helping share the excitement of opening weekend and introduce Thick as Thieves and When our eyes touch to wider audiences across Banff, the Bow Valley, and beyond.
Recent media coverage includes:
Rocky Mountain Outlook: Spring brings two new exhibits to Banff's Whyte Museum
CKUA Radio: Crystal Mowry on Thick as Thieves
About the Exhibitions
Thick as Thieves
How is an exhibition like a plot? The interrelations between artworks, like the artists who make them and the public who encounter them, yield conspiracies and allyships. Each object can be an agent – a powerful symbol of the various bonds that we nurture or conceal throughout our lives.
From an early age, we learn that resilience comes from connection, whether with other living beings, to a particular context, or as part of an exclusive network. Thick as Thieves brings together works forged in intense and often covert forms of connection. Drawn largely from the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s Permanent Collection, this selection of works invites us to consider how themes of fidelity, mutual desire, and fraternity formed by circumstance or power have held the interest of contemporary artists.
Thick as Thieves is organized and circulated by the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Curated by Crystal Mowry. The MacKenzie receives ongoing support from the South Saskatchewan Community Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, SaskCulture, City of Regina, University of Regina, and Saskatchewan Arts Board. The Banff iteration of Thick as Thieves is supported by The Rimrock Banff, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and Bowstrings Heritage Foundation.
Artists in the Exhibition
Deanna Bowen, Tammi Campbell, Lynne Cohen, David Furman, General Idea, Guerilla Girls, Jenny Holzer, Spring Hurlbut, August Klintberg, Marilyn Levine, Micah Lexier, Arnaud Maggs, Esmaa Mohamoud, Evan Penny, Wilf Perreault, Auguste Rodin, Amanda Strong, Inglis Sheldon-Williams, and Nic Wilson
When our eyes touch
Portraiture is an intimate art. It renders stillness, togetherness, and careful looking. It requires the hand to move slowly in unison with the eye, the eye tracing the contours of the cheek, mouth, and brow, the encounter transferred to the page. When our eyes touch considers several layers of intimacy: the act of portraiture, the blossoming relationship of two artists, Catharine Robb Whyte and Peter Whyte, and their sustained engagement with community through portrait-making.
This exhibition traces two distinct periods and locations in the lives of Catharine and Peter. The year 1925 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston marks the beginning of their lifelong pursuit of learning, exploring, and making art together. Through their correspondence and Catharine’s diaries, we see a budding romance as well as the development of their early skills in painting and portraiture. Both describe how their ambition to become artists was intrinsically tied to their partnership and to the support they offered one another. After settling in Banff in 1930, they continued to develop as artists. Their work reveals the lens through which they encountered the Bow Valley community, where they built their lives together. They often painted side by side, creating multiple pairs of paintings, one by Catharine and one by Peter.
For Catharine and Peter, portraiture was a way to engage with community. In art school, they sketched their fellow classmates for practice and for fun. In 1930, when Peter brought his new wife back to his hometown of Banff, they rented a cabin for a week at the Morley train station and trading post on the Stoney Nakoda reserve. This allowed Catharine to meet and paint an important part of Peter’s social circle. Ethnographic portraiture was popular during this era, and one can see Catharine and Peter caught up in the excitement of painting subjects perceived as more “exotic” than those they had encountered in art school. However, their portraits of Stoney men, women, and children cannot be reduced to this impulse alone. Several individuals seen in this exhibition held intimate roles in Peter’s life from childhood and remained connected to both Peter and Catharine throughout their lives. While these relationships have often been romanticized and simplified as those of “friends” or “supporters” of the Stoney community, today these works invite us to reflect more deeply on Catharine and Peter’s subject positions within a colonial system that repressed Indigenous communities across the country.
Today, these portraits continue to serve as a bridge to community. They invite us to consider not only the intimacy between artist and sitter, but also the layered histories that shaped these encounters. In bringing these works together, When our eyes touch asks what portraiture can hold across time: affection, curiosity, power, memory, and the possibility of renewed dialogue in the present.
When our eyes touch is on view from May 1 to November 8, 2026. This exhibition is organized by The Whyte and curated by Christina Cuthbertson, Emma De Sousa, Dagny Dubois, and Brittany Staddon.
Experience The Whyte Summer Exhibitions
Whether you are drawn to contemporary art, Canadian Rockies history, portraiture, or the hidden stories behind museum collections, these exhibitions offer a thoughtful reason to spend time at The Whyte this summer.
Thick as Thieves and When our eyes touch are on view at The Whyte from May 1 to November 8, 2026.
The museum is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 111 Bear Street, Banff, AB.
Plan your visit and discover what’s next at whyte.org.
Image Captions
Gallery 1: Photos from the Summer 2026 exhibition opening at The Whyte. Photos by Katie Goldie.
Gallery 2: Curator’s Talk with Crystal Mowry, curator of Thick as Thieves, followed by a Q&A with Christina Cuthbertson. Photos by Katie Goldie.
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