Agnes Etherington Art Centre

Props to this place for staying open after Hallowe’en!
Pretty much everything else in Kingston closes down. Students want to see tourist attractions too, and friends visiting students who are busy with student-​type stuff kinda need these tourist attractions lol.
TIP: Thursdays are free and they’re open late!
If you like Canada and like learning about Canada at all, you’ll like this place. It’s got an extensive collection of Inuit prints and sculpture, old-​school sketches of Kingston and places called Upper and Lower Canada (which I know I learned about at one point, but seriously, Upper and Lower are non-​intuitive place descriptors lol), and modern stuff featuring artists who suffered from AIDS or who migrated from South Korea or moved from their native reserve in rural Alberta to do humanitarian work in Rwanda. How cool is that?! Canada is awesome.
Two of my favourite pieces were:
A. This Punjabi-​born, British-​raised, now Canadian artist’s depiction of the … geez, it’s gotta be more than 24 … ways you talk about family relationships. Your wife’s mother’s brother’s wife has a specific name. I would just call her … «you»? lol
B. Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge’s staged photo series that’s supposed to be a social commentary about cola’s production chains having adverse effects on people worldwide. It’s deep. It’s so deep that I can’t understand it and therefore can’t explain it. My bad.
And the Queen’s students/​alumni behind the desk are über-​helpful. It’s a shame this place isn’t more frequented, but I had a couple of hours of eerily peaceful browsing time, broken by this weird piece that screams at you to rotate it when you get too close. Check it out yo!