The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) reopens November 14 with its $C276 million ($267 million) expansion completed. “I hope they like it,” says native son Frank Gehry, contemplating public response to his first Toronto building. They—we—are bound to be wowed by the museum’s new 600-foot-long glass and wood (Douglas fir) façade, its four-story glass and titanium wing housing contemporary art and the 450-foot-long sculpture gallery. Visitors, who for the past 13 months have had no access to its collections, are likely to find more than AGO’s architecture dazzling. Inside, exhibition space for 4,000 of the museum’s works—arranged in hubs devoted to African,Canadian, contemporary and European art, and to photography and prints and drawings—has been increased by 50 percent. The media tycoon Kenneth Roy Thomson launched the project with a $100 million gift. Following his death, in 2006, Thomson’s collection of more than 2,000 Canadian and European artworks passed to the museum. Among his treasures is the Massacre of the Innocents, circa 1611–12, by Rubens, for which Thomson paid a record £49.5 million($90 million) at Sotheby’s London in 2002.

"Gehry's AGO" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2008 Table of Contents.