A bootstrapped art show called the National Portrait Gallery of Canada of Bloorcourt opens today

Canada has been dangling the promise of a National Portrait Gallery for 25 years—just long enough for an entire generation of faces to develop permanent frown lines. Despite the fact that national portrait galleries in major cities like London, Washington and Canberra are bona fide crowd magnets, there’s still no official place to view the more than 20,000 drawings, paintings and prints of Canadian faces currently stored in Ottawa’s Library and Archives Canada.

During his baffling anti-art tenure, former prime minister Stephen Harper (who is something of an artist himself) officially halted funding for a portrait gallery in 2006—after half of the $22 million allotted by Jean Chrétien had already been spent on renovating the defunct US embassy building in Ottawa. (The project was officially canned in 2008.)

At the time, communications strategist Sarah Lazarovic was cobbling together a living as an illustrator and journalist, and one of her personal art projects involved drawing one Torontonian’s face a day. So she came up with her own solution, reaching out to artist friends who then donated works for a makeshift exhibition she dubbed the Montrose Portrait Gallery of Canada. Lazarovic mounted the show in the under-utilized garage of her Little Italy home.

Now, close to two decades and no National Portrait Gallery later, Lazarovic is reviving the legendary group show. This time, the exhibition has graduated to a proper venue, Gallery 1065, which will show more than 65 portraits of notable Canadians from January 9 to 18, with a free opening party this evening. The show is co-curated by Jode Roberts, and the duo are calling it the National Portrait Gallery of Canada of Bloorcourt.

“I’ve always wanted to redo the 2007 show. It was a no-brainer,” says Lazarovic. “In 2025, Monica Gupta, the owner of Gallery 1065, asked to do something together, and it felt fortuitous. No one ever says, Hey, use this gallery for basically the cost of food and wine at the reception. And who has the money to rent a gallery on top of $2,000 rent?”

After issuing an open call on social media, Lazarovic and Roberts received more than 150 submissions across painting, drawing, photography and sculpture. “There were a few funny outliers, like Curtis Saretske’s large-scale pigeon portrait and Kit Li’s lobster. But they both helped us stretch the definition of portraiture,” Roberts says.

The show features top-notch Toronto talent like Sarah Palmer, Chip Zdarsky, Pete Kiriakopoulos and James Braithwaite. Zdarsky, who was also part of Lazarovic’s first show, chose to paint one of his favourite Canadians. “Originally I was going to paint Mr. Dressup, who entertained and delighted countless Canadian children. But instead I went with comedian Nathan Fielder,” he says. (Fielder also happens to be Lazarovic’s cousin.)

Lazarovic noted that the timing feels apt, with more and more people craving screen-free real-life experiences. “On just about everyone’s in and out lists this year, I saw people saying they want more analog activities and IRL cultural stimulation,” she says. “Even though it may feel clichéd to say it, there’s something special about bringing people together offline to look at real faces.”

The remount of the portrait show also serves as an antidote to the increasing amount of AI slop art in the public eye.“It’s nice to see people come together to make art with their hands and eyes in an age where aunts and uncles are posting AI-created selfies rendered as sexy fantasy warriors to Facebook,” says Zdarsky.