The MacLaren Art Centre is an art gallery and museum, located in Barrie, Ontario, Canada. It houses many important Canadian works of art.
It is named in honour of Maurice MacLaren, who bequeathed his Victorian home, Maple Hill, to the Barrie Gallery Project. The MacLaren Art Centre later moved to the former City of Barrie library, a Carnegie building, and added to it; the new gallery opened in September 2001. The first piece in the gallery's collection is the Spirit Catcher, a sculpture of a thunderbird, first displayed at Expo '86 in Vancouver, and donated by the Peacock Foundation.
The Barrie Gallery Project was a group of citizens who wanted to create an art gallery in Barrie, a rapidly growing city in Southern Ontario, in the mid-1980s. The group hired a Georgian College School of Design and Visual Arts instructor William Moore, who became the gallery's first executive director. Moore won a City of Barrie Arts Award in November 2008 for his work in setting up the gallery, its educational outreach program and public-spaces arts programs.
Coordinates: 44°23′24″N 79°41′06″W / 44.39010°N 79.68502°W