From 2024 – 2026 MakeRoom designed and piloted a new gallery experience for MD Gallery.

When MD Gallery approached us, they were a new private gallery in Toronto located in the Yorkville area. The gallery wanted to create a new type of exhibit experience for their visitors, patrons, and exhibiting artists.  Since MD Gallery was still in its early days, they had asked MakeRoom to help conceptualize the gallery’s operational strategy for curation, exhibits and sales.

During initial conversations, MD Gallery’s main goals with this new model were:

• Create an elevated experience for guests beyond the typical gallery opening and exhibits.
• Organically encourage visitors to become art buyers.

The MakeRoom  team being designers at heart, we decided to take a design-thinking approach to conceptualize this new gallery experience. We ran research sessions with artists, gallery visitors, and collectors to gather what was working well with the traditional gallery model, and where they encountered pain points. This research resulted in an all-day design sprint with our participants to address identified pain-points and co-create the ideal exhibit experience. The design sprint was a mix of group sessions, card sorting, problem storming and 1:1 interview sessions.

Taking a page out of service design methodologies, we created a blueprint of the old experience model along with it’s pain points, and our proposed new model which addressed them. This spanned initial artist procurement, all the way to installation and exhibition. Once we reviewed our research findings and solutions with MD Gallery, it was time to pilot and monitor the new model with a series of exhibits.

Based on our findings we curated a series of exhibits at MD Gallery using our new model from 2024 – 2026. One of the basis’ of the new model was replacing the typical exhibit opening with a supper club experience featuring the exhibiting artist. This created a connection between a curated list of potential collectors and the artist in an intimate setting.

While we cannot share all of our research findings and resulting strategy, we can safely say that the pilot series was a huge success. With the help of MakeRoom Inc., MD gallery was able to create an exhibit experience that hit all of their goals. The model both created an elevated experience for visitors and also helped encouraged the sale of artwork.

Below is documentation of some of the exhibits from our pilot:

• CIFUENTES, MD Gallery One, Toronto, Ontario (2024)
• Haris Sardar, MD Gallery One, Toronto, Ontario (2025)
• Segun Caezar, MD Gallery One, Toronto, Ontario (2025)
• Nashid Chroma, MD Gallery One, Toronto, Ontario (2025)

CIFUENTES, MD Gallery One, Toronto, Ontario (2024)

Haris Sardar, MD Gallery One, Toronto, Ontario (2025)

Segun Caezar, MD Gallery One, Toronto, Ontario (2025)

Nashid Chroma, MD Gallery One, Toronto, Ontario (2025)