Finally. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada, announced Tuesday night that its long absence from the city’s cultural scene would end May 26, 2018 with the opening of Believe, the museum’s first exhibition in nearly three years.

The exhibition, curated by the museum’s longtime curator David Liss, embodies a spirit MOCA has had from the beginning: of bootstrapping, issues-driven art in tune with the local community. But it will also make a clear statement how a bigger, more ambitious MOCA will see itself in the wider world.

“I felt like this opening had to be positive; it had to be celebratory in some way,” Liss said. “But it also had to be global. We’re in Toronto, but we’re also citizens of the world.”

The list of artists included in the show include those both from here and abroad, across a range of media and generations: Nep Sidhu and Rajni Perera, both young Toronto artists, will occupy a significant portion alongside prominent Canadian artists like Jeremy Shaw, Tim Whiten and Carl Beam, as well as artists ranging far across the international field: Meschac Gaba from Benin; Kendell Geers and Dineo Seshee Bopape, both from South Africa; American artist Maya Stovall; and Ethiopian-American artist Awol Erizku, among others.

Liss’s ambitions for the exhibition dovetail with both the institution’s expanded footprint and larger goals. Since it closed its doors on Queen St. W. in August 2015, MOCA (then MOCCA, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art), has been holed up in temporary office space awaiting the retrofitting of the bottom five floors of a historic early 20th-century industrial tower on Sterling Rd., in the city’s west end, to be completed.

Its path to the finish line hasn’t been without its diversions. Twice, the museum has had to revise its opening date (first pegged to May 2017, then pushed to November that same year before acquiescing to the current timeline) and it lost its inaugural director, Chantal Pontbriand, in June of 2016 after just eight months on the job. (Terry Nicholson, the former head of culture at the City of Toronto, took over as interim director until Heidi Reitmaier, MOCA’s new director, arrived just this month.)

When it finally opens in May, MOCA will look nothing like MOCCA, beloved as it was. Even though the museum’s floorspace will have nearly tripled to 55,000 square feet, Reitmaier says its spirit will remain unchanged.

“They haven’t lost direction,” said Reitmaier, who is only in her second week here since being hired. “They’ve been thinking about local artists, the local context, as well as the invitation we can make and how to extend it beyond this place. And they’re very much committed to what are the big ideas that contemporary art can put on the table.”

Liss agrees, with his own longer view. “We’re opening this place, finally, because it’s something we believed in from the beginning: that there could be a major contemporary art museum in Canada’s largest city,” he says. “But to get to the point, it’s taken a lot of belief to get us here and we’re finally able to honour all the people that did.”

Believe, the inaugural exhibition of MOCA Toronto Canada, will open May 26, 2018, at 158 Sterling Rd. See museumofcontemporaryart.ca for information.