The front exterior of the Art Gallery of Ontario, designed by architect Frank Gehry. (AGO)

Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario, which reopened this weekend after undergoing a renovation by celebrity architect Frank Gehry, has already attracted 68,000 visitors.

Museum-goers lined up around the building, some in pouring rain, during three days of free admission.

A total of 51,800 went through the gallery between Friday at 4 p.m. ET and Sunday afternoon, and about 16,200 members came for a sneak preview the previous week.

The AGO has been getting rave reviews for its redesign, which features a glass-panelled gallery stretching a full city block on the north side and winding staircases that draw viewers to the upper floors.

The gallery had projected about 30,000 visitors for its opening weekend, so the volume of traffic was higher than expected.

The AGO is hoping art lovers continue their fondness for the new building.

It wants to draw 800,000 visitors over its first year of operation, starting this November. And it projects 650,000 visits annually after that.

The AGO was closed for a year while under construction.

The last full fiscal year it was in operation, 2004-5, it had 665,425 visitors, but that was a strong year featuring the Modigliani and Turner, Whistler and Monet exhibits.

Annual attendance in previous years ranged from 460,000 in 2003-4 to 568,000 in 2002-3.

The AGO does not keep daily attendance figures, but the per-day attendance over the weekend surpassed even its blockbuster shows.

The gallery has more than 4,300 works of art on view, about 40 per cent of them never shown before. The AGO has a permanent collection of 73,000 works.

The renovation helped increase exhibition space, as well as create new galleries to display works from the collection of newspaper magnate Ken Thomson that were bequeathed to the AGO.