Category: Museums, Galleries & Archives
Museums and archives from across Canada
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Joyce Frances Devlin: Painter & A Painted House
As part of the Jane’s Walk Burritt’s Rapids community festival, Ms. Devlin will be exhibiting select pieces in the main gallery space of the Burritt’s Rapids Community Hall on May 2nd & May 3rd, 2015. ********* If I had any sense, I would pound a wooden stake into my front lawn, attach a five kilometre length of string, and scribe… Read more
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Everything Changes: Shooting the Domtar Lands
Since mid-winter, I’ve had the pleasure of photographing the Domtar lands with a team of volunteers from the Workers History Museum in Ottawa. Windmill Development Group, Inc. is poised to re-develop the land which has been home to pulp and paper giants E.B. Eddy and Domtar since 1891. Because of the placement of the buildings, there isn’t much… Read more
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Marie Watt: Piecing Together A Story
It was my first community sewing circle. I couldn’t have chosen a better introduction than the one I received from Marie Watt, a Portland, Oregon-based artist whose storied circles bring creative ideas to life. A half-dozen tables bisected the Great Hall of the National Galley of Canada, arranged beneath the canopy of glass and steel that frames the finest views in Ottawa. … Read more
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Ellis Island: JR and the Art of Immigration
The United States, like Canada, is a country of immigrants. Between 1892 and 1954, twelve million citizens of other nations landed at Ellis Island seeking asylum in their new homeland. Close to 40% of Americans can trace their genealogy through these early immigrants. ((http://www.history.com/topics/ellis-island)) There are two kinds of Ellis Island tours available. The first is a free… Read more
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The Splendiferous Redpath Museum Montreal
A shrunken head. Mummies. Dinosaur bones. An anaconda skeleton. Shells the size of a child’s head. A life-sized origami Pterodactyl. A gorilla guarding the staircase. With nearly three million objects spanning natural history, ethnology and mineralogy, the Redpath Museum Montreal is the ultimate Victorian curio cabinet. The first purpose-built museum in Canada, it was commissioned by Peter Redpath and opened in 1882… Read more
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Literary Houses: Margaret Laurence
That house in Manawaka is the one which, more than any other, I carry with me. Known to the rest of the town as “the old Connor place” and to the family as the Brick House, it was plain as the winter turnips in its root cellar, sparsely windowed as some crusader’s embattled fortress in… Read more
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The Lost Villages of the St. Lawrence
The vintage homes and buildings look picturesque and inviting under the winter sky. They’re clustered together, in traditional village style, interlaced with Christmas-like trees frosted with snow. But what I see is not a real village. The clapboard church, barbershop, school and other buildings grouped by the side of County Rd. 2, near Long Sault,… Read more
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Mnemonic: A Book of Trees – Post 3 of 5
I grew up in a loving family but I wasn’t like them in so many ways. Our family culture centred on hockey, baseball, camping trips in summer. I couldn’t even begin to describe to them how the world shimmered for me, how I heard voices in the rustling of leaves, that I cried when I… Read more
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In the Footsteps of Madeline in Paris
In an old house in Paris that was covered in vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines. Read more
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In the House With Sir John A.
Did some macro- to micro-Habicurious time travel this weekend in celebration of Canada Day. Spent July 1st (the launch of confederation) in Kingston (the first capital city of the united Canadas), touring the house of Sir John A. Macdonald, the country’s first Prime Minister and a Father of Confederation. Bellevue House was built in the… Read more