It was the most hideous thing I had ever seen in my young life.
Its name, printed in black ink on a little white card affixed to the gallery wall was ‘Confedspread’. And to my eight-year old mind it was downright hideous.
Confedspread left me feeling decidedly unpatriotic
My grandmother, an avid fan of all art but more specifically the often baffling world of modernism, had taken my sister and I to the National Gallery of Canada on one of our cross-country visits to her Ontario home. Sheltered by island living, I believe she thought we must be in desperate need of a cultural education. It proved too late for my older now-biochemist sister, who often texts me pictures of mould spores at three in the morning. But for me it proved to be a rather fundamental point in my life.
Turning to my grandmother I voiced loudly, for the benefit of everyone in the surrounding galleries, that ‘Confedspread‘ was the absolute NOT art – it was simply TOO ugly to be in a museum anywhere.
She told me that the point of museums was not solely to showcase things we find conventionally attractive.
I was fairly certain at that point that she was a few knights short of a crusade. Fast forward fourteen years – as my education progressed and my family and friends began to gently prod me about what in the world I wanted to do with my arts degree, I started to look at museums and how they function. In doing so I realized exactly how right my grandmother was.
Gatekeeping - we take that stuff seriously round these parts
The part of museums open to visitors is like the tip of the iceberg. The artifacts and displays in the galleries of the Vancouver Police Museum, where I have been interning in the curatorial department, are only a fraction of our museum’s vast and varied collection. Though the public is often familiar with the programming face of any museum through its interpretive tours and activities, the curatorial department is often more mysterious leaving people wondering exactly what is it we do. The curatorial department is, foremost, responsible for maintaining the collection. We act almost like gatekeepers, monitoring the condition of the artifacts and archives and carefully crafting exhibits that we feel speak to the experiences with policing in our city. We welcome artifacts to the collection (accessioning!), recording their history and description fully from measurements, colours and materials used, to donor information and sketches of the objects, (which in my case are extremely unskilled). We note their condition, documenting any lose or broken parts, tarnish, rust or corrosion. This lets us to know, when examining artifacts in the future, which damage has been caused by natural decay or improper handling and what was there before it came to our museum. When their condition necessitates it we will treat objects, carefully cleaning grimy surfaces and mending broken pieces.
Julie-Ann accessioning her 13th post-it note. Only 2987 more to go there, little buddy!
As promised, we also curate exhibits – which might sound relatively easy but actually involves months of research and hard work. For our recent “Law and Disorder” exhibit we siphoned through the entire collection, pulling hundreds of batons, holsters and other items. We chose objects which were the most stable and had the clearest documentation. It was difficult to reject really interesting artifacts, however with such limited space we had to be merciless in our selection. After two frustrating days researching flashlights to no avail, our lovely curator and I uncovered an internet gem: an online museum dedicated to handheld torches. We giddily poured over images of similar Ray-O-Ban designs, triumphantly spotting a model identical to ours, succinctly dating it to the 1950s. Radiating curatorial victory, I met up with friends after work who nodded politely at my tale of mid-century flashlights and the generous Internet Gods who presented us with such a glorious find.
After we’ve conceptualized the exhibits, there’s still much work to be done. Physically constructing the exhibits is often our responsibility as well. For our display cases, we created foam mounts for the artifacts in-house. With scalpel, handsaw and exacto-knives we hacked away at mounds of black foam until each artifact had its own little niche.
We at the museum pride ourselves in taking ladder safety to a whole 'nother level.
Our department is also responsible for responding to research requests, scouring through the archives for information on topics from the prohibition to personnel files for genealogical research. Because the Police Museum is a modestly sized institution, we also pinch-hit for our front of house staff, watching the gift shop and ticket sales while they are engaged in public programming. On occasion you can find one of us teetering up a ladder to change lightbulb in the main gallery – not a favourite job among any of our heights-leery staff (see: me). I have spent much of my time at the museum working on our digitization project. We, along with our fantastic volunteers, have been moving through the collection, condition-reporting , cleaning and then photographing each of the artifacts. This project will allow us, in the future, to offer greater access to our amazing collection.
My experiences at the VPM this summer have led me to come full circle to that life-lesson my grandmother imparted to me standing in front of ‘Confedspread‘ in the National Gallery. Museums, in my opinion, aren’t intended to show us merely what is beautiful or even what is interesting but, rather, what is important. Museums, in a lot of ways, mirror the society which created them – one that sometimes isn’t pretty. Generally speaking, I think a museum’s goal is to preserve our history through the maintenance of our material culture. We piece together narratives to help people understand a part of our shared history – in our case the evolution of crime and policing in the city of Vancouver. Each of our artifacts has a story to tell and in our galleries we create a space for for them to be told.
And that is the true value of a curatorial department, according to me.
Tags: artifacts · curators office · research · summer2 Comments
