Off the 'Cuff

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. My grandmother, an avid fan of all art but more specifically the often [...]

This summer, our student interns are updating our blog with their experiences working at the Police Museum. Julie-Ann is one of our fantastic curatorial students who is going to return to her studies at the University of Alberta this fall and start her own blog because she’ll miss writing ours… This piece is written by [...]

This summer, our student interns are regularly updating this blog with their experiences working at the Police Museum. Julie-Ann is one of our fantastic curatorial students who is working hard at becoming ‘Vancouver-edgy’ before returning to her studies at the University of Alberta this fall.   Natalie, another of our awesome curatorial students, we’re sure, [...]

I never know what I am going to find when I poke around in the collection, which is one of the reasons that the digitization project (headed by the lovely Kristen) has been so much fun. See, in order for our team to inventory, document and then photograph all 20,000 items in storage, we have [...]

Uncovering interesting things in the collection is probably the most rewarding part of a curatorial staff member’s job.  In a way it is a privilege to find a nearly forgotten artifact and breathe new life into it by researching its past and telling others its stories. The three counterfeit coins in our archives are a [...]

Who doesn’t love toys? I got to thinking about this question today when Kristin, the Museum’s Assistant Curator, handed me a lovable sock monkey, handmade and dressed in his finest VPD garb. He clearly was a labour of love made for a child or as a keepsake for an adult, his little uniform painstakingly perfect [...]