Curator & Collector

Detail of promotional poster for www.theravenscall.ca Yesterday I attended at the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art the unveiling, as it were, of a new website produced by the Bill Reid Foundation: the Raven’s Call. The website has over 200 photographs, many of them of Reid’s artworks, many of which are not owned by [...]

Despite my intention, stated only two posts ago, to resume blogging about museums and numismatics, I feel I cannot quite get there before writing down a few thoughts on the recent election of the Conservative Party as a strengthened minority party. Some in the news media are blaming the fact that the Tories let a [...]

Image of recovered Bill Reid artwork from the CBC I just discovered that I missed an important story last month: the last two Bill Reid artworks that were stolen from the Museum of Anthropology some months ago have been found. Notwithstanding the damage to one of the pieces (an argelite carving), it’s wonderful that all [...]

Photograph of British Museum acquisition astrolabe taken from the BBC “He had an astrolabe to match his art / And calculating counters laid apart / On handy shelves that stood above his bed”–Chaucer’s words, taken from our favourite Canterbury Tale, “The Miller’s Tale,” refer to an instrument that has been described, according to the BBC, [...]

Image of stolen Bill Reid gold artwork taken from the CBC UPDATE: All but two of the stolen Bill Reid pieces have been found. CBC and other media outlets are reporting that some of the stolen Bill Reid artefacts have just been recovered from the Vancouver suburb of Burnbaby. Police aren’t saying just yet which [...]

CBC Image of stolen Bill Reid gold artwork UPDATED (Original post below): CBC has learned disturbing details about the art heist of the Bill Reid artworks at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology. Chiefest among them: -several cameras mysteriously “went offline” four hours before the incident -when the cameras went offline, an alarm was tripped, but nothing [...]

Apologies for the absence; blogging will be lighter, but will certainly continue. – The American Numismatic Society is being sued by the Hispanic Society for the return of thousands of valuable coins which had been “on permanent loan” to the ANS. In general, we tend to be suspect of these kinds of arrangements, as there [...]

A Sikh organization in India, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, was successful in lobbying Sotheby’s to cancel its plans to auction an armour suit believed to have belonged to the tenth guru, Gobind Singh. The group wrote a letter to the Queen, and was prepared to to take its protest to the United Nations in [...]

Peter Doig’s “Milky Way.” Oil on canvas, 1989-1990. Image taken from the CBC The CBC has a wonderful (if inconveniently laid out) feature on the British-born “Canadian” artist Peter Doig, whose art is being exhibited in a retrospective in the Tate Britain. Tate Britain itself has a webpage devoted to the exhibition on Doig. Following [...]

A few days ago, we noted the story of the Welshman who found an old Roman coin with a metal detector. Roy Page was congratulated on his discovery, but an Israeli from Tel Aviv was recently arrested for doing exactly the same thing. The Israel Antiquities Authority (called “Antiques Authority” by Haaretz), arrested a man [...]