Curator & Collector

Rotunda of the Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver, BC During the recent 2010 “Winter”* Olympics, the Vancouver Art Gallery was open for free to the public; my wife and I saved ourselves about $37 by visiting the VAG, which also housed the BC Pavilion, at this time. The VAG has a no photographs policy, but [...]

The two photographs in this post show some of the recovered gold Bill Reid artefacts in the Museum of Anthropology’s collection; I photographed them on the first day of the re-opened Bill Reid Rotunda. (For those interested, this post links to the last in a series I did on the subject of this particular heist [...]

Image of 1911 $500 Canadian Queen Mary Banknote taken from Canada.com story An extremely rare Canadian banknote that was “destined for the shredder” was recently sold in a Heritage Auction Galleries-brokered sale, fetching a price of $322,000 US, a record for Canadian banknotes. The Dominion of Canada banknote, which is one of only three known [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

We are happy that the Quebec City armoury that burned down a few days ago did not also see the loss of the bulk of its archives that were stored there. The armoury was built in 1884, and housed WWI and WWII memorabilia, as well as material pertaining to the Louis Riel rebellion. – UPDATE: [...]

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 [...]

O’Keeffe’s 1927 work “Radiator Building–Night.” Image borrowed from the CBC This story from last Friday was delayed until now, but it is no less important for that. A judge in Tennessee has ruled in the Fisk University-O’Keeffe Museum debacle. Judge Ellen Hobbes Lyle has ruled against the museum, writing that Fisk University may keep the [...]

The Royal Canadian Mint’s “Vignettes of Royalty” series case Punning aside, we have just received our case for the five-coin “Vignettes of Royalty” series put out by the Royal Canadian Mint, and we were pleasantly surprised. (This is a rare foray into contemporary coins for us, incidentally.) The case contains a velvet interior that holds [...]