Curator & Collector

Tomahawk restaurant with First Nations artworks; image originally posted by the CBC Twenty years ago, the Tomahawk Restaurant in North Vancouver suffered the theft of twenty artworks created by First Nations artists and acquired by the family that owned the restaurant. According to this CBC story, two days ago, a person came into the restaurant [...]

Image of Bill Reid’s “Killer Whale (Chief of the Undersea World)” large version at Stanely Park taken from www.theravenscall.ca Via Google alerts, I just found the following fascinating suggestion for what to do with the historic building that currently houses the Vancouver Art Gallery (originally found in context at this forum): My favorite idea for [...]

Image of Waap Galts’ap taken from BCLocalNews.com BCLocalNews.com has an article on the new longhouse built on the Terrace campus of Northwest Community College (NWCC). The building, which is known as Waap Galts’ap (Tsimshian for “community house”), has a certain stark beauty to it. NWCC, of course, operates the Freda Diesing School of Northwest Coast [...]

Trev Deeley Motorcycles: Host of Roy Henry Vickers in Vancouver, Dec. 12th-13th Yesterday I and my son went to Trev Deeley Motorcycles on Boundary Road to see First Nations artist Roy Henry Vickers’ Vancouver holiday show, which is continuing until late afternoon today. It was my first time to see Vickers since I was a [...]

It gives me great sadness to note the attempts at privatization of two of the world’s best and most famous mints: the Royal Mint and the Royal Canadian Mint. The Royal Mint will likely be privatized, reports the BBC; meanwhile, according to the Winnipeg Free Press, the Department of Finance is looking at privatizing the [...]

Finally, Canadian Coin News has hired a new Editor for its Trends section. The writing in the Trends paragraphs has been abominably bad for far too long, as the previous editor simply could not write even at a high school level; literally every sentence had serious grammar or punctuation problems. This reflected very badly on [...]

Image of recently recovered Bill Reid brooch taken from the CBC I haven’t had much time for blogging lately, but I did want to conclude the saga of the stolen Bill Reid artworks. The CBC is reporting that the last two artworks stolen from the UBC Museum of Anthropology were recovered. Also, a career criminal [...]

Image of loonie with “notankers” sticker applied taken from the Dogwood Initiative The Georgia Straight, the CBC, and other local BC newspapers are reporting on a recent numismatic imbroglio involving an environmental group called the Dogwood Initiative and the Royal Canadian Mint. Essentially, the Dogwood Initiative is selling stickers that can be applied to loonies, [...]

Images of Canadian 1870 50 cent pieces, with and without the engraver and designer’s initials, taken from Heritage World Coin Auction Catalog #312, Sid and Alicia Belzberg Collection, via Google Books. The two particular coins shown above are not the subject of this post, although their types are. Terry Campbell, in the current edition of [...]

A possibly authentic “Dali” found in Estepona, Spain. Image from the Associated Press An Associated Press story released from Estepona, Spain, has it that dozens of fake Dali artworks have been seized by police. The culprit, a Frenchman, has been found and charged with fraud and forgery. This discovery comes ten years after police in [...]