Curator & Collector

Bill Reid’s sculpture “The Raven and the First Men,” yellow cedar version in the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate to visit again Bill Reid’s wonderful sculpture The Raven and the First Men on the official reopening day of the Bill Reid Rotunda in the Museum [...]

Bill Reid’s “Jade Canoe” version of his Spirit of Haida Gwaii at Vancouver International Airport A few of Bill Reid’s largest and best-known sculptures are not in museums or galleries. One of these stands in a large fountain at the entrance to the Vancouver Aquarium. The most famous one, though, exists in two primary versions, [...]

Entrance to the interior of the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art The Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art, located at the beautiful and historic Cathedral Place on Hornby Street in downtown Vancouver, is a real jewel of curated space that is both museum and art gallery. The gallery is operated by the [...]

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 Royal Canadian Mint commemorative playing card money from an eBay auction I’m the sort of collector who likes to occasionally buy Royal Canadian Mint products. The operative word, of course, is “occasionally,” for the Mint’s productions have often been characterized by a deadly combination of high mintage runs, silly or boring subjects, and [...]

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 [...]

We have just created what we believe to be Canada’s first numismatic forum. [UPDATE: In fact, it is far from the first, and we may delete the forum, except for a section on token collecting.] The forum is dedicated to Canadian numismatics, as opposed to being only for Canadian people; accordingly, Americans with an interest [...]

The national Currency Museum in Ottawa has has an exhibit aimed at helping teens to spot counterfeit banknotes. We tend not to be interested in anything marketed at teens, but of course we always appreciate it when museums and numismatists reach out to the younger generation. For those who are interested, the CP has a [...]

This is the inaugural post for “Curator & Collector: A Blog about Museums and Collections for Numismatists and Other Collectors of Historical Artefacts.” I grew up reading about ancient Greece and Rome and collecting Canadian coins and paper money, having always felt the attraction of the historical. For some time now, I have wanted to [...]