Curator & Collector

Supposed Ming Dynasty stolen artwork image taken from the CBC I occasionally call myself a philistine when I mention that most modern art really doesn’t do much for me. I think a lot of five year olds can pull off what some contemporary artists do, and to me it doesn’t matter that the artists could [...]

Rear-side view of Bill Reid’s “The Raven and the First Men”* When I took a group of young people to UBC’s Museum of Anthropology some days ago, one of them asked me about the significance of the face at the bottom of the giant yellow cedar version of Reid’s The Raven and the First Men. [...]

Official First Day Terry Fox Coin I recently learned that when a museum accessions a piece, it gives it a number, for example, 2003.4.3.2. The 2003 would refer to the year that a piece was acquired by the museum, the 4 would indicate that this was the fourth accession of that year, while the next [...]

Tom Thomson Pine Island image taken from the McMichael Collection I just finished a most fascinating account of the controversy over the McMichael Collection (“Case Notes: One Premier’s Obsession? The McMichael Legislation in Ontario,” by Kenneth R. Cavalier in International Journal of Cultural Property 11:1 (2002) pp. 65–79). The McMichael Collection began as a gift [...]

I just finished reading Jeanette A. Richoux, Jill Serota-Braden and Nancy Demyttanaere’s article “A Policy for Collections Access” (Museum News Vol. 59 No 7 (July/August 1981), pp. 43-47). It was interesting, but at the stage of my career, when I neither need access to stored objects nor am in a position to make decisions about [...]

In Things Great and Small — Collections Management Policies, chapter 2 “Compiling Collections Management Policies,” John E. Simmons gives an overview of how museums and galleries can establish collections management policies. For obvious reasons, Timmons cautions against merely copying another institution’s policies; Timmons then recommends that the language to be used in the policy manual [...]