A new year for the Museum
This year, we’ve decided to forgo the traditional end-of-year wrap-up for our first blog of the year. Instead of bragging about our visitor statistics and the popularity our programming (both great!), we’ll talk about what’s coming up for early 2019.
However, I’m afraid I am going to immediately cheat and go back to last fall when we held a vernissage for our current special exhibition. Called A Noteworthy Woman, the exhibition is about the life of Viola Desmond and the new $10 dollar bill that features her. Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn A. Wilkins, our Director Ken Ross, Russell Grosse of the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia and Wanda Robson, sister of Viola Desmond, spoke to a crowd of 130 guests at this, our first exhibition opening. In the audience were community stakeholders as well as colleagues from national museums, including the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. A Noteworthy Woman will be on display here at the Museum until May 12, which more than qualifies it as a 2019 event. Check back periodically about future programming to accompany this exhibition.
The irrepressible Wanda Robson, sister of Viola Desmond, was a very special guest and a big hit at the opening event of A Noteworthy Woman.
A Noteworthy Woman has a number of artifacts from Viola’s life that have never before been exhibited.
Museum Director Ken Ross takes Wanda Robson and Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn A. Wilkins on a tour of A Noteworthy Woman.
Warming up this Winterlude
And now on to the future—well, the Museum’s near future, at least. Our agenda for 2019 includes participating in a number of local community events and festivals over the year. The first big festival is Winterlude, the National Capital Region’s big winter fest taking place from February 1 to 18. There’ll be plenty of action on nearby Sparks Street with live entertainment on the Capital Pride stage. Outdoor food, ice sculptures and chilly carnival games will line this popular pedestrian mall, and we’ll be right there every Winterlude weekend with activities for the entire family. Making puppets, building your own tea brick or doing some hands-on learning with a Métis fur trapper are just a few of the activities visitors will enjoy as they come out of the cold and into the Museum this February.
Educator and trapper Archie Martin returns in 2019 with his travelling museum of furs and trapping gear.
February is also Black History Month, and on February 23 we’re inviting you and your family to learn about Viola Desmond’s life, work and the inspiration she has become for Canadians. Join poet Nadine Williams as she reads her poem, Viola’$ Ten. Then, in a poetry-writing workshop, you will have a chance to write your own verse about someone you find inspiring.
Fraud, social justice and keeping the kids occupied
During March Break, many families will be looking to museums to provide activities for kids, and we’ll be doing just that with story times and conducted tours of A Noteworthy Woman. Our hands-on crafts, such as making your own bank notes, are money-themed activities designed to entertain and inform. Special guests this March will include our friends from the Royal Canadian Mint and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who will answer your questions about coins and counterfeits. If it looks like March’s special guests reflect a theme, that’s because it’s also Fraud Prevention Month, an event that couldn’t be more appropriate for us. Check the Museum website next month for details or, better yet, follow us on Facebook!
Counterfeiting is always a popular subject during Fraud Prevention Month. You get to handle the real thing (well, the fake thing).
But enough of events. We are just getting underway with our educational programming and will introduce two new school programs this spring.
- Inflation Busters is a game-based program for students in grades 10–12. How do you plan for the future or run a business when you don’t know what things will cost? Get a grip on inflation in this fun and informative game.
- Also coming off the program assembly line is Trading Planets. For grades 4–8, it places students in an interplanetary economy where they learn that trading without a common currency is very difficult indeed.
Who knew that learning about money and economics could be fun? We did!
I doubt your credit cards will work off planet Earth, so you’ll need “spacebucks” from our Trading Planets program.
We look forward to seeing you at any of our events or programs this season. Or just come in to see the Museum anytime! Keep informed about everything that’s happening here on our webpage and stay in touch by following us on Facebook and Twitter.
We want to hear from you! Do you have an idea for a blog post you’d like to see?
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The Museum Blog
January 14, 2015
The Adventure of Exhibit Planning VII
An exhibition fabrication company was finally selected by the Museum to produce the upcoming “Voices from the Engraver” travelling exhibition. It’s all very exciting.
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December 15, 2014
New Acquisitions
By: Raewyn Passmore
The recent additions to the National Currency Collection described below are from very different parts of the world and are between 1500 and 2500 years old.
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Blog posts
November 28, 2014
The Big Nickel
By: Paul S. Berry
The commemorative 1951 5 cent piece was issued to mark the 200th anniversary of the naming of nickel and its isolation as an element. Recently, I had the great pleasure to participate in the Big Nickel anniversary festivities and give a talk about the design competition for the 1951 5 cent coin.
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November 6, 2014
The Adventure of Exhibit Planning VI
By: Graham Iddon
This is not the time for ‘nay sayers’. Basically, we planned a luxury car knowing that when all was said and done, it was going to be a very nice family sedan (maybe with the big engine?).
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September 29, 2014
The Adventure of Exhibit Planning V
By: Graham Iddon
Now the writer takes a deep breath and attempts to take a subject like the ‘representation of 75 years of national identity as depicted on stamps and bank notes’ from 50 pages of research and squash it into 65 words.
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August 6, 2014
The Senior Deputy Governor’s Signature
By: Graham Iddon
For much of their history, Canadian bank notes have represented a promise, a guarantee that they could be redeemed for “specie” (gold and silver coins) at their parent institution.
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July 28, 2014
Becoming a Collector V
By: Graham Iddon
Suppose you walk into a bar frequented by currency collectors and in an attempt to join in you refer to a ‘planchette’ as a ‘rosette’ (beer mugs hit the tables and the pianist stops playing). This could be pretty humiliating and you’ll probably never be able to go to that bar again, at least not on numismatic night.
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July 21, 2014
Becoming a Collector IV
By: Graham Iddon
Now that you have a grasp of preservation techniques for coins, you might want to familiarize yourself with the finer points of their anatomy. It is all part of your numismatic education and besides, you need to be informed and sound informed when you are buying coins at flea markets or coin fairs.
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July 7, 2014
Museum Reconstruction - Part 3
By: Graham Iddon
Though naturally we are aware that the former Museum space is being gutted, the reality of seeing it empty is still pretty strange for most of us here. In the last blog of this series we showed you the empty cafeteria space that will become the new Museum, as well as some images of the old Museum as it was at the time: stuffed with odds and ends of exhibit cases, the occasional display still on the walls.
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June 23, 2014
CENTimental Journey
By: Graham Iddon
With all the blogging we’ve been doing for Voices from the Engraver, you’d think we had nothing else on our exhibition plate. We do, actually, and it’s called CENTimental Journey. This temporary exhibition, hosted at the Canadian Museum of History, walks you through more than 150 years of the Canadian 1 cent piece.
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