Author: Lora Senechal Carney
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773551921
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Book Description
From the Roaring Twenties and the Group of Seven to the Automatistes and the early Cold War, Canadian artists lived through and embodied an era of global tumult and change. With an interweaving of historical narrative, lavish illustrations, and writings by many of Canada's most revered cultural figures, Lora Senechal Carney illuminates the lives, perspectives, and works of the era's painters and provides glimpses of the sculptors, poets, dancers, critics, and filmmakers with whom they associated. Canadian Painters in a Modern World gives readers direct access to a carefully curated selection of writings, artworks, photos, and other documents that help to reconstruct the public spheres in which artists including Paul-Émile Borduas, Emily Carr, Alex Colville, Lawren Harris, David Milne, and Pegi Nicol MacLeod circulated. Each of the book’s eight chapters consists of a narrative about a key issue or debate, focusing on the relationship of art to politics and society, and on how these are negotiated in an individual's life. Relating artistic engagement with and responses to the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the Cold War, Senechal Carney discovers a common desire for new connections between art and life. Revealing continuities, ruptures, and watershed moments, Canadian Painters in a Modern World showcases artistic production within specific socio-political contexts to shed new light on Canadian art during three decades of conflict and crisis.
Canadian Painters in a Modern World, 1925–1955
Author: Lora Senechal Carney
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773551921
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Book Description
From the Roaring Twenties and the Group of Seven to the Automatistes and the early Cold War, Canadian artists lived through and embodied an era of global tumult and change. With an interweaving of historical narrative, lavish illustrations, and writings by many of Canada's most revered cultural figures, Lora Senechal Carney illuminates the lives, perspectives, and works of the era's painters and provides glimpses of the sculptors, poets, dancers, critics, and filmmakers with whom they associated. Canadian Painters in a Modern World gives readers direct access to a carefully curated selection of writings, artworks, photos, and other documents that help to reconstruct the public spheres in which artists including Paul-Émile Borduas, Emily Carr, Alex Colville, Lawren Harris, David Milne, and Pegi Nicol MacLeod circulated. Each of the book’s eight chapters consists of a narrative about a key issue or debate, focusing on the relationship of art to politics and society, and on how these are negotiated in an individual's life. Relating artistic engagement with and responses to the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the Cold War, Senechal Carney discovers a common desire for new connections between art and life. Revealing continuities, ruptures, and watershed moments, Canadian Painters in a Modern World showcases artistic production within specific socio-political contexts to shed new light on Canadian art during three decades of conflict and crisis.
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773551921
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Book Description
From the Roaring Twenties and the Group of Seven to the Automatistes and the early Cold War, Canadian artists lived through and embodied an era of global tumult and change. With an interweaving of historical narrative, lavish illustrations, and writings by many of Canada's most revered cultural figures, Lora Senechal Carney illuminates the lives, perspectives, and works of the era's painters and provides glimpses of the sculptors, poets, dancers, critics, and filmmakers with whom they associated. Canadian Painters in a Modern World gives readers direct access to a carefully curated selection of writings, artworks, photos, and other documents that help to reconstruct the public spheres in which artists including Paul-Émile Borduas, Emily Carr, Alex Colville, Lawren Harris, David Milne, and Pegi Nicol MacLeod circulated. Each of the book’s eight chapters consists of a narrative about a key issue or debate, focusing on the relationship of art to politics and society, and on how these are negotiated in an individual's life. Relating artistic engagement with and responses to the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the Cold War, Senechal Carney discovers a common desire for new connections between art and life. Revealing continuities, ruptures, and watershed moments, Canadian Painters in a Modern World showcases artistic production within specific socio-political contexts to shed new light on Canadian art during three decades of conflict and crisis.
The Practice of Her Profession
Author: Susan Butlin
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773575251
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
Florence Carlyle (1864-1923), born in Galt, Ontario, emerged as one of the most successful Canadian artists of her time. Trained in Paris, she lived and worked in New York City and in Canada, cultivating a career as a popular portrait and genre painter. Known for her masterful use of colour, Carlyle's paintings are nuanced and perceptive portrayals of feminine spaces, the female figure, and women's domestic work.
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773575251
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
Florence Carlyle (1864-1923), born in Galt, Ontario, emerged as one of the most successful Canadian artists of her time. Trained in Paris, she lived and worked in New York City and in Canada, cultivating a career as a popular portrait and genre painter. Known for her masterful use of colour, Carlyle's paintings are nuanced and perceptive portrayals of feminine spaces, the female figure, and women's domestic work.
Rethinking Professionalism
Author: Kristina Huneault
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773586830
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 472
Book Description
The history of women and art in Canada has often been celebrated as a story of progress from amateur to professional practice. Rethinking Professionalism challenges this narrative by questioning the assumptions that underlie the category of artistic professionalism, a construct as influential for artistic practice as it has been for art historical understanding. Through a series of in-depth studies, contributors examine changes to the infrastructure of the art world that resulted from a powerful discourse of professionalization that emerged in the late- nineteenth century. While many women embraced this new model, others fell by the wayside, barred from professional status by virtue of their class, their ethnicity, or the very nature of the artworks they produced. The richly illustrated essays in this collection depict the changing nature of the professional paradigm as it was experienced by women painters, photographers, craftspeople, architects, curators, gallery directors, and art teachers. In so doing, they demonstrate the ongoing power of feminist art history to disrupt patterns of thought that have become naturalized and, accordingly, invisible. Going beyond the narratives of recovery or exclusion that the category of professionalism has traditionally encouraged, Rethinking Professionalism explores the very consequences of telling the history of women's art in Canada through that lens. Contributors include Annmarie Adams (McGill University), Alena Buis (Queen's University), Sherry Farrell Racette (University of Manitoba), Cynthia Hammond (Concordia University), Kristina Huneault (Concordia University), Loren Lerner (Concordia University), Lianne McTavish (University of Alberta), Kirk Niergarth (Mount Royal University), Mary O'Connor (McMaster University), Sandra Paikowsky (Concordia University), Ruth B. Phillips (Carleton University), Jennifer Salahub (Alberta College of Art & Design), and Anne Whitelaw (Concordia University).
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773586830
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 472
Book Description
The history of women and art in Canada has often been celebrated as a story of progress from amateur to professional practice. Rethinking Professionalism challenges this narrative by questioning the assumptions that underlie the category of artistic professionalism, a construct as influential for artistic practice as it has been for art historical understanding. Through a series of in-depth studies, contributors examine changes to the infrastructure of the art world that resulted from a powerful discourse of professionalization that emerged in the late- nineteenth century. While many women embraced this new model, others fell by the wayside, barred from professional status by virtue of their class, their ethnicity, or the very nature of the artworks they produced. The richly illustrated essays in this collection depict the changing nature of the professional paradigm as it was experienced by women painters, photographers, craftspeople, architects, curators, gallery directors, and art teachers. In so doing, they demonstrate the ongoing power of feminist art history to disrupt patterns of thought that have become naturalized and, accordingly, invisible. Going beyond the narratives of recovery or exclusion that the category of professionalism has traditionally encouraged, Rethinking Professionalism explores the very consequences of telling the history of women's art in Canada through that lens. Contributors include Annmarie Adams (McGill University), Alena Buis (Queen's University), Sherry Farrell Racette (University of Manitoba), Cynthia Hammond (Concordia University), Kristina Huneault (Concordia University), Loren Lerner (Concordia University), Lianne McTavish (University of Alberta), Kirk Niergarth (Mount Royal University), Mary O'Connor (McMaster University), Sandra Paikowsky (Concordia University), Ruth B. Phillips (Carleton University), Jennifer Salahub (Alberta College of Art & Design), and Anne Whitelaw (Concordia University).
Sketches from an Unquiet Country
Author: Dominic Hardy
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773554262
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
Canadian readers have enjoyed their own graphic satire since colonial times and Canadian artists have thrived as they took aim at the central issues and figures of their age. Graphic satire, a combination of humorous drawing and text that usually involves caricature, is a way of taking an ethical stand about contemporary politics and society. First appearing in short-lived illustrated weeklies in Montreal, Quebec City, and Toronto in the 1840s, usually as unsigned copies of engravings from European magazines, the genre spread quickly as skilled local illustrators, engravers, painters, and sculptors joined the teams of publishers and writers who sought to shape public opinion and public policy. A detailed account of Canadian graphic satire, Sketches from an Unquiet Country looks at a century bookended by the aftermath of the 1837–38 Rebellions and Canada’s entry into the Second World War. As fully fledged artist-commentators, Canadian cartoonists were sometimes gently ironic, but they were just as often caustic and violent in the pursuit of a point of view. This volume shows a country where conflicts crop up between linguistic and religious communities, a country often resistant to social and political change for women and open to the cross-currents of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and fascism that flared across Europe and North America in the early twentieth century. Drawing on new scholarship by researchers working in art history, material culture, and communication studies, Sketches from an Unquiet Country follows the fortunes of some of the artists and satiric themes that were prevalent in the centres of Canadian publishing.
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773554262
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
Canadian readers have enjoyed their own graphic satire since colonial times and Canadian artists have thrived as they took aim at the central issues and figures of their age. Graphic satire, a combination of humorous drawing and text that usually involves caricature, is a way of taking an ethical stand about contemporary politics and society. First appearing in short-lived illustrated weeklies in Montreal, Quebec City, and Toronto in the 1840s, usually as unsigned copies of engravings from European magazines, the genre spread quickly as skilled local illustrators, engravers, painters, and sculptors joined the teams of publishers and writers who sought to shape public opinion and public policy. A detailed account of Canadian graphic satire, Sketches from an Unquiet Country looks at a century bookended by the aftermath of the 1837–38 Rebellions and Canada’s entry into the Second World War. As fully fledged artist-commentators, Canadian cartoonists were sometimes gently ironic, but they were just as often caustic and violent in the pursuit of a point of view. This volume shows a country where conflicts crop up between linguistic and religious communities, a country often resistant to social and political change for women and open to the cross-currents of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and fascism that flared across Europe and North America in the early twentieth century. Drawing on new scholarship by researchers working in art history, material culture, and communication studies, Sketches from an Unquiet Country follows the fortunes of some of the artists and satiric themes that were prevalent in the centres of Canadian publishing.
Through Post-Atomic Eyes
Author: Claudette Lauzon
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228013763
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 496
Book Description
What does it mean to live in a post-atomic world? Photography and contemporary art offer a provocative lens through which to comprehend the by-products of the atomic age, from weapons proliferation, nuclear disaster, and aerial surveillance to toxic waste disposal and climate change. Confronting cultural fallout from the dawn of the nuclear age, Through Post-Atomic Eyes addresses the myriad iterations of nuclear threat and their visual legacy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether in the iconic black-and-white photograph of a mushroom cloud rising over Nagasaki in 1945 or in the steady stream of real-time video documenting the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, atomic culture - and our understanding of it - is inextricably constructed by the visual. This book takes the image as its starting point to address the visual inheritance of atomic anxieties; the intersection of photography, nuclear industries, and military technocultures; and the complex temporality of nuclear technologies. Contemporary artists contribute lens-based works that explore the consequences of the nuclear, and its afterlives, in the Anthropocene. Revealing, through both art and prose, startling new connections between the ongoing threat of nuclear catastrophe and current global crises, Through Post-Atomic Eyes is a richly illustrated examination of how photography shapes and is shaped by nuclear culture.
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228013763
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 496
Book Description
What does it mean to live in a post-atomic world? Photography and contemporary art offer a provocative lens through which to comprehend the by-products of the atomic age, from weapons proliferation, nuclear disaster, and aerial surveillance to toxic waste disposal and climate change. Confronting cultural fallout from the dawn of the nuclear age, Through Post-Atomic Eyes addresses the myriad iterations of nuclear threat and their visual legacy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether in the iconic black-and-white photograph of a mushroom cloud rising over Nagasaki in 1945 or in the steady stream of real-time video documenting the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, atomic culture - and our understanding of it - is inextricably constructed by the visual. This book takes the image as its starting point to address the visual inheritance of atomic anxieties; the intersection of photography, nuclear industries, and military technocultures; and the complex temporality of nuclear technologies. Contemporary artists contribute lens-based works that explore the consequences of the nuclear, and its afterlives, in the Anthropocene. Revealing, through both art and prose, startling new connections between the ongoing threat of nuclear catastrophe and current global crises, Through Post-Atomic Eyes is a richly illustrated examination of how photography shapes and is shaped by nuclear culture.
I Can Only Paint
Author: Irene Gammel
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228013712
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
For Canadian impressionist Mary Riter Hamilton, capturing the emotional landscape of battlefields and graveyards in the months after the Great War's armistice became an artistic calling and defined her work. A woman alone after the storm had passed, she found that her life after the war was indelibly marked by the experience. Undeterred by a rejection from the Canadian War Memorials Fund, who nominated only male war artists abroad, in 1919 Hamilton received a commission from the Amputation Club of British Columbia (now the War Amps) to commemorate those lost at war. She travelled from Victoria to the pre-reconstruction battlefields and towns of the Somme, Vimy Ridge, and the Ypres Salient where amid harsh conditions - inadequate shelter and food, surroundings littered with unexploded shells - she recorded with determination, pride, and grace the ruins of war. Based on intensive archival research in Canada, France, and Belgium, and using many previously unpublished letters, I Can Only Paint offers an insider's view of the artist's vast, underexplored body of war work and the conditions in which she created it. It places this period, central though it was, in the context of a full understanding of her life and restores the work she created there to its proper place in the canon of war art in Canada and abroad. Irene Gammel argues that Hamilton's work encoded a female perspective that distinguishes her paintings from the work of official Canadian war artists. The first reliable account of Hamilton's impressions of Canada's most haunting sites of conflict, I Can Only Paint captures with detail and sensitivity an experience that defined her life and recovers a body of work that stands as a unique and enduring portrait of the effects of the Great War.
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228013712
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
For Canadian impressionist Mary Riter Hamilton, capturing the emotional landscape of battlefields and graveyards in the months after the Great War's armistice became an artistic calling and defined her work. A woman alone after the storm had passed, she found that her life after the war was indelibly marked by the experience. Undeterred by a rejection from the Canadian War Memorials Fund, who nominated only male war artists abroad, in 1919 Hamilton received a commission from the Amputation Club of British Columbia (now the War Amps) to commemorate those lost at war. She travelled from Victoria to the pre-reconstruction battlefields and towns of the Somme, Vimy Ridge, and the Ypres Salient where amid harsh conditions - inadequate shelter and food, surroundings littered with unexploded shells - she recorded with determination, pride, and grace the ruins of war. Based on intensive archival research in Canada, France, and Belgium, and using many previously unpublished letters, I Can Only Paint offers an insider's view of the artist's vast, underexplored body of war work and the conditions in which she created it. It places this period, central though it was, in the context of a full understanding of her life and restores the work she created there to its proper place in the canon of war art in Canada and abroad. Irene Gammel argues that Hamilton's work encoded a female perspective that distinguishes her paintings from the work of official Canadian war artists. The first reliable account of Hamilton's impressions of Canada's most haunting sites of conflict, I Can Only Paint captures with detail and sensitivity an experience that defined her life and recovers a body of work that stands as a unique and enduring portrait of the effects of the Great War.
I'm Not Myself at All
Author: Kristina Huneault
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773554033
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 401
Book Description
Notions of identity have long structured women’s art. Dynamics of race, class, and gender have shaped the production of artworks and oriented their subsequent reassessments. Arguably, this is especially true of art by women, and of the socially engaged criticism that addresses it. If identity has been a problem in women’s art, however, is more identity the solution? In this study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art in Canada, Kristina Huneault offers a meditation on the strictures of identity and an exploration of forces that unsettle and realign the self. Looking closely at individual artists and works, Huneault combines formal analysis with archival research and philosophical inquiry, building nuanced readings of objects that range from the canonical to the largely unknown. Whether in miniature portraits or genre paintings, botanical drawings or baskets, women artists reckoned with constraints that limited understandings of themselves and others. They also forged creative alternatives. At times identity features in women’s artistic work as a failed project; at other times it marks a boundary beyond which they were able to expand, explore, and exult. Bringing together settler and indigenous forms of cultural expression and foregrounding the importance of colonialism within the development of art in Canada, I’m Not Myself at All observes and reactivates historical art by women and prompts readers to consider what a less restrictive conceptualization of selfhood might bring to current patterns of cultural analysis.
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773554033
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 401
Book Description
Notions of identity have long structured women’s art. Dynamics of race, class, and gender have shaped the production of artworks and oriented their subsequent reassessments. Arguably, this is especially true of art by women, and of the socially engaged criticism that addresses it. If identity has been a problem in women’s art, however, is more identity the solution? In this study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art in Canada, Kristina Huneault offers a meditation on the strictures of identity and an exploration of forces that unsettle and realign the self. Looking closely at individual artists and works, Huneault combines formal analysis with archival research and philosophical inquiry, building nuanced readings of objects that range from the canonical to the largely unknown. Whether in miniature portraits or genre paintings, botanical drawings or baskets, women artists reckoned with constraints that limited understandings of themselves and others. They also forged creative alternatives. At times identity features in women’s artistic work as a failed project; at other times it marks a boundary beyond which they were able to expand, explore, and exult. Bringing together settler and indigenous forms of cultural expression and foregrounding the importance of colonialism within the development of art in Canada, I’m Not Myself at All observes and reactivates historical art by women and prompts readers to consider what a less restrictive conceptualization of selfhood might bring to current patterns of cultural analysis.
Unsettling Canadian Art History
Author: Erin Morton
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228013283
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Bringing together fifteen scholars of art and culture, Unsettling Canadian Art History addresses the visual and material culture of settler colonialism, enslavement, and racialized diasporas in the contested white settler state of Canada. This collection offers new avenues for scholarship on art, archives, and creative practice by rethinking histories of Canadian colonialisms from Black, Indigenous, racialized, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit perspectives. Writing across many positionalities, contributors offer chapters that disrupt colonial archives of art and culture, excavating and reconstructing radical Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic creation and experience. Exploring the racist frameworks that continue to erase histories of violence and resistance, this book imagines the expansive possibilities of a decolonial future. Unsettling Canadian Art History affirms the importance of collaborative conversations and work in the effort to unsettle scholarship in Canadian art and culture.
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228013283
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Bringing together fifteen scholars of art and culture, Unsettling Canadian Art History addresses the visual and material culture of settler colonialism, enslavement, and racialized diasporas in the contested white settler state of Canada. This collection offers new avenues for scholarship on art, archives, and creative practice by rethinking histories of Canadian colonialisms from Black, Indigenous, racialized, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit perspectives. Writing across many positionalities, contributors offer chapters that disrupt colonial archives of art and culture, excavating and reconstructing radical Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic creation and experience. Exploring the racist frameworks that continue to erase histories of violence and resistance, this book imagines the expansive possibilities of a decolonial future. Unsettling Canadian Art History affirms the importance of collaborative conversations and work in the effort to unsettle scholarship in Canadian art and culture.
Tear Gas Epiphanies
Author: Kirsty Robertson
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773558292
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 449
Book Description
Museums are frequently sites of struggle and negotiation. They are key cultural institutions that occupy an oftentimes uncomfortable place at the crossroads of the arts, culture, various levels of government, corporate ventures, and the public. Because of this, museums are targeted by political action but can also provide support for contentious politics. Though protests at museums are understudied, they are far from anomalous. Tear Gas Epiphanies traces the as-yet-untold story of political action at museums in Canada from the early twentieth century to the present. The book looks at how museums do or do not archive protest ephemera, examining a range of responses to actions taking place at their thresholds, from active encouragement to belligerent dismissal. Drawing together extensive primary-source research and analysis, Robertson questions widespread perceptions of museums, strongly arguing for a reconsideration of their role in contemporary society that takes into account political conflict and protest as key ingredients in museum life. The sheer number of protest actions Robertson uncovers is compelling. Ambitious and wide-ranging, Tear Gas Epiphanies provides a thorough and conscientious survey of key points of intersection between museums and protest – a valuable resource for university students and scholars, as well as arts professionals working at and with museums.
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773558292
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 449
Book Description
Museums are frequently sites of struggle and negotiation. They are key cultural institutions that occupy an oftentimes uncomfortable place at the crossroads of the arts, culture, various levels of government, corporate ventures, and the public. Because of this, museums are targeted by political action but can also provide support for contentious politics. Though protests at museums are understudied, they are far from anomalous. Tear Gas Epiphanies traces the as-yet-untold story of political action at museums in Canada from the early twentieth century to the present. The book looks at how museums do or do not archive protest ephemera, examining a range of responses to actions taking place at their thresholds, from active encouragement to belligerent dismissal. Drawing together extensive primary-source research and analysis, Robertson questions widespread perceptions of museums, strongly arguing for a reconsideration of their role in contemporary society that takes into account political conflict and protest as key ingredients in museum life. The sheer number of protest actions Robertson uncovers is compelling. Ambitious and wide-ranging, Tear Gas Epiphanies provides a thorough and conscientious survey of key points of intersection between museums and protest – a valuable resource for university students and scholars, as well as arts professionals working at and with museums.
Voluntary Detours
Author: Lianne McTavish
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228009960
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 317
Book Description
After visiting hundreds of museums across Alberta, Lianne McTavish chronicles some of the most challenging and unexpected sites where the idea of the museum is being reshaped. The concept of the visit as a “voluntary detour” encapsulates the way visitors travel along backroads to find small-town and rural museums, as well as the agreement to turn away from standard museum scripts when they arrive. Addressing themes of place, land, colonization, rurality, heritage, childhood, and play, McTavish reveals the museum visitor as multifaceted, with locals and tourists often interpreting museums very differently. Case studies include the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, and the Museum of Fear and Wonder. A key chapter analyzing sites devoted to resource extraction explores how these places promote settler colonial understandings of land use. By contrast, Indigenous museums and cultural centres defy colonial messages in displays that adapt and refuse conventional museum formats. Honouring local, rural, and Indigenous knowledge, Voluntary Detours enriches critical accounts of the past, present, and future of museums.
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228009960
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 317
Book Description
After visiting hundreds of museums across Alberta, Lianne McTavish chronicles some of the most challenging and unexpected sites where the idea of the museum is being reshaped. The concept of the visit as a “voluntary detour” encapsulates the way visitors travel along backroads to find small-town and rural museums, as well as the agreement to turn away from standard museum scripts when they arrive. Addressing themes of place, land, colonization, rurality, heritage, childhood, and play, McTavish reveals the museum visitor as multifaceted, with locals and tourists often interpreting museums very differently. Case studies include the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, and the Museum of Fear and Wonder. A key chapter analyzing sites devoted to resource extraction explores how these places promote settler colonial understandings of land use. By contrast, Indigenous museums and cultural centres defy colonial messages in displays that adapt and refuse conventional museum formats. Honouring local, rural, and Indigenous knowledge, Voluntary Detours enriches critical accounts of the past, present, and future of museums.