Photo Trip to the R.O.M.

Due to a scheduling snafu, I had to teach the second full-day session of my Information Architecture course at the U. of T. on the Thanksgiving long weekend. I was pleasantly surprised to see all of my students there, thinking I might not even have half the class turn up.

Afterwards, with no family to return home to (everyone had gone up north to the cottage at Deloro for the weekend, I decided to head over to the nearby Royal Ontario Museum and take some pictures in an unhurried manner. Here’s some of what I took:

Protective cladding is being applied to the angled surfaces of the “crystal”.

Jousting mural in the southwest quadrant of Samuel Hall/Currelly Gallery. The image features the Directors of the museum at the time it was painted in the 1940s, and features Currelly himself (the man behind the tapestry).

A Hadrosaur skeleton “stranded” in the Samuel Hall/Currelly Gallery while the new dino gallery is being built.

“Just arrived!” says the sign in the lower-left: A Triceratops skull giving a tantalizing glimpse of some of the new things to expect in the renovated dino gallery to come.

More signs of change as this glimpse of the former Insect Gallery, in the middle of being dismantled, shows.

This was a shock: finding that the European/Mediterranean ancient civilization galleries were closed and being renovated.

Bust of St. John the Baptist in the European Medieval Gallery

One of the Haidi Totem Poles — with nobody on the stairs! (the place was far from full when I visited).

There was an installation in a newly opened gallery on the ground floor by the Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa. This and the next image are panoramas I stitched together from several photos of a couple of his larger pieces. This one greets the visitor to the gallery, and is a model of a fictional urban complex made out of rice-paper lanterns.

This one is called “Negatividad”, made up of wooden toy trains.

The magnificent mosaic ceiling in the main foyer of the R.O.M.