Posts Tagged ‘Royal Ontario Museum’

I had to do an errand downtown, and since I had the time I went to the Royal Ontario Museum, where I knew that they had just opened a new Ancient Rome/Byzantium gallery space. I had thought it was to be in a whole new gallery space, and was somewhat disappointed to find that they were filling in a space which previously had been set aside for temporary exhibitions. Still, in addition to items they had on display before the renovations, they also had the chance to show other things which had been in storage.

I took my camera along and took many pictures — especially of the Roman-Egyptian items as well as the new display on Nubian/Meroë culture — but was struck by the scene of a number of artists who were sketching the Imperial Roman marble busts in the middle of the new gallery. They sketched, and I shot pictures. Here’s my favourite of the bunch:

Artists Sketching Roman Marble Busts at the ROM

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.

Erika took her mother and Vanessa for some Boxing Week clothes shopping, so I decided to take Annie along to the ROM to see the newly opened galleries there.

We got their early enough to beat the initial crowds, and Annie happily settled in to the kids activities on the second floor. Once she was happy having drawn several pictures, worn some kid-sized armour and gone into the Bat Cave a few times, I managed to persuade her to satisfy her Dad’s curiosity and explore the new galleries on the floor prior to heading out for lunch.

Seeing the light emerge through the stained-glass windows above the old east-facing entrance was impressive, and the replica old oaken doors are more in keeping than the misguidedly too-modern glass doors that formerly graced that entrance.

Could see that the Weston Hall adjacent to the coat check room was still being worked on, but the fact that there was natural light streaming in from previously covered-up windows was already a good sign for future development.

The equivalent space to the north, where the gift shops and the Druxy’s diner used to be is now devoted as a gallery space for the First Peoples. Didn’t get to see much as Annie’s patience was already being stretched, but noted that very few of the displays had anything by way of signage, and also saw a few empty display cases. Clearly things were not completely ready for the re-opening, and that there was still much work to be done.

We then headed over to the Samuel Hall/Currelly Gallery space, which basically sports many, many comfy seats. I realize that the general age of the museum’s patrons is getting older, but I can’t help but wonder how long it will take for somebody to re-convert this space to something more functional than for just sitting around and taking a much-needed pause between exhibits. Annie had fun playing with one of two large touch-screen displays detailing the history of the ROM, and I noted the two newly mounted dino skeletons on the south wall, surely a stop-gap measure for those disappointed at the continued absence of a dinosaur gallery, which is slated to re-open when the Michael Lee-Chin crystal structure is slated to open late next year. It was also nice to see the two murals dating to the mid-1940s on the east walls flanking the entrance arch had been uncovered. They match those that had been uncovered for the past several years on the west side, these newly uncovered ones depicting crusaders on horseback facing an opposing Saracen cavalry.

We then made our way into the first of the Asian galleries. Again, it is obvious that things were a little bit rushed prior to opening, as there were next to no explanatory text accompanying the objects on display, save for the large signs containing the gallery names that thank the people/firms that made the galleries possible in the first place. The new Chinese architecture gallery was impressive, with scatterings of architectural elements, a facsimile of a royal façade, and a tomb flanked by stone camels. The absence of any contextual signs lends itself to free-association as to why particular artifacts are displayed together. A situation not likely to last long, I am sure, so I took a few pics of some of the architectural elements in one of the display cabinets.

Annie’s patience was being sorely tested by this point, but I managed to dash through some of the other Asian galleries quickly, enough to get a sense as to where things are and where to head next visit.

It was a dull, grey day when we got back outside, but I managed to take a couple more shots, once of the old planetarium building, which I posted to the McLaughlin Planetarium page on Wikipedia, and one of the newly uncovered façade for the east entrance, which I also posted to Wikipedia under the page for the ROM under a section detailing its construction.

As a member of the ROM in addition to getting free admission and notifications of any special events there, we also get a small flyer called ROMLife that lists all of the programs and courses taught there. What caught my eye a while back was a talk that Rick Green – former member of The Frantics, the “Green” of The Red Green Show and head writer for History Bites – was planning to give. I love the show and have managed to catch most of the four seasons currently being shows on History Television, so I arranged to go and see it. And since my Aunt Audrey lives close by and I haven’t seen her for a while, I asked her to join me.

Turns out she hasn’t seen the show, and that’s because it’s on an “upper channel” she doesn’t get, but she was up for an evening out with her nephew.

After catching up on what she’s been up to of late, we headed over to the ROM, getting there with plenty of time to spare in order to get tickets and decent seats in the auditorium. It started at 7-o’clock and after a brief introduction by the directory of the ROMLife program Rick Green took to the stage.

He talked about the show in general and how the show started. He started out by giving us a version of the 2-minute pitch he made of the show to the people at History Television several years ago. The basic premise focused around the idea that television had in fact been around for most of the events in history – that much is known to anybody who has ever watched the show. But as he then went on to say, the show will also designed to be a dark critique of television as a medium itself, showing how the viewpoint and the emphasis shown distorts the overall picture. The end result is something like a mongrel cross between the classic SCTV and just about any other show you might run across on History Television. Interestingly, he has nothing but praise for the execs at History Television, who have apparently given him all of the support he’s needed to start the show and keep it running, now into its 5th season.

He started by showing off a clip from a yet-to-be-seen show from the new season that looks at the antagonism between Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I. Rick introduced the clip by saying that in fact the two of them never actually met during their lifetimes, and that the writers had to think of something that would bring them both together and be a good forum to display all of the issues each of them had with the other. The result: The Jerome Springer Show featuring a pissed-off Mary Queen of Scots with a strong white-trash/Southern accent bitching away at the way she’s being treated by her cousin. Great stuff! Bracketing this sort of material was extensive commentary from three curators at the ROM, all experts in their field who provided extra details on the history. Sometimes they provided further background for other clips from the show that were then played, other times showing items in the museum collections relevant to that era, or providing an archeological perspective on the events covered in specific History Bites clips. It ended up being a good mix of comedy and history lesson, taught by the best in both fields. There was even a bit of crossover, as the archeologists tried out some very dry comedy, explaining how horrible human tragedies (usually massacres) usually left him to find largely intact pottery from the hiding places where people had hidden them and never returned to collect them. Bad for the original owner, but great news for the archeologist. The condition of any pottery that was found quickly became a running joke throughout the evening.

Fans of the show would have been interested in the back-stories behind some of the clips he played. He mentioned a few of the places used as backdrops for some of the scenes – not too surprisingly, the Medieval Faire that runs in Oakville during the summer cropped up more than once. He prefaced the clip from the new season that featured a scene from All in the Family set during the time of the first American Thanksgiving by saying that the two writers who wrote it had not been born when the show was originally on air. They had to rent some tapes of the show in order for them to understand the format. This happens a lot, ranging from shows just before my time (like The Ed Sullivan Show), to shows I vaguely remember (like Laugh In), to much more recent shows like Survivor, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and so on.

The presentation went on for a couple of hours, and was lots of fun. I think you can measure its success by the fact that my Aunt, who had never seen the show, thought the evening out was a hoot.

This day definitely ranks as a good day. Erika came home surprisingly early from her film shoot, coming home at about 4am this morning (was expecting 9am or later). I got up a few hours later, and took Vanessa out to the venerable Royal Ontario Museum. I gave her the choice of either going to the Science Center or to go see Dinosaurs at the ROM — she chose dinosaurs. It’s funny, we visited the place about a month or so ago, and I figured when she said she wanted to see the dinosaurs, she’d want to see the actual dinosaur exhibit, bones and all. Silly me. She actually wanted to see the animated Maiasaur exhibit, where kids get to slap a button on a console and a 10ft high animated Maiasaur appears doing such things as drinking water, running, snorting, etc. While visiting the ROM, I had the strange feeling of time both standing still and moving forward at once. I’d swear that nothing has changed in the old dinosaur exhibit since I was a kid — and that’s a long time ago now. The mannequin of the archaeologist putting a dinosaur bone in a cast has been around since the 60’s I’d swear, and I suspect it may be even older. On the other hand you have things like the Maiasaur exhibit, the “Bat Cave“, and Inco’s “Dynamic Earth” which are relatively new (and both of which Vanessa loves). I remember when the ROM was a real Victorian-style institution, with standardized rows upon rows of stuffed animals, birds, butterflies and bugs of all descriptions in glass cases. The current version of the ROM is much more fun for kids, though it’s lost something its haunted, almost hallowed nature to me. This was the ROM that used to have the outdoor Ancient Chinese Garden which is frozen like a fly in amber in one of the stories from Alice Munro’s “The Moons of Jupiter“. Am really glad that Vanessa enjoys herself there, and will look into getting a family membership next I head there.

Interesting side note: finally read my personal emails from Friday and it turns out that my Frantics Web site has been selected as a Yahoo! Canada site of the week. Neat! 😉