Museum of Anthropology at UBC
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The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus near Vancouver, Canada, is one of the foremost museums of Pacific Northwest Coast First Nations culture. As well as being a major tourist destination, the museum is also a teaching museum, used in a number of courses at UBC, and a research museum.
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[edit] Location
The Museum is located at 6393 Northwest Marine Drive. Although the Museum is strongly affiliated with UBC, this site is technically off-campus. The Museum and UBC lie in the University Endowment Lands, which are not officially part of the City of Vancouver.
[edit] History
The Museum was founded in 1947 when the various items in UBC's ethnographic collection were put on display in the basement of the Main Library. Dr. Harry Hawthorn served as the first director of the new museum, with his wife, Dr. Audrey Hawthorn, serving as its first curator.
In 1971 the Museum received funds from the Government of Canada and UBC to begin construction of a new building. In 1976 the new building, designed by renowned Canadian architect Arthur Erickson, opened under new director Michael Ames, who served from 1974 to 1997. Walter and Marianne Koerner's 1975 donation of their extensive collection of Northwest Coast First Nations art to the Museum formed a large part of the new building's contents.
In 1997 Dr. Ruth Philipps became Museum director. In 2002 Dr. Michael Ames returned as Acting Director. Dr. Anthony Shelton became Director in 2004.
[edit] The Building
Arthur Erickson's building was inspired by the post-and-beam Architecture of the Northwest Coast First Nations people. Like much of Erickson's work, the building is made primarily out of concrete.
[edit] The Collections
This museum includes a number of large sculptures, totem poles and cultural artifacts. Although the Museum's focus is on the First Nations people of the Northwest Coast, the collection of 35,000 pieces includes objects from all continents. These are mostly located in the visible storage section of the Museum, a gallery where objects that would normally be stored behind the scenes are made accessible to the public. The collections include contemporary works as well as historical objects.
[edit] Highlights
The most iconic object in the Museum is probably the yellow cedar sculpture the Raven and the First Men by Bill Reid, which is depicted on the Canadian twenty-dollar bill.
Other notable Bill Reid works include his Bear and Wasco sculptures, some of his gold jewellery, and a prototype of the Haida dugout canoe he carved for Expo 86.
The Museum contains several large Musqueam artifacts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rare because the Musqueam were one of the first Northwest Coast First Nations to be displaced and decimated by European settlement and diseases.
The Museum's Great Hall contains many sections of totem poles from Haida villages abandoned in the late nineteenth century due to disease brought by European traders.
The Museum has an extensive collection from the South Pacific.
The Koerner Ceramics Gallery, which opened in 1990, contains over 600 European ceramics collected by Walter Koerner and donated to the Museum.
The Haida houses outside the Museum were designed by Bill Reid, who also carved, along with Douglas Cranmer, most of the totem poles surrounding them. The original Reid/Cranmer totem pole mounted on the front of the big house was taken inside in 2000 due to deterioration and replaced with the new "Respect to Bill Reid Pole" by Haida artist Jim Hart.
[edit] The Renewal Project
In 2006, the Museum launched a multi-million dollar project to rebuild and expand parts of the Museum, especially the offices, research labs, and visible storage. The project will be completed in 2009.
