WDM unveils Canada 150 plans

The Western Development Museum (WDM) is putting together a special exhibit to celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary in 2017, but Yorkton won’t see it until 2018.

Liz Scott, director of research for the WDM Curatorial Centre in Saskatoon was in Yorkton February 19 to help the local branch with its Heritage Day program.

Scott’s presentation, entitled Behind the Scenes at the WDM: Curating a Canada 150 Exhibit in Saskatchewan, outlined four museum Canada 150 projects. These include: Saskatchewan Contributions to Canada; Our Collective Threads: Saskatchewan People in Canada; The Centennial Canoe Pageant 1967; Quantum; and Women’s Hands Building a Nation.

The last one is the traveling exhibit that will come to Yorkton from July to October 2018.

For the most part, Scott kept the details of the exhibit under her hat, but described how curatorial staff goes about the process of deciding on themes, designing displays, seeking out potential theme-coherent artifacts and whittling those potentials to a representative few.

She noted the museum has 75,000 artifacts in its collection, approximately 35 per cent of which are on public display at any given time.

For the Women’s Hands exhibit, they have pulled approximately 50 that will be pared down to about 12 to 14 for the exhibit. These will be displayed on eight curved panels and in four plexi-cases.

As a teaser, Scott presented a slide of a silk, Chinese dressing gown that belonged to Jennie Wong Howe. Jennie, along with her husband Wong Get Howe, son David and daughter Pearl, arrived in Marcelin, Saskatchewan, a village approximately halfway between North Battleford and Prince Albert, in 1923.

The Howes were some of the earliest Chinese immigrants to the province and started a restaurant called the Star Café. It became a Marcelin institution that lasted 75 years before closing in 2002. David just passed away last year in Leask at the age of 95.

The WDM in Yorkton currently has a special exhibit from the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum called A Taste of Science.