After the Interlude: My Story Continued

Omen or not, driving to Peterborough from Edmonton during the week of Katrina, watching the gas prices steadily and sharply rise each day, was a minor adventure and a foot in the door of my dreams.  I'll let you be the judge of whether that metaphor works.  Anyway, what can I say about the Fleming College, Museum Management and Curatorship program?  It was an amazingly intense program where one of the greatest lessons was in time management, with so many projects on the go, from the various courses with various project partners and project group sizes, it was still hard to believe we fit so much into and accomplished as much as we did in the  months of course work and 4 month internship.  We worked hard and occasionally, on the days and nights I'm able to remember, we played hard, forging some great friendships along the way.  Many of us were quite sad to part company and go off to our various internships at the beginning of summer.  We even had to struggle through on our own while we worked on our final exhibit installation, which was a testament to our great training, for a few weeks during an Ontario college strike.    

Preparing a case borrowed from the Art Gallery of Peterborough

Mount that I helped make for our exhibit

A couple of our text panels intended to give a 1930s impression

Using to local media to publicize our exhibit

Hats for the 1920s

Our opening panel

My date for the grand opening with my 'strike beard'

My 1st foam core text panels for my mini exhibit

Anyway, the MMC program that year had 29 students enrolled and we all stuck it out to the end.  After the initial few weeks we were divided in half and given an exhibit project to work on each.  The one group was given 'The Italian Community of Peterborough' and allowed to use the exhibit space of the Peterborough Centenial Museum and Archives, where we had one of our classrooms away from the college and spent at least half our classroom time.  The other half, which I was in, was given Sadlier House or '751 George Street' to come up with an exhibit for in nearly 8 months of planning by various committees.  We made it easier on ourselves by dividing even further into 3 groups of 5 to work on 3 separate aspects of the exhibit - a little too separate, as it turned out.  We met weekly as a group of 15 to share progress and ideas and to attempt a common vision for the exhibit and had rotating chairpersons for the meetings, every few weeks.  I think that was my contribution, but I don't really want to take specific credit for anything we accomplished as a group. 
I think that's enough writing for tonight.  I'll be back in a couple of days to share the experience of my internship in London at The Royal Canadian Regiment Museum with a few photos again.

An Interjection - My Favourite Artist: Jeff deBoer "Buddha in You" Art Interview

Some Background

Hey, I thought I'd give a little background on my museum experience.  (Not part of my CV) ---> My earliest museum memories are going to the Provincial Museum of Alberta (now Royal Alberta Museum [RAM]) and Fort Edmonton Park.  Both of these I went to various times in my childhood, sometimes with my family, sometimes with a school group, and also managed to find other ways to get there.  The John Janzen Nature Centre should also be included in this.  I loved to get a book related to my experience and loved everything about these experiences - though most of all, I loved dinosaurs.

Years later, I was able to work two consecutive years as a volunteer at the Provincial Museum of Alberta (not yet, RAM) on a medieval exhibit, where they utilized my 'expertise' in medieval history, which was my area of concentration for my Bachelors degree in History at the University of Alberta.  That was my first taste of museum work, but I was able to get some training as part of my Anthropology training, taking a course in artifact handling.  Before that I had a great experience in Inverness, Scotland at their civic museum where I paid for a 3 day tour of various archaeological sites in the area, which included an extensive tour of the work and storage rooms of the museum.  I felt like I was becoming a museum expert already.

My next experience was volunteering at the Marischal Museum in Aberdeen, Scotland, where I became a regular there for three years.  I was even hired for a full summer as a student intern and worked 9-5, 5 days a week.  That was probably my most valuable experience, where I had a great mentor in Neil Curtis, the curator.  During the whole three years, he entrusted me to catalogue the museum's Scottish coin collection, dating back to the Roman Empire.  During my summer internship I was part of the team that rescued the collection from an infestation of spider beetles, which was also used as an opportunity to transfer a large number of artefacts from the old storage area to the newly created one - from the tower to the basement (you can imagine the walk between each one.  I was also part of a smaller team that catalogued and reorganized the painting and print collection belonging to the university - large project for a 500 year old university.  Amongst the various projects I assisted and was entrusted with, partly with a team and partly on my own, I organized the museum's Egyptology collection in the new storage, setting the parameters for the records storage area.

Marischal College, home of Marischal Museum owned by The University of Aberdeen

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/marischal_museum/

With this experience behind me, upon my return home, I spent 4 years finishing the thesis that I began in Scotland, at home in Alberta.  With the lag time between continents and examiners going on sabbatical during my rewrites, it took a bit longer than I expected.  In the meantime, I decided a career in the museum field was exactly what I should have been doing and set about researching where to go for my training, this time within Canada, though ideally, I would have loved to have gone back to Scotland to work.  I found Sir Sandford Fleming College and their Museum Management and Curatorship program and decided it would be perfect for me, with their hands on type of training and intensive 1-year postgraduate program.  The 1st year I applied I was accepted, but because I was still working on my thesis, I turned them down, quite correctly realizing that I could not accomplish both at the same time.  I applied again the next year, but was not accepted, since their numbers are very limited.  I tried again for the 3rd time and told myself that if I wasn't accepted again, I would give up my ideas for a museum career, since it wasn't meant to be.  I was accepted and at the end of August 2005 drove myself across country to move to Peterborough.  I will share a few photos and describe my time there in my next post and if I haven't taken up too much space, will also describe my internship in London, Ontario with photos.