Manitoba's Miniature Forests

Veneration, of course, means respect or reverence. An iconic exhibit must be one that will be admired, honoured, or thought highly of by many of the people who visit the Museum. The creation of an iconic exhibit is, therefore, a rather demanding prospect for the Museum’s exhibit team, since it must be more exciting than many of the other exhibits at the Museum, and more memorable than most of the exhibits they will have seen in other museums!

For an exhibit to be iconic, I think it really needs to have “legs.” It has to have the potential to last not just for years, but for decades, and to be effective throughout that time. It has to be the sort of exhibit that can excite the children when it opens, but that will also be memorable to those same people when they revisit the museum years later as adults, and to excite their children. That sounds like a high order indeed, but how can we consider something to be “revered” unless it is long-lived?

I was contemplating this question a few weeks ago, as I visited the collections building of the New Brunswick Museum in Saint John. The New Brunswick Museum is very different from The Manitoba Museum; one of the biggest differences is that their collections are not stored at the same place where the public view the exhibits. In Winnipeg we have our collections in various spaces within the same large museum building, but in Saint John the exhibits are in a rented space at Market Square near the middle of town, while the collections occupy much of the building that used to be the public museum, located more than two kilometres away on Douglas Avenue (near the Reversing Falls).

Since the current New Brunswick Museum’s exhibits were largely created new since 1990 (though of course some specimens and artefacts were relocated there from the old museum), the exhibit halls lack the sorts of long-lived exhibits that are so important at The Manitoba Museum. Some of our major exhibits such as the Nonsuch, the polar bear, and the Urban Gallery have all seen little change in forty years or more. The New Brunswick Museum may lack that sort of long-lived exhibit in its current galleries, but as I studied collections located in the former galleries, I was struck by how vividly I could recall the “ghosts” of some exhibits I had visited there as a child. Old New Brunswick Museum exhibits such the Hillsborough mastodon, the giant sturgeon, and the shipbuilding gallery all had a great impact on me, and were probably influential in my choice of a museum career.

Since The Manitoba Museum is already a place that houses many iconic exhibits, it is incumbent on us to try to keep these as we go forward in the development of new “icons.” Fortunately, from my observation of gallery planning, we are very respectful of the institution’s past, and though we have lost a few exhibits over the years, we have also taken extraordinary steps to ensure that others have been saved and refurbished. As we go forward, and as this institution is itself gradually becoming a historic site (this is hard for us to perceive, but it IS happening!), we will need to ensure that the best and most important of our old exhibits are preserved, with perhaps an occasional updating or “burnishing” to maintain their iconic status. People will always want to come to see the Nonsuch!

For our new exhibits to become icons, we need to always be considering the elements that give them the “wow” factor, that will take away the visitor’s breath, either on first sight or after slight contemplation. The most obvious iconic attributes will be in the exhibited objects themselves, which may be large, or splendidly beautiful, or unique. Again, the Nonsuch is an obvious example, but we have many others: the ground sloth (Megatherium), the giant trilobite, the elk diorama, and many of the artifacts in the Hudson’s Bay Company Gallery. In addition to the specimens and artifacts, though, there are many other factors. Cases are designed to optimize viewing by all visitors, and nowadays the Museum pays immense attention to factors such as lighting, colour schemes, graphics, and text readability.

Of course, there are also the technological elements, which are constantly grappled with by all modern museums. These can frustrate museum staff and they can sometimes torpedo an otherwise solid exhibit, but when they work they can elevate an exhibit to iconic status. I hope that will be the case for our Ancient Seas exhibit, opened a few years ago and a solid favourite of some of our younger visitors. I was very pleased a few weeks back when my friend Cortney posted a photograph of her daughter Teagan, with the statement, “enraptured by the Ancient Seas exhibit, every time.”

Those of us working at the Museum need to endeavour to find a way to share all of our treasures, but at the same time we should have no room for exhibits that are “worthy but dull.” We have to strive to “enrapture” all of our visitors! This is a big and exciting challenge as the Museum continues to develop and evolve.

Michael Cuggy (L) and Dave Rudkin discussing specimen notes.

Research visits tend to occur in cycles or waves; researchers from out of town, in particular, seem to plan extended study visits for the summer months. This may be partly because many of them work at universities and other teaching institutions, and the summer is the interval in which they get a break from day-to-day teaching responsibilities. In the case of The Manitoba Museum, it might also have something to do with the climate, as some people from outside the prairies have the (mistaken?) impression that Winnipeg’s weather is something less than tropical from November through April.

Right now we are into that summer stage, and this week I have the pleasure of receiving research visitors in the lab. My friends and colleagues Dave Rudkin (Royal Ontario Museum) and Michael Cuggy (University of Saskatchewan) are here to spend some serious time with the fossil eurypterids (“sea scorpions”) that we have collected from Ordovician age rocks in Manitoba over the past dozen years or more (these rocks are about 445 million years old).

In this particular case, Dave and Michael are collaborating with me on the project, which is particularly nice as I receive visitors and also get to contribute to the research myself. Eurypterids are a very tricky group to study, since they were arthropods (joint-legged animals) that had external skeletons made up of many different components. In the specimens we are considering, the components have come apart in different ways and/or been squashed at different angles as they were buried in mud and fossilized. As a result, the patterns they make are extremely complex and difficult to decipher. One specimen may look like a jumble of legs and segments, while another may have the body twisted so that, at first, it may be difficult to tell where the head is.

We have many eurypterid specimens in our storage cabinets, so Dave and Michael are pulling out each one, examining it closely, consulting the notes that they made previously, and in many cases taking photographs to supplement the ones we already have on hand. Ed Dobrzanski and I are making sure that Dave and Michael have all the tools and space they need, and I periodically supply them with opinions, observations, data, and coffee and cookies.

It seems to be working well so far. Still miles to go before we see where we are with the project at the end of the day Friday, but I’m sure the research will be exciting and interesting, at the times when it isn’t exasperating and frustrating!