University of British Columbia

Museum Monday: Vancouver BC’s Museum of Anthropology

It’s been a while since we had a chance to visit the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus.

The whole museum was closed for more than a year while seismic upgrades were made to the spectacular Great Hall, which has 50-foot-tall glass walls and displays of Northwest Coast poles, house posts, carved figures, canoes, feast dishes and other objects primarily from the mid-19th century.

Work by contemporary artists are mixed in here and there, and there are other temporary exhibitions as well as permanent galleries, including the Koerner European Ceramics Gallery, which displays one man’s collection of over 600 objects.

Beyond the Great Hall, our favorite part of the museum is the Multiversity Galleries displaying more than 16,000 objects from the museum’s permanent collection in open storage and in enticing pull-out drawers.

Impossible to see in one visit, many of the exhibit groupings were created in consultation with members of the communities whose relatives and ancestors made the pieces on display.