Beaver Staff
May is Museum Month and to celebrate the Lennox and Addington Museum and Archives will be chalk full of virtual events over the next four weeks.
While supplies last the museum will be offering free fimo beaded necklaces art kits. Totternot’s Laura Nimigan will lead a video that provides step-by-step instruction on how to make a unique chain necklace. Each kit comes with an assortment of colourful, oven-bake clay and a silver plated, snake chain necklace. The video is available to view throughout May on the museum’s Facebook page. Email ameyer@lennox-addington.on.ca to reserve a kit.
On May 4 at 7 p.m. via Zoom will be a presentation on folk art collecting, led by local folk art collector David Field.
He will take a wandering trip around, thinking about folk art – what does not apply; how does one define it; what does one appreciate when one views and acquires folk art. There are some categories and regional differences that are worth thinking about.
On May 11 at 7 p.m. via Zoom, Bill Bickle will host Nature in Photography.
The local wildlife photographer will share stories of local species that he has photographed. Marvelling in the beauty of nature, Bickle will tour guests through Eastern Ontario by showing off the majestic creatures he has been able to photograph in their natural habitats. Following the presentation he will be available for a live question period.
On May 18 at 7 p.m. on Zoom Norma Shepherd will host the History of Millinery-A Show and Talk.
Shepherd is a Mobile Millinery Museum director and will lead a discussion of 20th Century Canadian Millinery Designers. Among other discoveries, learn which designer is considered by experts to have been the greatest in Canadian history and why; which designer had a reputation for making any woman look beautiful; and which Canadian millinery designers are excelling at their craft today.
On May 20 at 1 p.m. via Zoom Dr. Sequoia Miller will be the guest speaker for Revisiting Colonial Dinnerware.
A collection of ceramic tableware on view in Toronto’s Gardiner Museum depicts idealized scenes of nineteenth-century Canadian life. Manufactured in England, these objects and others like them participated in the colonial project by imagining and asserting both national and colonial identities. In this virtual program Miller, chief curator at the Gardiner, will discuss how seemingly decorative objects such as these engage complex questions around colonialism, political economy, and cultural authority. Miller will also consider the role of museums in offering new and critical interpretive strategies for thinking through problematic historical objects.
To close out the busy month on May 25 at 7 p.m. via Zoom will be Little Wanderers: A Literary History of the British Home Children in Canada with Brooke Cameron and Alicia Alves.
Between 1863 and 1939 as many as 118,000 children came to Canada under a British program of child migration. These “Home Children” journeyed to Canada from the UK in search of a better life. Following the advice and help of Victorian social reformers, these little migrants hoped to leave behind a life of poverty and/or class discrimination limiting their opportunities and happiness in the Old World.
To register for any of these programs, visit https://www.lennox-addington.on.ca/museum-archives/events. For those who can’t watch the events live, video of the presentations can still be obtained by emailing ameyer@lennox-addington.on.ca.