Director of the McCord Museum, Victoria Dickenson

PHOTO: OWEN EGAN

A museum for the ages

BRONWYN CHESTER | It doesn't look all that big from the outside. But the McCord Museum, sitting grey and tastefully reserved on Sherbrooke Street in the former McGill (student) Union building, has one of the largest collections of artifacts of Canadian history in the country.

"The McCord's a jewel in the crown [of Canadian museums]. It's considered in museum circles to be one of the best in Canada," says Victoria Dickenson, the museum's director for the past one and a half years.

Dickenson knows the crown well. Having begun her career in museums at the ROM, while a student of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto, she has worked at the National Museum of Man, was chief curator at the Newfoundland Museum for six years, director of public programs at the National Aviation Museum and, most recently, senior advisor in information technology at the National Museum of Science and Technology.

She has curated shows or prepared multimedia resources on subjects as varied as "The Amazing Potato," "The Decade of the [Avro] Arrow" and "The Illustrated Bird in Canada."

Dickenson got her museum legs as a girl growing up in west end Toronto, where every Saturday morning she would take the eastbound Bloor streetcar to the Saturday Morning Club at the Royal Ontario Museum and immerse herself in Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome and the geology section.

It's one of her goals as director -- a goal shared by the museum's board -- to further develop a similar "sense of entitlement" towards the McCord by offering weekend activities for adults and children and possibly evening talks and concerts. The recently created J. Armand Bombardier Theatre has increased such possibilities.

Dickenson also wants her museum "to get the information out there" to the academic community. Virtually speaking, that is.

The museum, home of the famous 750,000-photo Notman Photographic Archive, one of the biggest (16,000 items) costume collections in the world (rivalling London's Victoria and Albert Museum, notes the director), and boxes upon shelves of all sorts of prints, drawings, maps, diaries, collections of letters, etc., documenting the lives of Canadians between the 18th century and roughly 1945, is a treasure-trove to researchers.

While not everyone can make it to the building -- international scholars, in particular -- the Internet can make it to the researcher and the McCord has begun the process of photographing and digitizing its photo collection. So far there are 15,000 Notman photos on-line, bringing the famous portrait photographer's depictions of high and low Canadian society of the last century to the world.

"Magic lantern slides" too will shortly be on-line thanks to a Heritage Canada grant. These were hand-coloured glass slides used by McGill lecturers in the '20s and '30s. Dickenson isn't sure, but she believes the slides may have been used in public lectures or in continuing education classes for recent arrivals. The lecture titles include "Canada a generation ago," "Canadian geography and economics: Quebec" and "Other Days in Canada" and the plan is to re-create two on-line courses complete with video.

"Colour prints all used to be hand-tinted," Dickenson says, as were colour slides and engravings. "Whole families used to do it in the early 19th century; the Audubons had a whole poor family doing the colouring of engravings."

Once a formal part of the University, the McCord, plagued from its beginnings in 1921 by financial insecurity, set out on its own in 1987 as a private museum, with the help of a multi-million dollar gift from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation. While the museum is self-governing, McGill remains the owner of almost the entire collection and the building, which it rents to the custodians of its collection at one dollar per year, and three of the seven voting members of the corporation represent McGill.

Dickenson believes museums play a pivotal role in connecting us to the day-to-day lives of our forebears -- their artifacts can spin powerful tales that help bring the past to life. She mentions the recent donation of a wedding dress. It came with photographs of the wedding that took place in a small Quebec village. "These are documents of the life of an ordinary woman in the 1930s," she says. "That information doesn't exist in books."

Collecting the stuff of the daily lives of ordinary people has become a priority at the McCord, but poses some difficulties. "Try to find a pair of jeans from the turn of the century," challenges Dickenson, adding that costume curators Jacqueline Beaudoin-Ross and Cynthia Cooper are now collecting clothing for an upcoming exhibit with the working title: "Making the man: a history of men's dress."

The upper echelons of society tend to own clothes that last longer and say more about the fashion design of a period. The McCord collects such items as the gown Diana Fowler Leblanc, wife of the former governor general and a McGill social work graduate, wore when she met the Queen, because of its eventual historical significance and because it's a Marie St-Pierre of Montreal design. And if anyone knows how to convince former prime minister Pierre Trudeau to donate his famous cape, Dickenson would be thrilled.

Clothing, the decorative arts and urban and native history may seem a far cry from Dickenson's particular area of interest: "What people thought about the world and how scientific thought shaped images and how images shaped scientific thought." The title of her recently published book (the content of her PhD thesis), for instance, is Drawn from Life: Science and Art in the Portrayal of the New World.

Winner of the Wallace K. Ferguson prize from the Canadian Historical Association and a contender for the Raymond Klibansky prize for best English-language work of non-fiction, the book is an examination of hundreds of illustrations from the late 16th to the early 19th century which Dickenson uses to paint a vivid and frequently amusing portrait of how European explorers and artists, many of whom never set foot in the New World, imagined the flora, fauna and people of this land.

But, whether the artifact is a 17th century engraving of poison ivy or the correspondence between two debutantes from the Golden Square Mile, the medium, the artifact, is what counts. It's all part of material history, what a particular item says about the people of the time, what they did, how they interacted and how they perceived things.

"I'm interested in the archaeology of the past," says Dickenson, explaining that material historians use objects to study the past as opposed to only written materials, as tends to be the way of academic historians.

Her appreciation of what the past offers the present and vice versa, not to mention her experience as a planner and operator of museums, gave Dickenson all the skills required to direct the McCord, according to the chairman of the museum's board of trustees, R. David Bourke. Furthermore, he adds, "she loves people and she's a computer nerd. The future of museums has to be electronic."

Dickenson, a newcomer to Montreal, says that her adaptation to the city and the McCord has been smooth. She already had a good knowledge of costumes, ceramics and the "two-dimensionals": photos, maps, paintings and illustrations.

But sports history?--another speciality of the McCord. That she had to learn, with a little help from her husband and three sons. And whether or not Montreal will have a baseball team come next spring, there will be baseball at the McCord: "Play ball Montréal: a century of baseball in Quebec," runs the exhibit's working title.