New West residents are invited to contribute to an exhibition that will be taking place in the New Westminster Museum next summer.
The New Westminster Museum, in partnership with Simon Fraser University, will open its summer exhibition, Our Working Waterfront, in July 2015. The city has issued a call to contribute to see if certain items might be available for loan or donation to the museum as it prepares the new exhibit:
* Royal City Cannery photographs, pamphlets, cans, labels, hand tools used for preparing fruits and vegetables.
* Pacific Veneer rule book (with plywood cover), plywood grade stamp, catalogues or other pamphlets.
* Columbia Street bags and coasters from notable businesses, such as the King Edward Hotel, Pacific Café, Fraser Café, the Windsor, the Russell, Eaton’s, Army and Navy, etc, as well as a Copp’s Shoe box and Columbia Theatre movie stubs.
* Fishing items – a fishing pick, “Scotchmen” and fishing gaff from New Westminster-based fishermen.
* Tugboat items – lights, ropes, hooks, navigation tools and radar.
* Mill goggles.
“Since the 1940s, the city’s waterfront has changed dramatically and little work has been done to document the history of theses changes and their impacts on our community of today,” said a press release from the city. “Our Working Waterfront aims to shed light on these changes through objects, images and stories related to the history of work during this period.”
Anyone who has an item to contribute can contact curator Oana Capota at 604-515-3843 or [email protected]. Loans will last for the duration of the exhibit, which runs in the summer and fall of 2015 in the museum that’s now located in Anvil Centre.
For the past three years, Simon Fraser University, the International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union, the New Westminster Museum and Archives and community stakeholders have partnered on the (Re)Claiming the New Westminster Waterfront project.
“The community-university research partnership is a unique model for collaboration that has yielded spectacular results for New Westminster,” Pamela Stern, a New West resident and an anthropologist at SFU, said in a press release. “As a team, we have conducted 94 oral history interviews with waterfront workers, which will be housed at the New Westminster Archives and available to the public. We’ve also piloted an inter-generational art-based learning model in three New Westminster schools, participate in RiverFest and conducted oral history collection workshops.”
Located in Anvil Centre at 777 Columbia St., the New Westminster Museum is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (and until 8 p.m. on Thursdays.) Admission is by donation.
Send Around Town ideas to Theresa, [email protected].
