Supplied — Southern Inspection Tour 2004.19.74Thursday, Feb. 25 until Saturday, Feb. 27
Museums and Collections Services, Ring House 1
Free
Kept behind three locked doors in a room monitored round the clock by security is the Mactaggart Art Collection. Like Triffo Hall’s study rooms and Filistix, it is one of the University of Alberta’s hidden treasures, but this weekend, the museum is ready to step into the spotlight.
The Mactaggart Art Collection was donated in 2005 by Sandy and Cecile Mactaggart, who had been compiling the artifacts since the 1960s. It contains over a thousand relics — from specialized shoes for women with bound feet to ancient postcards — dating back to China’s Imperial Order, which spans from the Ming Dynasty of the 1500s to the Qing Dynasty of the 1800s.
U of A Museums will host a lecture series from Feb. 25-27 that aims to supplement the Mactaggart Art Collection and make the artifacts more widely available to the university community to use as a resource. The series — which is themed “Making Order Visible” — is one of three sessions this year focused on China’s imperial period.
For Lianbin Dai, a post-doctoral fellow who coordinated the lecture series, the purpose of the series is to bring the collection out from its vault in the Telus Centre and create a connection between students, scholars and the artifacts themselves.
“Primarily, we wanted to create avenues of access to the collection,” Dai says. “The lecture series allows two things to happen: scholars with new perspectives add to (our body of knowledge), and students are able to hear from them.”
“The database is only as good as the information, so the more researchers we have available to study this mysterious material, the better.”
This session, U of A Museums will host four speakers, who will present on Chinese architecture paintings, the introduction of Jesuit principles to the court in Beijing, Qianlong poetry and social justice in early modern China. Though all the speakers hail from the United States, they hold degrees in fields ranging from archaeology to East Asian languages.
For Dai, the speakers’ diversity of backgrounds is a reflection of how he hopes the university community uses the Mactaggart collection. Though its most frequent visitors are historians and art students, the artifacts can be viewed through as many lenses as the university has departments.
“(This collection) is ripe with research projects of all kinds,” Dai says. “It isn’t just for the obvious study of art history. We can look at each of these artifacts from anthropology, from sociology, from history (and) from political science.”
Frannie Blondheim, the associate director of U of A Museums, admits the specificity of the collection makes it “unusual” for the university to have.
“It isn’t just a random group of objects,” she says. “It’s a very thoughtful collection of a certain type of object that tells a particular type of story, and allows us to have scholarship on that story.”
“We provide a lot of unique material. There’s a couple of unique collectives in Canada, but nothing like this.”
