In a changing world, what role do museums play today?

Royal B.C. Museum CEO sounds off on their importance: 'It's how we teach, how we learn, how we educate, how we get to know one another'

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Published Dec 26, 2024  •  Last updated 1 hour ago  •  4 minute read

People walk up stairs to the entrance of the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, B.C., on Thursday, December 21, 2017. Photo by CHAD HIPOLITO /THE CANADIAN PRESS

Have you been to a museum lately?

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This question was posed to Canadians in a 2021 study led by the Alberta Museums Association. Of the study’s 3,000 respondents, 40 per cent reported visiting a museum at least once a year. And half of those were “avid museum-goers,” averaging two to six visits a year.

The national study also explored this central question: In a changing world, what role do museums play?

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It’s a query that Tracey Drake, chief executive officer of the Royal B.C. Museum, spends a lot of time thinking about.

“I happen to believe that now, maybe more than ever, we need museums,” Drake says, adding that a museum “brings people together in a way that is, first of all, connected. And it provides this very interactive and very tactile and very engaging experience.

“It’s how we teach, how we learn, how we educate, how we get to know one another.”

Billed as one of the oldest continuously operating museums in Canada, the RBCM has faced an uphill battle since the global pandemic. The number of visitors has yet to reach pre-pandemic numbers.

“We’re not there yet. We’re getting there,” said Drake, who was appointed to her role in February 2024.

There have been other challenges, too.

The planned $789 million teardown and rebuild of the 54-year-old building, put forward by the NDP in 2022 — and then scrapped that same year by then-premier John Horgan — was a primary source of public concern and conversation.

“The announcement was made that we were getting a new museum, and then, approximately 40 days later, the project was cancelled because of outcry from the province — and, in my opinion, rightfully so. The timing was very, very wrong given what was going on in the world,” Drake says.

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But the move left the museum without a backup plan.

“There were no exhibits waiting in the wings, just in case we didn’t close. We were closing on 6th of September of 2022,” Drake says noting that exhibitions can’t just be thrown together. “Exhibitions take anywhere from two to five years to contract … because they’re in such high demand. And then, if it’s homegrown, for example when Orcas was here, that was an RBCM exhibit, those take somewhere between four to seven years, from concept through to completion.”

The content of existing exhibits was also under scrutiny at that time, according to Drake.

“One of the things we were accused of was erasing history when we closed the Old Town galleries. And that was never the intention,” Drake says. “The fact that we were able to reopen, and it looks exactly the way it did before, just with new context, should testify to the fact that we had no intentions of tearing it down.”

That ‘new context’ aims to update the museum’s displays to meet the evolving understanding of B.C.’s history on topics including Indigenous culture and settler interaction. But not, Drake stresses, to rewrite it.

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“It’s so critical to how we do that work,” Drake says of the work to update and introduce new dialogue into the museum. “With the understanding, though, that we are not erasing the past. We are not disregarding what did happen.

“I am a firm believer that our history is our history. And we should learn from it.”

The museum’s has been soliciting feedback from British Columbians about what they want to see in their museum.

“We have spent two years going around the province asking British Columbians what do you see in your provincial museum? What works for you? What’s relevant for you? And, what’s not?” Drake says. “And there have been some very, very interesting and fascinating conversations.”

The woolly mammoth in the Royal B.C. Museum. Photo by Royal BC Museum

With the ultimate goal of making the RBCM a relevant, ‘modern museum,’ the 2025 programming features four major exhibits: the 60th edition of Wildlife Photographer of the Year (Feb. 14-April 27); Global Threads: The Art and Fashion of Indian Chintz (March 28-Sept. 28); Odysseys and Migration (April 18-May 3, 2026); and, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ Beyond the Beat: Music of Resistance and Change (May 30-Jan. 25, 2026).

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“We’ve just been very careful and deliberate,” Drake says of the programming plans. “It’s our biggest year since closure, and there’s so much going on.”

When prompted to pick a particular highlight, Drake pointed to aspects of each major exhibit. But she picked the presence of John Lennon’s psychedelic Rolls-Royce, which is part of the provincial collection, in Beyond the Beat — an exhibit that features highlights of artists such as Neil Young and Snotty Nose Rez Kids — as an unexpected, yet fitting inclusion.

Odysseys and Migration, which come from the Chinese Canadian Museum in Vancouver and follows the migration journeys of Chinese Canadians from the 18th century through to present day, as another important programming piece.

“We’re choosing to be audacious. And we’re choosing to sort of step outside of our usual comfort zone a little bit to do things that are a little bit different,” Drake says.

At the precipice of a new year, with new programming, Drake says the work the museum has put into examining its position in the province has been monumental. And more than worth it.

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“It has taken us a few years for us to get back in the good graces of the province. And it has been a really hard job to do that,” she says.

“But, it was a necessary one because, at the end of the day … the collections don’t belong to the museum. And they don’t belong to the government … They belong to the people of British Columbia. This is our collective history.”

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