Curator's Notebook: Lunchtime Lecture Series

A Wendat “Tapestry”: The Drama of Identity

Tapestry or tablecloth, Wendat or French-Canadian, craft or art, art or artifact: a complex drama of identity is played out in the cultural biography of a Wendat moosehair-embroidered tablecloth in the collection of the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Created in the Wendat community of Wendake, Québec, and purchased as a luxury home furnishing by Québec industrialist James Gibb, the tablecloth has appeared in both the Detroit Institute of Arts exhibition The Arts of French Canadaand theRoyal Ontario Museum exhibition Modern Canadian Crafts, thus moving from Aboriginal community to seigneurial estate, to the National Gallery of Canada, and finally the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Anne de Stecher shares the cultural biography of this extraordinary work, and its many layers of narrative. Its creation illustrates the rich history of exchanges between First Peoples and settler communities, the fur-trade origins of the woollen fabric, and the combined influence of Aboriginal tradition and Québec convent arts in its moosehair embroidery. In addition, the cloth’s movement through space reflects the collection and exhibition practices of individuals and institutions, providing insight into a century of Canadian museum and gallery history.

Anne de Stecher

Anne de Stecher graduated from Ottawa’s Carleton University with an M.A. in Canadian Art History, and is now in the fifth year of the PhD program at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton. Her dissertation research explores the visual arts traditions of the Wendat of Wendake, Québec, focusing on their nineteenth-century souvenir arts traditions.

The tradition of research at the Canadian Museum of Civilization dates back 100 years, when its forerunner — the Anthropology Division of the Geological Survey of Canada — was established. For the past 20 years, members of the Museum’s curatorial staff have hosted lunchtime conferences with a view to exchanging ideas, collections and questions with fellow researchers and Museum visitors. This winter’s line-up features several distinguished speakers, chosen from among the Museum's curators and research fellows. We welcome one and all to these lectures — pull up a chair, indulge your mind, speak your piece. Each presentation lasts 30 minutes, and is followed by a question-and-answer period.

For more information, please contact John Willis: john.willis@civilization.ca.