Toronto Royal Ontario Museum | ?m | ?s | Daniel Libeskind

[Richard White]

It's being done because the original crystal architecture frankly has underperformed programmatically (or even failed if one wishes to be harsher about the amount of remedial work being done on what would have been considered an 'untouchable' piece of art).

The main staircase in it was designed to be used as sort of display for artefacts.

Unfortunately, I find the ROM to be underwhelming these days overall.

The artefacts and displays haven't changed much in 20 years while the costs have gone up.

The special exhibitions are also underwhelming. I went to the immersive earth exhibition recently and was left scratching my head.

I considered getting a ROM membership but it's not really worth it. You don't even get a tax receipt for the membership like you would with the curators circle.

 

[thaivic]

 

[jje1000]

An interesting little side story.

I doubt these are missing, likely mislabeled or never existed to begin with - still, it makes me wonder if more of the ROM's collection should be out on rotating display rather than everything being seemingly static.

ROM can't account for 2,234 items in its collection, including 10 missing harpoons​

The Royal Ontario Museum's thousands of missing items could stock a respectable museum on their own.

he Royal Ontario Museum cannot account for 2,234 items that are supposed to be in its collections, documents released under access-to-information laws show.

The missing items are wildly varied and could stock a respectable museum on their own.

For instance, 136 oracle bones are among the missing antiquities.

Oracle bones were used to try to foresee the future in medieval China. Questions would be carved or painted on a bone, often a turtle shell, then it would be heated. The way in which the heat cracked the bone was interpreted as an answer to the question.

Also missing: 10 harpoons; a nativity scene; two “shabtis,” figurines found in ancient Egyptian tombs; and seven “undetermined objects” — which seem likely to remain undetermined.

TorontoToday asked how 10 harpoons could go missing.

"I guess if we knew how they went missing, they wouldn't be missing," said Leela Outcalt, the ROM's chief of collections care.

Across the ROM's art and culture collections, about one item in 250 is unaccounted for.

Outcault said the quantity of missing items stems from the inventory practices the ROM used in the past, informal by modern standards.

Some of the museum’s methods of accounting for objects reflect the systems used when they were first acquired generations ago, she explained. This can lead to confusing problems in the present.

"It's not uncommon to end up with a situation where you have two numbers that are attributed to what appear to be the same object, and you then have a four-month research project ahead of you to weed through the documentation and ensure that you have the correct piece aligned with the correct number.”

"In 1915, when people went out into the field and did archaeological digs, it was a different world, and people were bringing things back by the truckload. And we're still dealing with the results of that today.”

The ROM was founded in 1912 as the merger of five separate museums run by the University of Toronto. In the 1920s, it inherited about 44,000 objects from a teachers’ college, which Outcalt described as “poorly documented.”

“When the school shut down and the over 44,000 works were transferred, records were created from ledger books, without confirming one-to-one relationships with the objects themselves,” she said in a written response.

The museum didn’t introduce a uniform, consistent tracking system for objects until 1948.

Quantities of historic clothing are also missing. These include 40 dresses, 24 skirts, 11 belts, 10 coats, four waistcoats and three underskirts.

Outcalt said clothing and textiles used to be kept track of much more informally by museums than they are now.

"They weren't understood in the same way that we understand collections of objects today. People could bring in, say, bed hangings and then repurpose those bed hangings to cover a chair. Sometimes historic textiles were repurposed to incorporate in decorative arts rooms and the like."

The list of missing items includes a number of objects that may have Indigenous significance, such as four wearing blankets, three moccasins, two headdress fragments, two kamik boots and two worked bones, as well as a wampum, wampum string, rattle, parka and toboggan.

The items’ object numbers show some batches of missing objects were acquired at the same time.

Most of the now-missing oracle bones were acquired together in 1931, while a group of 21 missing photographs all arrived at the museum in 1940.

TorontoToday requested further information on 30 missing coins from the museum's collection.

These turned out to include a group of 19 coins found in an archaeological dig in Jerusalem, studied in 1985, but found missing during an inventory conducted in 2014.

"We're talking less than $20 per coin," Outcalt said of their value. "These are very, very common. In terms of the concerns around this being something going on to the black market, that's unlikely."

A 17th-century Japanese coin in the inventory of missing items could be more valuable, however.

"That is something that we need to explore further and will — but it's really hard, because there's very little documentation on it."

The Royal Ontario Museum's thousands of missing items could stock a respectable museum on their own.

The Royal Ontario Museum's thousands of missing items could stock a respectable museum on their own.

www.torontotoday.ca