Brrrr....Looking for something to do indoors?

The Museum is a great place to visit on those days when you need something to do indoors! Our Current Exhibits include young artist, Courtney Auger and a travelling exhibit from the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre: The Barbed Wire Solution: Canada's First Internment Operations, 1914-1920.

We also have our rocks and fossils, including a chunk of meteorite from space, the molar of a woolly mammoth and even the tooth of an Albertosaurus dinosaur!

The Sir Alexander Mackenzie Gallery has a variety of furs and fur trade artifacts. You can pet a brown bear or a wolverine and explore the lives of the early traders and trappers, including how they stayed warm in these cold, northern winters without the benefit of modern heating and transportation.

We welcome everyone to come and warm up at the Museum!

Artist of the Peace: Courtney Auger

For January, the Museum's art will be featuring a young artist, Courtny Auger. We are excited to feature a developing artist and to showcase the variety of styles and techniques Courtney has explored.

According to Courtney, "My preferred style of art is surrealism, surrealism is like a fantasy and it's the way I see the world...it's with this kind of mind set that I have created my version of wonderland..."

We invite everyone to come view Courtney's work this month!

2012 is here!

We hope everyone had a lovely holiday season and safe New Years!
The Museum is busily preparing and planning for our next year of exciting exhibits.

If you are looking for calendars to help plan your next year, the Museum has three different unique and historic options:

The Archives Society of Alberta has put together a 2012 calendar: Archives in Living Colour featuring colour photography from the collections of Archives across Alberta. Our own Archives is featured in December! This calendar is $5.To see some of these photographs as well as many others, please visit this year's online exhibit: Archives in Living Colour.

Soul of Canada has put together two lovely calendars, each with approximately 100 archival photographs and packed with research and information on Canada's Petroleum Pioneers or Canada's Work Horses. These calendars are $20 each.

The Barbed Wire Solution: New Travelling Exhibit at the Peace River Museum

The Peace River Museum will be hosting a travelling exhibit from the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre:

The Barbed Wire Solution: Ukrainians and Canada's First Internment Operations, 1914-1920

Our first exhibit for 2012 "explores the social, economic and political circumstances that led to Canada's first use of the War Measures Act. It also looks at the conditions of daily life in the camps for the prisoners and their guards and leaves the viewer with a striking reminder of a dark and relatively unknown moment in Canadian history" (from the UCRDC).

 

 

The Museum would like to also showcase local Ukrainian families and culture while we host this exhibit. We invite anyone willing to loan material culture depicting our local Ukrainian heritage, to contact the Museum(i.e. clothing, photographs, dolls, pioneering implements). We would also like to collect stories of Ukrainian Peace Country pioneers and their own experiences as early immigrants to Canada and specifically, to our area.

Christmas Hours 2011

The Peace River Museum, Archives and Mackenzie Centre will be closed between December 24th and 27th. We will reopen for regular hours (Monday to Saturday 10 am to 4:30 pm) on Wednesday, December 28th.

We wish everyone a happy and safe holiday season!

Peace River's newest Arts & Culture magazine is well worth picking up!

The Vault Magazine contains thoughtful, challenging articles about political and social issues as well as coverage of our lively, local culture and music scene. The Community Calendar is packed with events from Peace River and surrounding communities.

The Peace River Museum, Archives and Mackenzie Centre wishes to compliment the staff over at the Vault Magazine for putting together a great read every two weeks!

Christmas shopping at the Peace River Museum

We wanted to remind everyone that we have a wonderful selection of unique, Peace Country gifts available for Christmas including:

• loose leaf teas
• honey
• jewelry from local artists
• locally made massage oils and soaps
• photography and a DVD of the Northern Lights
• postcards and Christmas cards
• Art prints of archival photographs
• books about the Peace Country and historical figures such as Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Sheridan and Juey Lawrence and family, aviation history, the Edson and Grouard Trails, RCMP history and others!

Also, if you are interested in any photograph we have in our archival collection, we can give you a digital copy for $5 until the end of 2011 or we can provide a print in 4x6, 5x7 or 8x10 sizes. They make a great gift that can be chosen specifically around the historic interests of your friend or loved one! Feel free to call our Archivist, Wendy at 780-624-4261 for more information or photograph suggestions.

Happy 224th birthday Louis Daguerre!

Google's homepage doodle for November 18th celebrates Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) who invented one of the earliest forms of permanent photography, which he aptly named the Daguerreotype. Daguerre had been working with a partner, Nicéphore Niépce, to find a way of affixing an image seen through a lens onto a permanent surface. Niépce died in 1933, but Daguerre continued with their experiements and finally in 1839, he presented the first photographs to the French Académie des Sciences. (from: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dagu/hd_dagu.htm - accessed November 18, 2011)

In celebration of this groundbreaking invention, we are posting pictures of the daguerreotypes in our Archival collection. Unfortunately, we do not know who these two people are, but the photographs have been dated to ca. 1845. For more information on caring for daguerreotypes, you can visit the Daguerreotype Research Portal.

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Remembrance Day 2011

The Peace River Museum will be open this Remembrance Day, Friday November 11 from 11 am to 4 pm.

We invite everyone to come and view some of our local veterans uniforms as well as a collection of digitized World War I postcards on display.