F E AT U R E
BY ANY I OTHER NAME Reviewing and Revising Artwork With Outdated Titles By Dr. India Rael Young Curator of Art and Images
n recent years, museums across Canada and the United States have been grappling with legacies of racism within their cataloguing practices. When I first arrived at the museum, just over a year ago, Paintings, Drawings and Prints collection manager Lesley Golding brought to my attention that many artworks in the collection bear outdated and offensive titles. I had just completed a project with Princeton University Art Museum to reimagine how they catalogued Indigenous belongings from the Northwest Coast, and I was eager to tackle similar work here. Revising artwork titles is now one small part of a monumental project to review and revise outdated and outright derogatory terms used in cataloguing at the museum and archives. We’re only in the initial phase, which includes consultation with community partners, reviewing departmental standards and writing policy. With thousands of relevant records from Indigenous Collections, Human History and the BC Archives, the project will take a few years to unfold.
As we began to prepare for opening of the Emily Carr: Fresh Seeing exhibition, our new project was quickly put to the test. Many of Emily Carr’s representations of Indigenous people and places have been given titles that use outdated and sometimes offensive terms. How can we change our practices before we’ve consulted with communities and written new policy and procedure? Then again, how in 2020 can we continue to use derogatory and outdated terms? If you move through Emily Carr: Fresh Seeing with a keen eye on artworks in Royal BC Museum collections, you may note we’ve made some changes.
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