The Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at UBC will reopen to the public on June 13, 2024, at 5 p.m., following an 18-month closure to complete historic seismic upgrades of its iconic Great Hall.
MOA is the first museum in Canada retrofitted with base isolation technology to protect its collections in the event of a major earthquake. Twenty-five base isolators have been installed under each of the Great Hall’s concrete columns, which were rebuilt from the ground up in the original 1976 design by architect Arthur Erickson.
During the closure, MOA partnered with First Nations communities and families to revitalize and reinterpret its Northwest Coast collections, including carvings, poles, weavings, and other works. New pieces, such as an 8.7-metre canoe carved by Stz’uminus artist Qap’u’luq-John Marston, will also be on display.
The museum will reopen with two new feature exhibitions:
In the Audain Gallery, MOA presents To be seen, to be heard: First Nations in Public Spaces, 1900–1965, an immersive multimedia exhibition that explores the diverse ways that First Nations worked to be seen and heard, striving to have their rights recognized, during a period of potlatch prohibition and other forms of erasure in Canada.
In the O’Brian Gallery, MOA presents Māori artist Lisa Reihana’s in Pursuit of Venus [infected], a digitally animated interpretation of the French Neoclassical scenic wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, which portrays harmonious encounters between Europeans and Polynesians amidst a Tahitian landscape. Reihana’s work depicts a darker narrative, exposing the oppressive and often violent exchanges absent from the utopian colonial portrayal.