Museum gets game Manitoba Museum celebrates 50th birthday with hockey display By: Randall King Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Wednesday, Jun. 27, 2018

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This article was published 27/06/2018 (2629 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As the Manitoba Museum turns 50 this year, it is admirably avoiding the pitfalls of middle-aged crazy.

It’s not out there co-ordinating exhibits of, say, ostentatious convertibles. Instead, it is reaching out to a wide swath of visitors, using enticements spanning from high culture to hockey culture.

On that latter front, the museum next week opens Hockey: The Stories Behind Our Passion, called a “blockbuster” by Candace Hogue, museum heritage consultant and a guest curator for the show. Hogue has put together a Manitoba-specific adjunct exhibit alongside the larger one from Ottawa’s Canadian Museum of History.

“A blockbuster is what I’m anticipating it’s going to be,” Hogue says. “It’s 5,000 square feet of travelling hockey history. Along the way, they decided to have an exhibit (featuring Manitoba hockey history) as well.”

That proved to be a tall order, given the province’s rich history with the game.

“When the Manitoba Museum asked me: ‘How much space do you need?’ I said: ‘How much space do you have?’”

The main exhibit features items to excite the hardcore hockey fan, including the jersey Paul Henderson wore when he scored the winning goal in the 1972 Summit Series versus the Soviet Union. Also on display will be Sidney Crosby’s 2010 Olympic jersey when he scored the gold-medal winning goal and a hockey stick from Cape Breton a couple of decades shy of being two centuries old.

But the Manitoba exhibit can play off the larger Canadian exhibit in interesting, even humorous ways, Hogue says.

For example, goalie Jacques Plante’s famed “pretzel mask” has, in a way, become the face of the larger exhibit. Plante helped create the lighter, cooler prototype mask from fibreglass in 1963 when he played with the New York Rangers.

“The player who reportedly hit Jacques Plante hard enough in the face that he started to wear a mask was a hockey player from Manitoba named Andy Bathgate,” Hogue says of the Hockey Hall of Fame inductee, who was born in Winnipeg. “And we have his skates and jersey on display.”

Manitoba hockey history is represented by relatively fresh exhibits such as the Olympic medals won by Winnipeg-born hockey star Jonathan Toews, as well as his three Stanley Cup rings he has won with the Chicago Blackhawks, “which he has been super-generous to loan to us for a pretty lengthy period of time,” Hogue says.

Less known, but arguably more important is the 1932 Olympic gold medal and jersey that once belonged to the Winnipeg Hockey Club’s Kenneth Strath Moore.

“We believe Kenneth Strath Moore is the first First Nations athlete to win an Olympic gold medal,” Hogue says. “We’re super-excited to showcase those. And because they are from a private collection, they haven’t been seen before. It’s going to be incredible,” Hogue says.

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High culture at the museum will be represented by two performances by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra celebrating the museum’s half-century anniversary. On the evening of Tuesday, July 3, the orchestra, under the baton of resident conductor Julian Pellicano gets spacey in the Planetarium for two shows (at 7 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.) for a promised concert “of shimmering celestial compositions inspired by space, time and vision.”

(The program includes Pachelbel’s Canon, Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question and John Adams’s Shaker Loops.) The Science Gallery will be open before and after each performance.

The long-anticipated re-opening of the Nonsuch Gallery will see the deck of the replica ship populated with musicians — in lieu of hearty seamen — with Pellicano playing classics including Monteverdi’s Toccata from L’Orfeo, Mozart’s Divertimento in D major, Haydn’s Symphony No. 67 in F major and Handel’s Suite No.2 in D major, from Water Music.

The concerts are standing room only with limited seating reserved for those with mobility issues.

The Museum Galleries will be open to explore before and/or after each performance. Tickets for each performance are $25, available at wso.ca/manitoba-museum.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing

Randall King
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In a way, Randall King was born into the entertainment beat.

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