Province contributes another $10-million to Manitoba Museum renovations

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This article was published 15/10/2015 (3972 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A new Winnipeg gallery, revisions to existing galleries and less circuitous pathways are coming to the Manitoba Museum as the Main Street institution enters the second phase of a $160-million renewal program.

Over the past year, the non-profit provincial museum spent $5.3-million on a makeover for Alloway Hall, the space where temporary exhibits are housed.

On Thursday, the Manitoba Museum launched the start of a campaign to raise $16 million on gallery upgrades intended to modernize the non-profit provincial museum, both in terms of technology and content.

The province provided the lead $10-million contribution for a package of upgrades intended to wrap up in 2020, the year Manitoba turns 150 and the Hudson’s Bay Company turns 350.

Claudette Leclerc, the museum’s executive director, said the museum’s grasslands and Nonsuch galleries will receive makeovers, pathways will be changed to better connect all galleries and the famous entranceway will be remodelled, without removing the much-loved stuffed bison.

The new Winnipeg gallery, meanwhile, will continue a civic story that currently wraps up abruptly with immigration leading up to the Second World War.

“We sort of stop with the European wave in our galleries right now. We want to talk about immigration since then and up to today. We want to talk more about indigenous people,” Leclerc said Thursday following a provincial funding announcement on the deck of the replica Nonsuch ship.

Leclerc said the museum, which currently features mostly static exhibits, wants to add more touchable technology, akin to the multimedia devices that offer layers of content at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

The completion of the federal museum at The Forks paved the way for the provincial museum to begin fundraising. The biggest-ticket item in the Manitoba Museum’s capital campaign will be the third phase of the museum’s renewal, which involves the construction of a provincial artifact-storage space and a science centre expected to cost somewhere in the vicinity of $80 million to $100 million.

“Our initial plan was to combine artifact storage with the science gallery, but that’s an expensive structure to store artifacts,” said capital renewal committee chairman Jeoff Chipman. “There are some other options we’re looking at that could potentially reduce the cost.”

It’s possible artifact storage may be placed offsite, Chipman said. Right now, the museum displays about five per cent of its collection, stored above the museum’s galleries.

“The fourth floor is about to fall into the third floor, where I work,” Leclerc said. “We are definitely overflowing. We are 25 per cent above our collections capacity.”

The province, which plans to borrow the $10 million it will contribute to the gallery-renewal project, has not yet committed funds for the science centre and artifact-storage components of the museum’s upgrades.

Premier Greg Selinger said the province will be involved in the final phase, which is still in the planning stage.

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