Fort Smith museum gets curator
Rachel Dell fills position vacant since 2010
Paul Bickford
Northern News Services
Published Monday, December 8, 2014
THEBACHA/FORT SMITH
For the first time since 2010, the Northern Life Museum in Fort Smith has a curator.
Rachel Dell started in the position on Oct. 20.
Dell said she was captivated when she learned about the opportunity at the museum and about Fort Smith.
"I knew at once that I would love to work at this dynamic, active and engaging museum," she stated in an e-mail interview with News/North.
"Apart from the museum's outreach programs and activities, I also quickly learned that the Northern Life Museum is the custodian of a large, unique and significant collection of northern artifacts - the second largest in the North. The opportunity to care for, research and exhibit this material is a dream come true."
Rev. David Lehmann, the chair of the board for the museum, said the new curator will be dedicated to the priorities of refreshing the permanent exhibits, having more temporary exhibits and utilizing the aboriginal cultural centre more fully.
"It's really quite an exciting chapter in the museum's history," he said.
Dell and Lehmann both believe the museum has not suffered because of the years without a curator.
"The museum has been fortunate to have a dedicated volunteer in Ray Currie, who has been diligently trying to manage the organization and storage of the collection," noted Dell.
"The museum's staff over the years has also striven to be aware of and meet standards set by the Canadian Museums Association and the Canadian Conservation Institute. In general, the Northern Life Museum's collections have been remarkably cared for in the absence of a curator."
She believes she will be able to build on that foundation and begin more actively using the museum's collections in exhibits and programming.
Lehmann said during the years without a full-time curator, the museum's former executive director took on a curating role as part of his job.
"We realized it was a larger role that we needed someone to take on full-time," he said of the decision to hire a curator.
"It wasn't that the work was being neglected. It was just that we could up the ante and do more. As the museum was finishing its five-year visioning process, we realized one of the things we were looking for was a full-time curator so that we could advance that part of the museum's efforts."
In general, a curator is responsible for the basic care of a museum's artifacts, and for their organization, cataloguing and research, along with being involved in the development of exhibitions.
Dell, who is from Quebec, has a post-graduate certification in museum curatorship and management from Sir Sandford Fleming College, and a Master of Arts degree in anthropology from Trent University.
She has worked in a curatorial capacity for three organizations in the last 10 years.
While obtaining her graduate degree, she worked with Trent University's archaeological field school in Belize.
She has been responsible for the Bay Chaleur Military Museum in New Richmond, Que., since its opening in 2004.
Between 2012 and 2014, she served as co-ordinator for the Cascapedia River Museum in Cascapedia-St. Jules, Que.
At Northern Life Museum, she wants to see it continue to actively engage the community of Fort Smith.
Among other things, she hopes to more effectively use all of the museum's exhibition spaces, since the lower-level galleries are sometimes empty, and is looking forward to designing a series of temporary exhibits for those galleries to display some of the special artifacts and collections not normally accessible to the public.
"The museum's board has set two long-term goals, the first being the proper cataloguing, reorganization and storage of the museum's archival collection, which has largely been left untouched for some time, and they have also set a goal to see the permanent exhibit renovated, reworked and updated by 2020," she said. "These are challenging but exciting long-term goals to have in sight."
