Creative city: How McCord Museum celebrates heritage and community of Montreal

Launched in 2014, PhotoSparks is a weekly feature from YourStory, with photographs that celebrate the spirit of creativity and innovation. In the earlier 710 posts, we featured an art festival, cartoon gallery. world music festival, telecom expo, millets fair, climate change expo, wildlife conference, startup festival, Diwali rangoli, and jazz festival.

The McCord Museum in Montreal celebrates over a century of showcasing the life of the city through its art exhibitions, active communities, educational programmes, and digital tools. The exhibits reflect a creative blend of art, education, technology, and design (see our earlier photo essays from 2022, 2019, and 2018).

The exhibition Swallowing Mountains by multidisciplinary artist Karen Tam is a tribute to the women of Montreal’s Chinatown from the 19th to the 20th centuries. Developed as part of the museum’s Artist-in-Residence programme, the exhibits include original artworks and objects belonging to members of the Chinese community.

“One of my main goals with this exhibition is to bring different communities into the space. Not just the Chinese diaspora, but other groups who will reflect on the hidden narratives of their own community, or the contributions women in their community have made to Montreal,” explains curator-artist Karen Tam.

Another exhibition area features the works of photographer and film director Joannie Lafrenière. Via videos, photographs and poetry, it profiles the Hochelaga neighbourhood in Montreal where the artist lived for 18 years.

The exhibits profile endearing characters such as bike repairman Renaud and Michel the barber. Poet Benoit Bordeleau’s poems are also featured on the walls of the exhibition.

“Through this intimate portrait of my neighbourhood, I want to give a dignified voice to forgotten and marginalised people as well as to important individuals who have crossed my path during the last two decades spent in Hochelaga,” Joannie explains.

Another exhibition takes museum visitors even further back in time: Becoming Montreal: The 1800s Painted by James Duncan. His photographs document Montreal’s development from 1830 to 1880.

An outstanding feature of the exhibition is titled Mental Maps, which uses artificial intelligence to reinterpret the artist’s work in the form of computer-generated images. Created by digital art studio Iregular, it depicts a composite world of dreamscapes of Montreal from a bygone era.

The studio’s work is a creative blend of art and technology. lregular’s work has been reportedly showcased in 25 countries.

The museum also showcases a permanent exhibition titled Indigenous Voices of Today: Knowledge, Trauma, Resilience. It shines the light on many unrecognised aspects of the Indigenous peoples of Canada, featuring their resilience and aspirations for a better feature.

The displayed artefacts were selected by the Innu Jean St-Onge, of the Maison de la Transmission de la Culture Innue Shaputuan, in the Uashat reserve of Quebec.

The exhibits remind viewers of the suffering that Indigenous peoples have had to endure, and how more empathy, dialogue and collaboration are needed to create a better future for us all.

Now, what have you done today to pause in your busy schedule and find new avenues to apply your creativity and sense of purpose?

(All photographs were taken by Madanmohan Rao on location at the museum.)

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