The snake wraps itself leisurely around the cane, green scales gleaming. Its delicate red tongue flickers upward, as though forever looking for the hand that wields it. Above its head, crossed flags bar its way: one a Union Jack, the other a Canadian Red Ensign. Below...
Article submitted by Adriana Davies, Curator, The Rise and Fall of Emilio Picariello exhibit. On December 19, 2017, Justice Kevin Feehan was sitting in Queen’s Bench in Lethbridge, Alberta and a colleague drove him to the Galt Museum to see a travelling exhibition...
For as long as adults have been driving, kids have been pedalling. All the way back to 1890 and the dawn of the automobile, every make and model had its tiny, child-powered twin, from the Mercedes Benz to the Model T Ford. Like the first automobiles, early...
Britain and the Commonwealth declared war on the German Empire on August 4, 1914. Fernie, like much of the rest of Canada, responded with a wave of excitement and patriotic fervour. Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph MacKay opened a recruiting office on Victoria Avenue on the...
EXHIBITION DATES August 27th-September 4th 2018, Location TBA, Nelson, BC September 27th- October 14th 2018, Fernie Museum, Fernie, BC WHY The purpose for this art show is to highlight the work of queer and trans/gender non-conforming artists in the Kootenay region...
This is the first in a series of posts that will highlight the Museum's collections as we continue to evaluate, research, catalogue and rehouse the collections over the next three years. For most of us, it’s just butter: innocuous stacks of foil-wrapped bricks or...
Emilio Picariello was an adventurous and hard-working family man whose ambitions led him to challenge the law of the land for profit. On the other hand, he was well known in the community for helping the less well off. His contravening of the Prohibition Act,...
It's December 9, 1910. At 7:10 pm, Fred Heale heard a sound. Pop. Not a boom, or a crash, as you might expect. Not a gout of flame or a roar of crumbling rock. Just a small sound, like a distant rifle shot on a windy morning. Pop. Then a gust of burning wind,...
Imagine a cold afternoon, in town. It’s a town so young that, if it were a human, it would not yet have taken its first steps- and already it’s bursting with 1,200 people, with shops and hotels and a school, with rutted frozen-mud streets and hastily-erected wood...
Hardship and heartache were the norm during World War II. Rationing, in every Allied country, made life difficult with shortages of food, clothing and general supplies. Watching young men leave, knowing it might be the last time you glimpsed their faces, would break...
Rationing, making do, shortages – no matter who you were or where you lived in the early 1940s this was the stuff of daily life. Every effort was being made to win the war. Keeping spirits up also required a huge effort. Despite blackouts in the face of nightly...
Jackets enhanced with shoulder pads, narrow waists, knee length skirts – my uniform for work during the 1980s. But it wasn’t the cusp of a new innovative design in fashion – it was a nod to the difficult war years of the early 1940s. What I love about the Fernie...