Affordable housing, gay rights, foreign policy, pot and even other protesters.
Indeed, Vancouverites love a good protest. And even the odd riot, too.
A century’s worth of that political history plays out beginning Thursday, Sept. 28 as part of a new exhibit at the Museum of Vancouver called City on Edge: A Century of Vancouver Activism.
Spanning events from 1907 to present day, the exhibit consists of 650 photographs taken from the archives of the Vancouver Sun and Province.
“I tried to represent the broadest possible spectrum of protests from people on both sides of issues — there are protests by women for abortion and against abortion, there are picketers picketing picketers,” said exhibit co-curator Kate Bird, a retired Pacific News Group librarian.
The exhibit consists of still photos, videos, projections and the unmistakable sound of protest — voices, drums, chants, explosions and rallying cries. It’s an extension of Bird’s 2016 book Vancouver in the Seventies, though the exhibit follows themes — labour, social justice and riots, for example — rather than the chronological style found in Bird’s book.
Bird and co-curator Viviane Gosselin purposely selected made-in-Vancouver protests and scenes: the anti-Asian race riot of 1907, the 1971 Gastown Riot, last year’s Kinder Morgan protests and, of course, the city’s regrettable past dealing with losing big-time hockey games.
“Because of the content, we want it to be overwhelming at times, we want it to be dramatic,” said Gosselin, who serves as the museum’s director of collections and exhibitions. “It should be because this is about these big, transformative moments.”
Other protest movements that aren’t inherently specific to Vancouver are also included: Clayoquot Sound in the early ’90s, or immigrants protesting government policies in their native countries where they’d be persecuted or even killed for doing so.
Getting access to a treasure trove of photos normally protected by copyright and usage fees was a coup for the museum. Bird got buy-in from Sun editor Harold Munro for her book last year, and that agreement carried over to the current museum exhibit. Those photos would have cost somewhere in the thousands of dollars otherwise.
Roughly 40 photographers are represented in the exhibit, with Bird’s favourite — at least in name — being former Province shutterbug Huxley Lovely.
“There is no one specific profile type of a photographer,” Bird said. “But they’re very competitive and they’ve always been very competitive to try and get their shot on the front [page].”
The 2011 Stanley Cup riot comes up in conversation almost as a matter of course, but also because of its place in the city’s history. The images are striking, shocking and in some cases, just plain stupid.
“Obviously, the sexiest images are the ones of the riot but we didn’t want them to overtake the legitimate protest photos,” Bird said. “The two things that Vancouver is known for, hockey riots and pot protests, that is not really what we’re looking to. Here are all these people actually trying to make change, whereas that’s a whole other story.”
City on Edge: A Century of Vancouver Activism is on display at Museum of Vancouver from Sept. 28 until Feb. 18, 2018.
@JohnKurucz
