Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec

It's a weird feeling to walk into a museum and recognize several of the objects on display; not because you're familiar with the work but because the objects are the same as ones in your house. My parent's home is a carefully curated collection of antiques and family heirlooms and does at times feel a bit like a museum. Nonetheless, to walk into the the Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec and see our living room armoire is slightly bizarre.

The museum's mission is to promote Quebec's cultural heritage, including traditional and contemporary arts and crafts. The museum is located in a 19th century Neo-Gothic church, the interior of which provides a striking backdrop for displays about craft. A large portion of the museum's collection is religious objects. Displaying said objects in a secular way inside a building which would have been the former setting for their spiritual purpose is interesting. We are asked to revere these objects and to understand their purpose and we are asked to do so in a former house of worship. Yet the experience is meant to be aesthetic and educational and not spiritual. The church becomes a temple for the secular ritual of looking at objects but unlike a typical museum where the white walls highlight the art, here the interior competes for attention. What stands out are the intricately carved wooden beams and sculptures and the colourful stained glass windows that echo the work and skill of the objects explicitly on display.

One of my professors at U of T said that if you needed information about an object you should flip it over and have a good look at its bottom. The Musée shows several object's undersides with their seals or maker's marks. The Musée is a lesson in material culture. Displays teach viewers to see, to develop a visual literacy around the objects on display. Display explain how to tell the difference between the work of a master carver and a craftsman (and the value of both) or between an antique and a fake. We learn what now unfamiliar objects would have been used for, which ones are more valuable than others, what materials are used in different time periods, how objects are crafted etc. By including elements of connoisseurship in the exhibits the museum is helping visitors feel less daunted by the objects on the display and also suggests that engaging with material culture on a deeper level is attainable. I appreciate the transparency in the approach to display and in the didactics, as it suits that kind of collection.

It wouldn't be a trip to a Montreal museum without a comment on language. My mom and I were both very impressed with the English text panels in the permanent collection. Not only were they gramatically correct but they were clearly written in English rather than directly translated from French. Refreshing. The temporary exhibition, in honour of Montreal: City of Glass, had such awful English didactics that it would have been better not to include them. Suddenly the words I was reading no longer made sense. The present tense was the only tense employed which just contributed to a confusing mess of sentences. My mom figures that the text was fed into some kind of automatic online text translator, and then created into text panels by someone who has never heard of a language other than French. This is an issue of sloppy curatorial practice. I don't care how small or understaffed a museum is, if text panels are going to go up on the wall, they should be legible.

The museum is free on Wednesdays and fairly inexpensive on other days.

13 down, 19 to go.