The Galt Museum is holding its Treasures and Curiosity exhibit is full of different objects from around the Lethbridge area like old kitchen utensils or dolls. The museum invited over 100 volunteers to pick out an object from the archives to be on display during that time.
Tyler Stewart, curator at the Galt Museum, says one of the best part of his job is the community.
“I get to meet lots of cool people,” says Stewart, as he gets to know the community more and learn about their interests to be showcased. There’s always a story behind their choices too, from thinking the object is cool to their grandpa donating his old military jacket to the museum.
One of the purposes of the exhibit is to bring more of the archives out into the public and to give people an experience not everyone has the chance to get.
“A project like this with Treasures and Curiosities is a good opportunity to allow people basically to go behind the scenes,” Stewart says.
The Galt Museum wanted to give that experience and to have a sense of joy and discovery while looking through everything inside the vault.
Anji Algaber, a local polytechnic student, originally found the Galt Museum through TikTok and Instagram about a nurse statue out front.
“I wanted to know more,” Algaber says, “and I felt like the museum was a great place to go.”
She enjoyed how homely it felt because of the real artifacts and interactive displays.
The main pull for her was the history about how Canada as a country and the mines played a part into how Lethbridge grew into how it is today.
Everything in the museum is a collection of the geographic area of southwestern Alberta.
Stewart says they are careful to only add things that are specifically related to southwestern Alberta region, only stretching out towards Crowsnest Pass, towards the U.S. boarder and up to Medicine hat.
“It’s honestly eye-opening, seeing the history laid out like this,” Algaber says it makes her feel more grounded getting to see where you came from, “The museum does a great job making everything easy to understand and interesting, making it feel more homely in a way.”
A lot of people perceive of the museum is that it’s mostly full of old stuff, but that’s not how Stewart views their work.
Stewart says there are people who maybe older, around 50 to 60 years old and they expect to see stuff on display.
“They don’t expect to be challenged in their critical thinking,” Stewart says.
But for people who are in the Millennial or Gen Z generation, they are more interested to be critically challenged by exhibitions and want to think deeper.
The Galt Museum often focuses on showcasing history and culture of the southwestern Alberta. “History isn’t just things that happened 50 years ago or 100 years ago.
History is happening right this moment,” says Stewart, people forget that we’re living in history, teachers being forced back by the government is history that will be looked back on. “History is yesterday or last week and the Galt is trying to connect the past to the present and what’s happening right now,” Stewart continued.
They can see how important those connections are and is what the Galt tries to think about while developing exhibitions.
Austin Smith, another community member says he doesn’t think it occurs to people that they are apart of history, “if more people took a moment to think about that, they might make different decisions.”
