In The Vault Before COVID!
Where do I even begin? Before the shit show of 2020 started, I was working in the Nickle Galleries at the University of Calgary. The project was to reorganize the Greek and Roman coin collections into some semblance of order.
Photo Credit: Scott Coleman, Nickle Galleries, 2020.
This was, and still is, a long and tedious project where I need to sift through hundreds — maybe a thousand — of coins and reorganize them in some form of chronological or alphabetical order (depending whether they are Greek or Roman), rewrite hundreds of labels, while taking each group of coins (say those of Trajan) and put them into order according to their accession numbers! Sweet Baby Yoda! Throw a little COVID into the mix and you can see why this project is long and tedious. Thank Baby Yoda that I have an amazing supervisor for this project, Marina Fischer (click HERE for her profile) who keeps me sane and keeps things fun. Plus I enjoy our conversations about conspiracy theories! YES WE LIKE TO TALK ABOUT OTHER SHIT!
Anyway, the short of this is that this project got me thinking about how we present these amazing artifacts to you! Many people don’t know that the University of Calgary has one of the most varied and extensive coin collections in Canada. And why would you know that? Most of the time the coins remain in a vault, locked away in the basement where only the few can access them, unless you ask! Which you wouldn’t, presumably, because you didn’t know about these coins until now. Some people did. But not every one. And that’s the point.
Again, I digress. Every once and awhile some coins would be allowed to surfice. To be displayed in an exhibition. Then the coins would be brought back down to their eternal resting place. Now, don’t get me wrong, those who work with the coins are not Warlocks or Rancors protecting these coins from intruders and hoarding them for ourselves. But I want you to see what I am working on.
Our Rancor protecting coins from intruders.
https://hipwallpaper.com/rancor-backgrounds/
We are, however, even more restricted now due to the pandemic with respect to how we can display our beautiful collection. So it will be my goal to present these coins in a new and interactive way, I hope. THE VAULT will be a series about my time working with these coins and the virtual exhibition that I am creating during the COVID-19 pandemic. Follow along and see how my day-to-day research and the development of the exhibition is coming along, or not! Read about how academia is adapting to the new world we all live in. I will look forward to your feedback and suggestions on what I am doing and what you would like to see done. The theme of the exhibition will be posted soon! Stay Tuned.