« Help Save Canadian Design Heritage »
Press release:
“DOMINION MODERN RELEASE. FEBRUARY 4, 2015.
For over ten years, Dominion Modern has been assembling an archive of Canada’s modern architecture and design heritage.
Dominion Modern, a registered charity (2003), actively conserves that legacy. And to encourage others to protect our modern heritage, Dominion Modern has mounted exhibitions, published books and created Canada’s largest archive of the 20th Century.
Our last project, the cataloguing of the Montréal Métro resulted in the book, Métro: le design en mouvement.
Currently Dominion Modern is looking for donated space (approx 1000sq.ft) in which to digitize and catalogue its collection for a proposed exhibition and publication about design and manufacturing in Canada (working title, Cataloguing Canada).
LOOKING FOR DONATED SPACE
The digitization and cataloguing project will take one year. The donated space may be located in Montréal or Toronto? For the donation, the donor will receive a major sponsor credit in the proposed exhibit and book.
Dominion Modern will also give donor a charitable tax receipt for the value of the donated space.
Please help save Canadian design history. (see below for further info on cataloguing)
If you would like to help please contact us: info@dominionmodern.ca
THE COLLECTION
Dominion Modern’s permanent collection includes over 55,000 artifacts, comprising:
• Industrial design and manufactured products
• Original architectural drawings and sketches
• An oral history of over 250 interviews with leaders of the Modern movement in Canada
• Books, periodicals
• Original photography, slides, negatives and large format transparencies
• Ephemera of the period: original packaging, graphic design, merchandising materials, posters, etc
• Original documentation
A CULTURAL ASSET IN NEED OF CONSERVATION
The Dominion Modern (A&I) Collection is a cultural asset, housing the most comprehensive primary sources for any historical research into Canada’s Modernist period. The great originators of the movement have died or are now in advanced old age. Dominion Modern’s archive is the only link to the living testament of Canadian Modernism—a source that is fast disappearing.
It is important to have the collection properly catalogued while the last of the formative generation of artists, designers, engineers and architects is still alive.
An important component of the collection is the oral history comprising over 250 interviews on tape with leading contributors to the Modern movement in Canada. This has been a work in progress. It is essential to have 150 of these interviews transcribed; recording tape becomes perishable with age, and once the interviews are rendered into digital text, the material can be readily searched by historians and researchers.
Much of the ephemera, e.g. original packaging materials, become increasingly fragile with age and handling. It is important for their conservation to have these artifacts digitized and catalogued.
CATALOGUING CANADA – PROJECT DESCRIPTION
The program’s objective is to methodically digitize and catalogue Dominion Modern’s archive of over 55,000 artifacts and documents—all original sources—relating to the Canadian Modernist movement.”