Hoarder or collector?

Museum of Vancouver show probes impulse to gather odd stuff together

VANCOUVER Why do people collect stuff? Like corsets. And glass eyeballs. And pinball machines.

It’s a question the Museum of Vancouver plans to address when it puts those items, and many more oddities, on display this summer.

The museum invited Vancouverites to submit their treasured piles of paraphernalia for consideration as it planned a show that would probe the collecting impulse. Among those that made the cut:

An anthropologist’s collection of Chinese-Canadian menus.

A social worker’s collection of her father’s drag queen costumes.

A prosthetist’s collection of vintage artificial arms and legs.

A bus driver’s collection of public transit ephemera.

“Some of the collectors, you can see why they do it, it’s part of the industry they work in, so they have an interest in it, while for others it’s just a hobby,” albeit an obsessive one, museum marketing manager Myles Constable said.

“Obviously we didn’t want hoarders,” he added. But there is a fine line between collecting and hoarding that “we hope to get people thinking about.”

Nineteen “beautiful, rare and unconventional” collections will be featured in the exhibition that draws inspiration from 17th-century cabinets of curiosity created by European scientists, the museum says. A key highlight will be materials assembled by Maj. James Matthews, Vancouver’s first archivist.

As well, museumgoers will have the opportunity to wear name tags that identify their own collections.

“If they run into someone who collects the same thing or something similar, they might strike up a conversation,” Constable said.

All Together Now: Vancouver Enthusiasts and Their Collections will run from June 23 to Jan. 8, 2017.