Tkaronto welcomes the lights and crafts season

Photo by Annie Spratt / Unsplash

I’ve been watching in horrified fascination what the city of Toronto has been doing to its history museums. They were kept shut for the longest possible time during the pandemic and reluctantly began part-reopening around October 2021, when I went for a refresher tour of one of my favourite places in this city, the Spadina House. The long-time readers may remember my perplexed dispatch from back then, when the self-flagellation around the lack of “BIPOC” representation in the city's history museums was becoming visible in permanent collections and programming. 

You would presume that someone in some of those “strategic plans for 2020-2024” meetings would have suggested that the city look at what it itself put on the tin - they are history museums, about prominent people in Toronto who lived in these houses from 1820-1920s, so they will almost inevitably be Irish Protestant, Scottish or English. But apparently not. The city’s Kultur-Aparat over in Ec Dev & Culture, obviously bitten by the summer of BLM protests bug, decided to stuff most of these museums with “BIPOC” content and fast. That no one thought, hang on a second, why don’t we create a separate historic museum of Black Toronto – a Mary Ann Shadd house would have been interesting - or a House about an East Asian or Indian family in Toronto, or an Indigenous Toronto museum of some sort? No, it was decided, they’ll stuff content willy-nilly into existing, disappointingly British-Irish houses.

That is how for most of this year, the Spadina House ended up pretending to be a house owned by an imaginary wealthy Black Toronto family which… contained a lot of Raptors players. Namely, the museum asked a Black artist to re-design the house tour highlights as if a Black family lived there, and with no sense of or interest in history, the man filled the house with paintings of prominent Raptors, two or three other Black Canadians from other spheres of life (a prominent banker lady was a rare moment of wit, as the original Spadina owners were the Austins, a banking dynasty) and some portraits of his friends. A couple of these are indeed beautiful - his portraits of two unnamed lady friends are where I lingered the longest - but to experience the Spadina House so reinvented was to experience an incongruous, self-loathing mess. A particularly sadistic detail was that the historical family photos on various mantelpieces and dressers have been turned to face the wall. The guides were also quite confused and confusing; they would offer the bare minimum about the house and the Austins in each room, only to change the topic to the BIPOCs or the injustices of it all. The top floor, which in October 2021 made part of the tour the big airy room where one of the sons of the Austin family lived with TB, needing continuous light and ventilation - was largely emptied out, the only thing on show the hired artist’s studio and bits of “the process”. 

As I mentioned in the previous post, there are ways and there are ways in which you can tack BIPOC art onto the present historical content in city museums; many of those ways are lousy and do not do justice to either content, the old or the new, but the odd thing, like a commissioned video piece, could work. The Raptors Spadina House was not it. 

Then last year, a writer at the very good centre-right online outlet C2C noticed the disappearance of the Fort York Guard. Oh yeah, I thought; where are the redcoats? I remember taking a picture with a lady redcoat one December during Christmas programming at the Fort York Museum, but that was a long time ago, when the Guard reenacted manoeuvres for the entertainment of the visitors. The current, renovated Fort York is also a mess of a museum in search of a purpose. What it is certain about though is that it wants to be scent-free. “Fort York is a Scent Sensitive site. For the health and comfort of those with allergies and sensitivities please do not wear scented products at this site,” says right under Admissions and Hours. 

Mackenzie House, across town, meanwhile has been closed “for restoration” due to some flooding that happened in the mists of memory. When I went there with an 11-y-o for a printing machine workshop earlier this year, I was told they were also in the process of “rethinking” what this museum could be. I dread to see what they come up with. The guides to the one-room printing shop, just like in every other city museum today, start their spiel with an elaborate Land Acknowledgement. They also, turns out, happen to be not particularly strong or intellectually nimble guides willing to contextualize and leap through different eras to the present time and back. Thanks to the typesetter in the house, the Mackenzie House could be, in addition to being the museum on Toronto’s Rebel Mayor, a museum on the history of political and alternative media in Toronto, all the way to blogging and Substack. The man did print his paper in his own home after all, and mostly content against his political opponents. What other media were there around at the time, and how would the landscape shift over the next 200 years? But that’s just what I’d like to see. What do I know about history museums. I don’t work for Ec Dev & Culture. 

Then late last year reporter Bruce DeMara at the Star noticed that none of the heritage museums had any Christmas programming that December. Normally the season which sees most foot traffic through those old houses, Christmas did not make an appearance in 2022. Councillor Shelley Carroll: “Somebody dropped the ball here”. Accurate, but also, what cave have you people nominally in charge been living in not to notice the ongoing near total rewrite of the history museums for three years now? The city’s media department almost says as much in the provided statement to DeMara: “The city continues to advance its ongoing work to share stories told by all of Toronto’s diverse communities with a particular lens on decolonization across all of its museums and heritage spaces.” Here comes the d-word! This is where the person in charge should ask, explain, please, what you mean, a city museum funded through property taxes in Toronto, what you mean by decolonization. The media contact helpfully adds, “This work expands the stories being told, rather than limiting them” but that has absolutely not been the case. Either you tell the story of Mackenzie’s and the Austins and John Howard’s life or the War of 1812, or you tell some other stories unrelated to those historic houses. It’s obvious what the city is choosing to do.

I remember going to a workshop of Victorian-era Christmas baking at Mackenzie House, and a night at the inn in the same museum (where a bunch of us came to the House after hours as inn guests at the same dinner table, with museum staff in costumes talking about life in budget inns in the first decades of the twentieth century). The ticket holders for those, this being Toronto, are always, unfailingly, diverse and always full of new Canadians and new residents. And interested in precisely the content offered. This may come as a shock to some at the City, but people of all ethnicities take interest in all kinds of programming that is not about their own ethnicity. It’s a scandalous state of affairs, but it’s how it is. That makes your job actually easier. Make good, historically informed programming, and they will come.

This year, the City’s offering a Nov-Dec programming which it named Lots of Light. I am not joking. That is the name. Even the word ‘holidays’ is rare in the event descriptions; it’s all about celebrating the light. (The Druid community thanks you for the terminology sensitive to the neo-Pagan religions.) We can see that the Spadina House has discovered its inner South Asian for the season, with a Diwali celebration and a sari exhibition. You can enjoy a family drop-in with a tour over some unspecified holiday traditions at Todmorden Mills (“...and learn about food and festivities from many traditions, finding the common threads that connect us all”). You can take yoga by candlelight in a couple of historic museums; living close to the Market Gallery, I have registered for that one but haven’t managed to go yet; I’m all for free yoga but what does it have to do with the St Lawrence Market, can someone enlighten me? Also, a journaling workshop in the same place? (Although it could always be worse; last August the city was advertising Emancipation Aerobics with Jully Black.)

Montgomery’s Inn will also have a tea and baked good celebration of unspecified holidays this December. “All are welcome to attend this series of teas co-hosted by partners from diverse communities celebrating the miracle of light in a dark season.” Then there’s the Festive Shopping Event at Fort York where you can get unique gifts (for what occasion?). Over at the Scarborough Museum, you can “join the Queer Tamil Collective's Tkaronto-based artists and learn to carve, cast and weave new ways of being during this time of unraveling. Dive into new creative techniques and learn how the arts can be used to build spaces that foster a sense of community, anchored in safety and creativity for marginalized queer and trans voices.” There’s nothing more flattering than being described as a marginalized voice that needs a safe space with like-minded people, isn’t there? And how do you “weave new ways of being”? But precision in event descriptions is a colonial imposition, I expect.

There are various other crafts and festive markets drop-ins and solstice and Lunar New Year events and gasp! the words Christmas does end up appearing in one event name and one other event description. Small steps, City of Toronto. Take your time. “Lots of Light: Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories at Colborne Lodge,” boldly proclaims the event copy for Dec 7-15 in High Park and there will even be two nights of Christmas Carols at that daredevil place in Etobicoke, Montgomery’s Inn. There is, and I salute this, a Hanukkah night too this year in collab with the Holy Blossom Temple, but hilariously, they put the do at the military Fort York Museum. Of all places. But again, small steps, shouldn’t grumble.

Are these modest changes a sign that the City is coming out of the grip of the updated strategic planning?  

I made a mistake of looking at the Toronto Book Award for 2023 in search of some further evidence. Jury, consisting of three “BIPOC” writers (two of whom are activist, the remaining one barely published anything but hey has an MFA from Columbia) and two painstakingly woke Anglos, had this to say about the winner: 

The jury described Moving the Museum as “revelatory,” saying the book “kicks the colonial gaze to the curb, insisting instead that museums and galleries radically shift what they’ve been doing and offers page after page enacting the potential of Indigenous art to empower, inspire and create community.”

Oh dear. OK, then.