Royal Ontario Museum Blog
Monthly Archive: December
Of Africa at the ROM. Exploring the complexity of African and Diasporic experience.
The third week of October marked the launch of the three-year multi-platform project Of Africa: a rich and thought-provoking series of talks and performances entitled Histories, Collections, Reflections.
In the Shadow of the Volcano: The Discovery of Pompeii
In 79 CE Mount Vesuvius erupted violently. Pliny the Younger, in his eye-witness account of the event, describes earthquakes, towering plumes of hot ash, and skies filled with fire.
Beautiful Bugs! A New Acquisition
The ROM Library has recently acquired an edition of E. A. Séguy’s Insects, published in the 1920s. The book contains highly coloured and detailed full-page illustrations of insects, executed in the expensive pochoir printing technique favoured at this time.
The Wildlife Photographer of Yesteryear
The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition is celebrating its 50th year, and the exhibition showing this year's outstanding images of the natural world opened at the ROM last week. Wildlife photography has a history nearly as long as the medium itself.
The Monastery of St Moses, Syria: The Prehistoric Remains
Since 2004 I had walked the Qalamoun mountains around the monastery of Deir Mar Musa looking for archaeological features to record. In all that time I found one lithic, a stone tool from humanity’s prehistoric past. My colleagues back home that specialised in these objects would say that I just didn’t know what I was looking for. In the last days of the 2009 season, what turned out to be my last season at the monastery, I thought I would reconnoitre the southern part of the field area.
Modern Design for a Modern World: Art Deco in Paris
In the years between the World Wars a new design style emerged which embraced the imagery of industrialization. This style, known as Art Deco, responded to the social and technological developments that had come out of the First World War, and celebrated all things modern.
Pacifist Males & Warrior Females
About a hundred year ago, mass produced colour lithographs proliferated across the South Asian subcontinent creating new imaginary communities through a shared visual imagery. In this new kind of visual culture, hero images seemed to flip traditional gender roles by being dominated by warrior females and pacifist males. Written by Deepali Dewan
Staying in Style: Books on Fashion
October saw another Fashion Week in Toronto come and go - one of many events that mark the seasons of the fashion calendar.
Unfrozen in Time: From the Erebus and Terror to the ROM
Today’s blog post is a glimpse of a tale that is largely untold. It is the story of the exploration of the Canadian Arctic, as seen by Adam White in his botanical scrapbooks. These scrapbooks were donated to the University of Toronto, and came to the ROM together with what is now the ROM’s Green Plant Herbarium. What do these scrapbooks have to do with Franklin, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror? It’s a fantastic story!
Weapon Wednesday: Bagh Nakh--making humans into tigers
The blades, like the tiger claws they are named for, are made to slash though an opponent and, in modern history, is most often associated with the Hindu Marati warrior Shivaji. Written by Aruna Panday
