BANFF – Peter Whyte and Catharine Robb Whyte were lovers of nature and the great outdoors.
With this top of mind, the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies – founded by Peter and Catharine – is focusing on exhibitions and programs with an overall connection to its new nature brand positioning.
The Whyte took advantage of downtime during the COVID-19 pandemic to consider more closely what visitors to the museum are looking for, discovering they are first and foremost coming to the mountains for nature and the outdoors.
Donna Livingstone, CEO of the Whyte Museum, said the museum wants to incorporate that important connection to nature more into its programming moving forward.
“It doesn’t mean we’re going to become a natural history museum, but when you look around at everything we have – every Jimmy Simpson hiking pole, Catharine’s paintings, Byron Harmon’s photographs – you realize people are coming from that passion for nature,” she said.
“There’s a deep innate urge to get close to nature and it stretches to the Indigenous peoples who for thousands of years have gathered in this area because of the healing water and this generous valley… it’s a wonderful place to come and reconnect with nature.”
After almost two years of COVID-19 restrictions, the Whyte Museum on Jan. 22 kicked off five new exhibits featuring diverse artists, mediums and topics with the first live opening event since 2020. The exhibitions run into April.
While the artists and their work cover a variety of backgrounds, they all carried a common thread highlighting environmental challenges and cultural issues facing the Bow Valley and beyond around the world.
“I believe that artists are the cultural and environmental first responders,” said Livingstone.
“They are the ones who notice change in the world around them and their insight – funny, poignant, angry or just plain beautiful – give us an opening into difficult conversations.”
Rockies Repeat: Chasing Beauty in a Disappearing Landscape, is a multimedia exhibition that grapples with the cultural impacts of climate change in the Canadian Rockies.
This diverse collection juxtaposes Catharine’s landscape paintings with fresh interpretations by six contemporary artists. For two years, a team of Indigenous and settler artists trekked into the mountains to the exact places Catharine painted almost a century ago. Like Catharine, the artists were confronted by the whims of nature, but unlike her experience, they endured record-breaking temperatures, smoke from wildfires raging in British Columbia and backdrops besieged by climate change.
Part of the exhibition experience is Rockies Repeat, a story captured in a short documentary about human connections to disappearing landscapes. The film explores Catharine’s enduring legacy, the importance of sustaining traditions on ancestral lands, and the impact of a changing climate on sense of place.
“I hope this collection reminds you of how central the glacial landscape of the Rockies is to our identity as mountain people, yet how fragile its future remains in the face of climate change,” said organizer Caroline Hedin.
Another current exhibition is Iconic Rockies: The Photography of John E. Marriott, featuring images that have defined the career of one of Canada’s most well-known wildlife photographers. The Canmore resident’s encounters with wildlife, including wolves and grizzly bears, have resulted in magazine covers, wraps on local Roam buses, billboards and publication of several books.
Elise Findlay’s installation Under the Mountain’s Shadow brings awareness to the challenges that face residents and visitors in resort towns such as sexualized violence, domestic and intimate partner violence, as well as challenges with addictions and mental health.
Local artist Michael Corner’s exhibition What I Did Last Summer comes out of a trial artist-in-residency launched by the Whyte working out of the Mather Cabin on the museum’s property. His paintings of exterior views capture elements of both the Whyte home, Sinclair and Peyto cabins with pathways through the wooded lawn taking the viewer farther afield. Corner’s paintings of figures submerged in black represent a historic event when the river overflowed its banks and flooded the space.
Lastly, From the Collection: The Photography of Edward Burtynsky features an overview of the Burtynsky collection. Burtynsky’s photography is held in more than 60 major museums around the world including the Whyte, whose holding includes 36 works dating from 1983 to 2012.
Burtynsky’s most famous photographs are sweeping views of landscapes altered by industry – mine tailings, quarries and scrap piles. The beauty of his images is often in tension with the compromised environments they depict.
Livingstone said the artists in these five exhibitions are cultural and environmental first responders.
“This is a theme that isn’t accidental,” she said.
The Whyte Museum, which opened in 1968, was the inspiration of Peter and Catharine and intended as a gathering place to engage with the evolving history, peoples, cultures, environment and ideas of mountain cultures.
The museum collects, preserves and exhibits materials related to the cultural heritage of the Rocky Mountains, making them available for education as well as research. The museum also contains an archive and a library.
The Whyte Museum offers a wide variety of public events throughout the year, including artist talks, book launches, film screenings and workshops.
Livingstone said the popularity of some programs seems to lie in their ability to connect people to nature, which she said resonated with people struggling on various levels during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
She pointed to a guided art and geology tour last summer by art curator Lisa Christensen and geologist Dave Christensen, which explore the places depicted in some of Canada’s finest art and discovers the landscapes that inspired them – like Emerald Lake.
“It was sold out and people loved it,” said Livingstone.
“I asked Lisa about it and she was really touched by a number of people who came up to her and said, ‘this was a healing experience for us; we’ve had a trauma or we’ve lost our jobs or we’re just scared of being in the city’. They just wanted to be out in nature.”
The Whyte has also taken time during the pandemic to make improvements to the facility.
Renovations were completed in the Heritage Gallery as well as the Founders Gallery, located downstairs. In addition, there have also been new acquisitions, including stunning artifacts, paintings, drawings and sculptures from a variety of sources in the art and heritage collection.
The closure also led to the reinvigoration of the museum’s shop, with a new focus on mountain culture books.
Livingstone said the shelves are stocked with the most compelling, thoughtful and award-winning books on mountain life of all kinds.
“When Indigo closed down, there wasn’t really a major book store,” she said, adding the bookstore aims to fill that gap.
One of the museum’s greatest resources is the Archives and Special Collections.
Archival holdings include approximately 350 metres of textual records, more than 700,000 photographs, and over 1,500 sound recordings, motion pictures and videos.
Special Collections include the Archives Library, Art Library and Alpine Club of Canada (ACC) Library.
The Archives Library includes over 8,500 books, rare maps, periodicals, films, clipping files, and local newspapers which primarily focus on the human and natural history of the Canadian Rockies. The Art Library includes over 1,000 books, which complement the holdings of the Art Collection and provides a general overview of artists and art history. In addition to the Archives holding the ACC’s fonds, the Whyte Museum is also the custodian of the ACC’s Library, which contains more than 4,000 books and periodicals documenting the mountain cultures of the world from the mid-1600s to current.
Livingstone said the museum continues to make extensive progress in digitizing the archival material, which is of international interest.
She said the archives are increasingly being used for climate change research, pointing to University of Alberta researcher Zac Robinson whose recent work has looked at climate change, fire regimes, and forest dynamics in Canada’s western mountains.
“He takes out copies of photos from Mount Logan in 1925 and 1955 and goes to Mount Logan this past June… he’s going to change the world’s understanding of glaciation because of that,” she said.
“There’s an emerging climate change interest in what we have here – our resources are amazing.”
While pondering the future best for the museum during the pandemic, Livingston vividly recalls an inspirational conversation with Cliff White, the nephew of Peter and Catharine, during one of his many visits to the museum.
“We were sitting up in the Archives and he looked up said: ‘Look at Nesters and the Town of Banff and the post office – that’s the Anthropocene, that’s human impact on nature. And then look out here, you’ve got the mountains and the Bow River and elk going by – that’s nature’. So what’s in between is the Whyte so we can build that bridge between the two – and bells just went off for me,” said Livingstone.
“We realize the impact the Whyte has in the community. As we look down the road, we’re trying to figure out what we do, not just what’s important to us, but how is it going to impact and benefit the community as Catharine and Peter would have wanted.”
