This summer, I was lucky to be working with the Canadian Tulip Festival as a curatorial assistant to create a small exhibition for the World Tulip Summit in October 2017 and the next Canadian Tulip Festival in May 2018. It was my job to research the history, search for artifacts, and write the exhibit text. The contract was only nine weeks long. If I’m being honest, I felt a little like a fish out of water. Off the stove and into the oven? I’m not great with idioms.
Most of the time, my student job looked like this:
There were few historical materials available to me at the beginning of my contract, as The Festival had recently moved into a small office space at in the Horticulture Building at Lansdowne. I spent the first week reading through a previous archive student’s notes and emailing local museums in hopes they may have some tulip-related artifacts in their collection. There was a noticeable void of material. In desperation, I decided to think out of the box and put out a call on Reddit Ottawa…
“To all tulip festival goers past and present: Do you have any old knick knacks, posters, pictures, or artifacts from past Tulip Festivals that I can use for a project? I’d give you full credit for your items. Putting together an exhibit of sorts.”
Redditor and local historian Dave Allston replied with a clue that would lead me on a journey to the Reid Farmhouse on Sherbrooke and Reid, just off of Carling Avenue, and to some difficult curatorial decisions. The Farmhouse is a dusty, forgotten-in-time structure slated for demolition built in 1865, and at one point, it was the only three-story home in Kitchissippi. This makes the farmhouse one of the oldest buildings in the Ottawa region. Astonishingly, it also happens to be the storage space of a decade’s worth of Canadian Tulip Festival materials!
Unfortunately, because the building has been modified at various times, the structure could not attain a heritage building designation. The Reid farmhouse will maintain a small portion of its first floor and be revamped to better fit the needs of the Kitchisippi community. Moreover, because the Canadian Tulip Festival experiences a high staff turnover, the artifacts in storage were almost entirely forgotten about.
On two separate occasions, I swallowed my vehicular fears and got behind the wheel of a coworker’s old pick up truck that has neither air condition nor interior car lights. Together, we sifted through dusty photo albums, financial reports, posters, objects and rat-droppings; selected the most important materials; and hauled boxes and boxes of them to back to headquarters. Today, our little Horticulture Building office is pressed for elbow room.
I was also faced with (what I think is) the classic curatorial dilemma. My original problem of not having enough materials was now the inverse — I had an enormous excess. How to go through it all?
After consultation we decided to write a story about the tulip as a symbol of international friendship, using images and objects that were shared between Canada and our friendship countries around the world. My favourite object is a wooden Japanese flower vase, a gift from the Japanese delegation in 1997. The vase will be shown with a fresh ikebana flower arrangement, created in collaboration with the Ottawa Ikebana Chapter.
UPDATE:
Here’s a sneak peak of a couple of interesting finds. See the finished exhibit at the World Tulip Summit at the Westin Hotel in Ottawa October 4-7, 2017.
I can hardly thank the Canadian Tulip Festival enough for giving me the space to learn independently and trusting me to take on this project. After these short nine weeks, I have a renewed appreciation for the tulip, and the kind people who take their time to ask people to stop and smell the flowers.
Jenn Leah Ko 
Amazing! I’m so glad my tip worked out! Both so that your project could be assisted, but also to save some of those items that I was told would be junked (as a historian, that is a soothing feeling). I was half-tempted to try to rescue some things myself, but they were just too “new” for my purposes (and I too have a space issue in my home). So it worked out perfectly that they can hopefully help you! Cheers!
So much would have been lost without you. Thank you!