The Welcome Gallery greets visitors and introduces each of the museum galleries. Colourful identities are established for each gallery and carried through the institution’s wayfinding.
Manitoba Museum Welcome Gallery
As part of the exhibit design team at AldrichPears Associates, I worked for three full years on The Manitoba Museum capital renewal project, "Bringing Our Stories Forward". I designed the graphics for three permanent exhibit galleries: Welcome, Prairies, and Winnipeg.
A renewed Welcome Gallery (opened 2021) is now a warm, dramatic space that “wows” visitors and sets the tenor for the rest of the museum experience. In the Welcome Gallery, existing exhibits—an iconic bison diorama and a mural by renowned Indigenous artist Daphne Odjig—are emphasized and recontextualized through fresh interpretation and modifications to the surrounding space.
All images: © Manitoba Museum / Ian McCausland
Iconic objects, colours and symbols representing each gallery introduce the museum’s collection.
The refreshed iconic bison diorama greets visitors to the Welcome Gallery. A wall featuring diverse people, plants, animals and geology of the province creates an inclusive welcome.
An exhibit of treaty medals is now the first exhibit visitors encounter in the Welcome Gallery, next to an existing diorama reinterpreted to reflect Manitoba as the homeland of the Metis. These exhibits provide a new emphasis on Indigenous stories in the narrative of the province.
In the Welcome Gallery, an existing mural by artist Daphne Odjig is given new prominence by opening up the surrounding architecture and adding new interpretation.
