The local news and cultural happenings we followed this week—and what we’re up to this weekend.

Yet another take on cabinets of curiosities. During the four-month run of Ravishing Beasts—our feature exhibit on taxidermy—the blog looked at how the design world is reinterpreting the natural world. You’d be hard-pressed to open a shelter mag these days without finding some reference to this trend, or something about creating off-beat vignettes that go beyond books and vases and into the slightly macabre. An image of Patch NYC’s vignette from the French edition of Marie Claire magazine is pictured left. (Poppytalk)

“Radical Homemakers,” and “Femivores.” In advance of our fall 2010 exhibit on the local food revival, we’re tracking stories from here and elsewhere on the new breed of homemaker—namely, the new generation of people embracing self-sufficiency through gardening, bee keeping, chicken keeping, etc. This week, a New York Times Magazine piece looked at it from a feminist perspective, dubbing the proponents of this new movement “femivores.” Meantime, a just-published book entitled Racial Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture,looks at the trend in families and the focus on sustainability. (NY Times and Globe and Mail)

London’s Jewish Museum reopened to the public this week following a £10-million transformation that involved a move to an old piano factory and a tripling of their exhibit space. New interactive displays are designed to take visitors into the daily experiences of Jewish residents, right down to the smells of traditional cooking. (Jewish Museum London)

And a museum closer to home… We love this slideshow of images of a blue whale skeleton being reassembled for the soon-to-open Beaty Biodiversity Museum at UBC. Can’t wait to see this hanging in their new atrium soon. Look at those vertebrae! (Vancouver Sun)

Vancouver’s oldest school is slated for demolition. On Wednesday, parents, students and teachers gathered to protest plans to level a two-room schoolhouse next to Sir Guy Carleton elementary. The structure was built in 1896 but damaged in a fire in 2006 and has sat empty ever since, awaiting restoration. (Vancouver Sun)

And something to do here this weekend…We’ve blogged about it, tweeted about it, and the night is nearly here. Tomorrow at 7 p.m., we host a screening of the acclaimed documentary “Handmade Nation.” (Click here to be taken to the March 2nd blog post about it.) It promises to be a great event, complete with mini-craft fair by Got Craft? and a reception in our MOV Studio. Be sure to arrive early to view our feature exhibit Art of Craft, which showcases incredible crafts from local, national, and Korean talent. Happy weekend!

Image credit: Poppytalk

It occurs to me that I ought to be posting a weekly round up of MOV observations from the week. We’ll call them MOVments. Here’s a first take:

Yet another new downtown neighbourhood? In recent years, Vancouver has gotten neighbourhood-naming crazy. Crosstown. Railtown. Now Midtown? The Cecil strip club will make way for a new condo project that the developers hope will anchor the north end of the Granville Street Bridge. Whatever their hopes, the building, called The Rolston, looks very cool (rendering pictured left). (Globe and Mail)

Traffic is pretty well back to normal (oh, the days when the buses shot down the round-the-clock Olympic Lanes on Hastings Street). But there is this bright spot: the new bike lane on the Dunsmuir viaduct opened this week, the first run led by Mayor Gregor, naturally. (Beyond Robson)

Vancouver’s favourite son actor Seth Rogen is back home shooting “I’m With Cancer,” a film based on the story of his friend Will Reiser. (Lainey Gossip)

A national headline, but not exactly news: Statistics Canada projections indicate Vancouver’s visible minority population will be the majority within two decades, “accounting for 59% of the metro region’s total population… up from a current figure of about 40%.” (Vancouver Sun)

Good news for lovers of independent book stores: some former employees of Duthie Books are planning to opening a new store called Sitka Books and Art. Owner Ria Bleumer hopes the store is as resilient as its namesake. (Quill and Quire)

We get the final word: Tomorrow morning at 10:15 a.m. the Museum hosts a craft workshop for kids and parents, inspired by our ongoing exhibit Art of Craft. Entitled “Fabric Sandwich,” it’s a how-to collage session led by textile artist Bettina Matzkuhn whose work is featured in the exhibit. Details on the workshop are on our events calendar linked here. Have a great weekend!

Image credit: Rize Alliance Properties Ltd. via Globe and Mail

A couple days ago, I tweeted a link to a blog post written by Frances Bula, the ever-productive urban affairs/Vancouver City Hall writer. Followed for her forward-thinking and pragmatic reporting, Bula proposed three ideas the city should adopt to keep the Olympic vibe alive. Specifically: adding an aboriginal museum downtown; removing red tape around street food and sidewalk cafes, and; coming up with incentives to keep people using public transit like they did these past couple weeks (i.e. free transit attached to event tickets, temporary U-passes, etc). The complete post and the 47 other suggestions it’s spawned to date are linked here.

Whatever the outcomes of all this city-making-from-the-ground talk—and maybe it is just talk—it’s been pretty incredible to see the conversation unfolding everywhere, especially outside the usual circles. This is precisely the kind of citizen engagement that local writer and educator Matt Hern advocates in his just-published book Common Ground in a Liquid City (AK Press 2010). In it, he calls on Vancouver to find a new, organic, participatory way into its future.

Each chapter is based around a city case study. Some of the cities are an entertaining mess (Las Vegas), others admirable (New York, Portland), and all of them compared against Vancouver—make that East Vancouver. (Hern’s blunt analysis—East Van = authentic and noble; Rest of Vancouver = not—will be familiar to his followers.) He advocates strongly for the rejection of the globalizing forces he sees as threatening diversity of “place” and calls for “a thoughtful relocalization of pretty much everything.” The vision calls for steadfast citizen involvement at every turn: “City-building leadership cannot fall to experts, bureaucrats, or planners. People have to make cities by accretion: bit-by-bit, rejecting master plans and letting the place unfold.”

Many of the statements made in the book are contentious, intentionally so. (I would argue that as in New York and Paris, some of Vancouver’s best decisions—particularly those made in recent years—have come from master plans, which Hern is very critical of; see chapter four.) Wherever you sit on these issues, he has pulled together a diverse group of often lesser-known approaches to city life and related them to what’s happening in Vancouver now. “Even in the face of the Olympics, the Gateway Project, and an increasingly brazen corporate governance structure, I think we still have a real chance to remake this city using some compelling, radical urban traditions and examples.” It all makes for fascinating dinner-party fodder (especially his ideas around class divisions here), and can serve as a primer for the brainstorming sessions playing out on places like Frances Bula’s blog. Track down a copy and tell us what you think.

Cover design credit by John Yates for AK Press.

In March 2005, Vancouver-based graphic designer Jan Halvarson launched Poppytalk, an influential design blog followed internationally by design enthusiasts and shelter-magazine editors alike.

A prolific curator of all things “handmade, decayed, and beautiful,” Halvarson has been at the forefront of contemporary arts and crafts trends, spotting new talent here and abroad. In conversation with MOV, she shares her thoughts on the revival of craft, how the Vancouver scene is evolving, and the local artists she’s following now.

What inspired Poppytalk?
Back in the day, I was studying graphic design and was using the blog to catalogue inspiration, never realizing or even thinking of a readership.

Poppytalk Handmade was added in 2007. It was hard to find quality work to write about and I was spending an incredible amount of time online looking for inspiration. Etsy was very new and I had started an “Etsy Pick of the Day.” It got so popular that I created a blog just for it, and people started sending me submissions to write about them. I realized there was a need for these artists to be seen and heard, and I loved the idea of giving them a venue to showcase their work. As it was also difficult to find these artists in the sea of shops online, I realized it must be hard for buyers and retailers to find as well. I started curating all this talent and realized that when I did post about their work, people were buying their wares. Hence Poppytalk Handmade, a curated online virtual arts and crafts fair, launched thanks to my husband and partner Earl Einarson, who built the site.

How has craft and the handmade world changed since then?
It’s totally bloomed! People have realized the importance of handmade for so many reasons, which in turn has created a new and positive economic model. So many more artists and designers are able to quit their day jobs and can support themselves selling their work than they were able to in the past, and this is probably due to their online presence with blogs, virtual marketplaces, social networking sites, etc.

The online and local community is also very supportive these days, making it easier to learn how to create a handmade business from the arts. And the general public is more socially aware of the benefits of buying handmade, and how it helps the environment, the economy, and people’s quality of life vs. purchasing mass-produced items made in sweatshops overseas that are sold in big-box stores.

Through our current exhibit Art of Craft we’ve observed a schism between, let’s call them traditional craft artists and emerging craft artists. The traditional crafters seem to take a more formal approach to their work. They have a strict definition of their audience and how and where their work should be shown. Emerging craft artists seem to draw influences from a wider sphere; there’s a social aspect to their work, too. Have you observed something similar?
I think in the past it was much harder to support oneself in the arts and people never took you seriously unless you had some sort of formal education or training. That might be part of what you are talking about. I don’t know, it’s a tough call. I don’t focus on that at all, as I’m more interested in the beauty and meaning of one’s work and how it affects the lives around us.

Why do you think handmade arts and crafts are experiencing such a revival?
I think it goes back to social awareness and genuineness. We want to be good to the earth, we want to create and support community, we want meaningful things in our lives; items that are unique, one-of-a-kind, recycled, and beautiful.

How would you characterize Vancouver’s craft scene?
I think it’s amazing. We have some of the most amazing talent here out there. There’s a sense of Canadiana present in many of their works, from woodland forest inspirations to pieces made from locally found or reclaimed wood to pieces from one’s own unique heritage. I think the scene here is really alive and thriving. It’s probably one of the more established scenes and is also supported by great schools here such as Emily Carr.

Which Vancouver artists do you follow?
Local artists here keep popping up and it’s so exciting. A few come to mind. There’s a collective called Hob Snobs. I also love following student work. There’s Kate Beckett, a ceramic student from Emily Carr, and Alanna Scott, a recent graduate of their communication design program. There are so many little clusters everywhere, it’s hard to mention them all.

Image credit: Poppytalk