Museum of Vancouver

The Museum of Vancouver (MOV) is the city's civic museum, located at 1100 Chestnut Street in Vanier Park, Kitsilano, Vancouver, British Columbia. The museum traces its roots to a collection started in 1894 and moved to its current building in 1968. The building is a Modernist structure designed by Gerald Hamilton, topped with a stainless-steel crab-shaped sculpture and fronted by the George Norris fountain sculpture of a crab, a symbol of the city's links to the Coast Salish peoples and the sea. The museum holds more than 100,000 objects and focuses on the history of Vancouver, from its Indigenous origins through settlement and the 20th century. The permanent collection includes Coast Salish and other Northwest Coast Indigenous belongings, a large collection of 20th-century consumer culture, and material about neighbourhood life, protests, and migration. The Gallery of Vancouver stories, the Vancouver Neon collection, and displays of mid-century household objects are among the best-known features. The museum presents its material thematically rather than strictly chronologically, in a style that is often playful and critical and draws on contemporary issues. Exhibitions have addressed topics such as the history of cannabis, the 1960s counterculture, and Indigenous knowledge. Since the 2010s the museum has worked more closely with Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh communities on how Indigenous history is shown. The building and its collections face the ongoing challenges of preserving materials in a coastal climate, and the museum has pursued renewals of its galleries and storage. Visitors typically need 1.5 to 2 hours, and the museum is next to the Vancouver Maritime Museum and the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre.