Maybe it's just a Lethbridge thing. But people have been interested in the wind for eons, so the Galt Museum is pleased to present a new traveling exhibit called Wind Work, Wind Play: Weather Vanes and Whirligigs, which officially opens on June 2 and runs until Sept. 2.
The 30 piece travelling exhibition comes to Lethbridge courtesy of the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau Quebec .
“ We actually don’t have anything like these in our collection,” said Galt Museum curator Wendy Aitkens.
“ It is an exhibit which is about the most common topic of weather conversation in Lethbridge — the wind — if it is blowing, how fast it is blowing and what direction it is blowing.”
The exhibit features a variety of innovative weather vanes and whirligigs created out of a variety of wood, copper, various metals and found objects like oil cans and juice jugs. They date back to the 1700s, though most of them are from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which reflect what people were thinking about at the time.
There is a kinetic sculpture of a man milking a cow, a plethora of pigs, roosters, beavers and assorted animals.
“ It’s folk art, so there were created by people about things which related to their lives,” she continued.
There are also more whimsical works including a fiddler, several people chopping wood, a guy kicking another guy’s butt and the centrepiece — a large Voyageur canoe created by staff at the Gatineau Museum. If you press a button, you can watch the voyageurs row, though you have to use your imagination to see how the wind would make the other items
move.