Planning for the new Canadian Peace Museum in Bancroft is now underway, with a decorated team of planners tackling the project.
Hugh Spencer, James Jensen and Diane Oliver-Jensen of the Museum Planners Group recently spent two days at the museum building on Valleyview Drive.
Spencer is the founder of the group, and said he has worked on museums on every continent except for Antarctica and South America.
Spencer has notably worked on the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg and the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.
Spencer said it is important to be working on a museum dedicated to peace because conflict is often top-of-mind when thinking about the world.
“I’m just really enthusiastic about this project. I think it has enormous potential, and I think Bancroft is a great home for it,” Spencer said.
James Jensen is a specialist in exhibit design and has worked at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa and the Boston Children’s Museum.
Diane Oliver-Jensen is the group’s architecture specialist and a licensed landscape architect. She has worked on a wide range of projects, including small exhibits and a $20 million exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American History.
Oliver-Jensen said the subject matter of the Peace Museum overlaps with a number of her personal passions. She has done volunteer work with parolees living with addictions, and with efforts to bring attention to missing and murdered Indigenous women.
Chris Houston, the executive director of the Peace Museum, emphasized the significance of having this team working on the design for the museum.
“We’ve got this really super experienced team that also have all these real-life experiences of working on similar topics,” he said.
Houston described the plethora of important material the team will be working with in creating the museum’s design.
“It’s a peace museum. It’s going to promote peace, and peace is two different things at the same time. Peace is often defined by the absence of things, so the absence of violence, the absence of war, the absence of fear – that is absolutely peace,” he said.
“But it’s also defined by the presence of many things. The presence of democracy, the presence of equity, the presence of planetary health, the existence of advancing human health. A free and fair media. These are all part of peacefulness.”
Houston said the museum will combine local and international content in its exhibits, as well as combine museum exhibits with community-focused spaces. There is already a community garden set up behind the museum building.
“[North Hastings Community Trust] are gifting us this building with conditions and [the] conditions are that we continue to let this building be used for various community purposes. So there’s nonprofits that come and use this space and we celebrate that, you know, we’re happy with these conditions,” he said.
Houston said the design team will come back to Bancroft in the fall to participate in community consultations about the museum’s design.
