Have you met Tom, the Collections Assistant with University of Alberta Museums and Collections who has been helping to ensure art and installations at the U of A are well cared-for for more than 23 years? Spend the next few minutes getting to know him a little better.
Where is your favourite place on campus?
Well it was Quad when the Steinhauer sculptures were there, but I really like FAB Gallery because my good friend Blair works there and there is always great art exhibited there.
Tablet or paper?
Well, I spend a lot of time on the clickity-clack, but I write it all down first.
Name one thing you’ve brought to work from home.
Photos of my family. I have photos of my baby with me always. My baby is now 30 and has a baby of her own. Here, I’ll show you…(he pulls his phone from his pocket and displays a photo of his daughter and smiley infant grandbaby.)
What’s the one thing you can’t live without?
Probably coffee in the morning. It’s a very long morning when I have to wait to have my coffee.
If you won airfare anywhere in the world, where would you go?
I’d like to go back to Amsterdam and Prague. Our late curator Jim Corrigan and I went for 10 days once to pack up an exhibition and ship the art back here. It was a quick trip because we were working, so I’d like to see more of the old buildings and art. It was quite the experience. We had to hire local people to help and there were no elevators in those old buildings.
You can invite anyone — alive or dead, real or fictional — to dinner. Who would it be?
My Mom. She died when I was young — I was 16 when she passed away, she was 44. I thought she was old until I was 44 and now I know that’s not true.
If you could switch jobs with someone else on campus for a week, what would you do?
I’d like to switch places with my cousin Elsey. She’s an Elder with First Peoples’ House and gets to talk with all these young Aboriginal people with all these dreams and aspirations. I think being connected to young people would be inspiring.
What does “uplifting the whole people” mean to you?
You know what I think about that? I think about reconciliation and the part I can play to help non-Indigenous people understand their part in the Treaties, and show that we all have a part to play in healing and moving forward.
If you could solve any problem in the world, what would it be?
Poverty. It just doesn’t make sense to me. They’ve got some great innovative ideas around the world that work. Why can’t we use them everywhere and give people a chance?
What 3 words best describe your U of A experience?
Enlightening, exciting, and enriching.
Tom has been with U of A Museums for more than 23 years and has participated in more than 100 exhibits. He came to the university through a pilot program called Libraries, Archives and Museums, a partnership between the academy, Métis Nation of Alberta, and the Federal Government Employment Services grant. The program had teaching components followed by nine weeks of practicum in each of the three areas. Tom loves working with art and other museum objects, and one of his important duties is monitoring and helping to maintain environmental settings of the spaces where art is stored and placed on our campuses. He says, “I’ll keep the art looking like it did when you first brought it to me.” Tom is a third-generation survivor of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, believes in the uplifting the next generations, and is a proud Dad and doting mošôm (grandfather).