Royal B.C. Museum CEO sounds off on their importance: ‘It’s how we teach, how we learn, how we educate, how we get to know one another’
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Have you been to a museum lately?
The national study also explored this central question: In a changing world, what role do museums play?
“I happen to believe that now, maybe more than ever, we need museums,” Drake says, adding that a museum “brings people together in a way that is, first of all, connected. And it provides this very interactive and very tactile and very engaging experience.
“It’s how we teach, how we learn, how we educate, how we get to know one another.”
Billed as one of the oldest continuously operating museums in Canada, the RBCM has faced an uphill battle since the global pandemic. The number of visitors has yet to reach pre-pandemic numbers.
“We’re not there yet. We’re getting there,” said Drake, who was appointed to her role in February 2024.
There have been other challenges, too.
“The announcement was made that we were getting a new museum, and then, approximately 40 days later, the project was cancelled because of outcry from the province — and, in my opinion, rightfully so. The timing was very, very wrong given what was going on in the world,” Drake says.
But the move left the museum without a backup plan.
The content of existing exhibits was also under scrutiny at that time, according to Drake.
“One of the things we were accused of was erasing history when we closed the Old Town galleries. And that was never the intention,” Drake says. “The fact that we were able to reopen, and it looks exactly the way it did before, just with new context, should testify to the fact that we had no intentions of tearing it down.”
“It’s so critical to how we do that work,” Drake says of the work to update and introduce new dialogue into the museum. “With the understanding, though, that we are not erasing the past. We are not disregarding what did happen.
“I am a firm believer that our history is our history. And we should learn from it.”
“We have spent two years going around the province asking British Columbians what do you see in your provincial museum? What works for you? What’s relevant for you? And, what’s not?” Drake says. “And there have been some very, very interesting and fascinating conversations.”
With the ultimate goal of making the RBCM a relevant, ‘modern museum,’ the 2025 programming features four major exhibits: the 60th edition of Wildlife Photographer of the Year (Feb. 14-April 27); Global Threads: The Art and Fashion of Indian Chintz (March 28-Sept. 28); Odysseys and Migration (April 18-May 3, 2026); and, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ Beyond the Beat: Music of Resistance and Change (May 30-Jan. 25, 2026).
“We’ve just been very careful and deliberate,” Drake says of the programming plans. “It’s our biggest year since closure, and there’s so much going on.”
When prompted to pick a particular highlight, Drake pointed to aspects of each major exhibit. But she picked the presence of John Lennon’s psychedelic Rolls-Royce, which is part of the provincial collection, in Beyond the Beat — an exhibit that features highlights of artists such as Neil Young and Snotty Nose Rez Kids — as an unexpected, yet fitting inclusion.
Odysseys and Migration, which come from the Chinese Canadian Museum in Vancouver and follows the migration journeys of Chinese Canadians from the 18th century through to present day, as another important programming piece.
“We’re choosing to be audacious. And we’re choosing to sort of step outside of our usual comfort zone a little bit to do things that are a little bit different,” Drake says.
At the precipice of a new year, with new programming, Drake says the work the museum has put into examining its position in the province has been monumental. And more than worth it.
“It has taken us a few years for us to get back in the good graces of the province. And it has been a really hard job to do that,” she says.
“But, it was a necessary one because, at the end of the day … the collections don’t belong to the museum. And they don’t belong to the government … They belong to the people of British Columbia. This is our collective history.”