Winnipeg: Folklorama

by Alex Robertson Textor on


In Winnipeg, as in most big Canadian cities, there is an unassimilated immigrant presence at the surface of daily life. Canada has an official policy of multiculturalism, enshrined in the constitution, and cultural displays of difference are actively encouraged by federal and provincial governments. Winnipeg’s diversity is impressive. The city has a significant Francophone minority, several large immigrant communities, including Canada’s largest per capita Filipino population (at over five percent), and a relatively big Aboriginal population. This is just the tip of the iceberg, however. Over 100 languages are spoken by city residents.

Enter Folklorama, an annual August multicultural festival. Since 1970, Folklorama has provided a celebratory space for Winnipeg’s various immigrant groups to showcase their traditional culture, food, and performance. This year 45 different pavilions were set up to host guests and provide a little cultural exposure.

Last year Folklorama saw over 400,000 visitors over the two weeks of its festival. Folklorama has become a major event on Winnipeg’s cultural calendar. Admission to each individual pavilion is just C$6, and children 12 and under enter free of charge. Most pavilions focus on a live performance, but there is also traditional food and drink for purchase, as well as informational booths and boutique areas where various traditional objects can be purchased.

The Folklorama experience is quite moving, and in no small part because the participants are so enthusiastic. I attended three pavilions. At the first, the Chilean pavilion, we ate empanadas and drank wine prior to a performance, which was kicked off by the Canadian and Chilean national anthems. The rollicking Irish pavilion followed, and the evening ended at the Brazilian Pavilion, with its energetic samba and capoeira performance.

I took a Folklorama VIP World Tour on the opening night of this year’s festival. The VIP World Tour provides expedited access to three pavilions an evening, a progressive meal (including beverages), and coach service between pavilions. It costs C$69.95 per person.

During the 50 non-festival weeks of the year, Folklorama operates workshops, lectures, and other forums to educate Winnipeggers about their city’s many different cultures. This year’s two-week Folklorama ends this Saturday, but it’s not too early to start thinking about next year’s Folklorama festival.

Check out other dispatches on my road trip to Winnipeg here.

Some media support for my stay in Winnipeg was provided by Tourism Winnipeg and Travel Manitoba. All opinions expressed are my own.

(Image: Flickr/noricum)

Why Winnipeg should be on your radar

by Alex Robertson Textor on


When I first visited Winnipeg, in 2005, I did so on the advice of an art world acquaintance in New York who spent a lot of professional time in Canada. I asked him which Canadian city he deemed to be coolest. After a perfunctory nod to Montreal, he zeroed in on Winnipeg. He cited the city’s high culture, its dynamic contemporary creative figures, its prairie sunsets, and its very undiscovered status as reasons to visit.

When I got to Winnipeg I found a city teeming with good cultural, architectural, and culinary stuff. I also found a city that seemed to know itself. There are countless cities in North America obsessed with their relationship to New York or Los Angeles. Winnipeg is not one of these. If Winnipeg has an inferiority complex, it is tempered by the recognition that quality of life is high and opportunities feel boundless here.

There is quite simply something very special about Winnipeg. It’s a bit of a Grand Old Dame, with a genteel spirit at play across charming residential and commercial neighborhoods. It’s not always the prettiest city. The city’s downtown lacks a unified scale, and a clutch of Brutalist buildings make a dramatic claim on the urban landscape. (The latter always strike me as desperately beautiful, though anecdotal evidence suggests that I’m in the minority in this respect.) There are parks and monuments and unexpected corners. There is also The Forks, an enormous multipurpose entertainment area, which organizes a lot of leisure time in the city.Winnipeg’s strong creative scene is partially attributable to its deep winter freeze, which has fostered a creative atmosphere. The city has a deep artistic tradition that has produced a bevy of contemporary filmmakers and artists. Ponder the work of local filmmakers Guy Maddin and Noam Gonick and you gain some real insight into Winnipeg, a city bound to its many idiosyncrasies, the harsh climate, and its varied ethnic diversity.

There’s also the question of the city’s population in relation to the surrounding territory. There are 1.2 million people in Manitoba; around 650,000 of them live in Winnipeg. Winnipeg is the only metropolis of note for a great distance. The prairie is just outside the city, and it is vast. Winnipeg draws the country refugees in magnetically.

Winnipeg has a number of major projects underway; the most notable of these, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, is scheduled to be finished in 2012. The museum is is a very ambitious and very heady undertaking. In architectural terms alone, it will be a tour de force. There is already talk in Winnipeg about a future Bilbao Effect.

By the end of my second visit to Winnipeg last week I’d discovered more delightful Manitoban quirks: the phenomenon of the wedding social; the local appetite for Slurpees, even in the dead of winter; the fact that, in early August, I saw leaves that had already turned color; the genuine friendliness of completely random people.

Over the next few days, I’ll post reports on Winnipeg’s Folklorama cultural festival, Winnipeg’s museum scene, the city’s locavore wave, The Forks, and some other dimensions of this exciting city.

See my entire road trip to Winnipeg series here.

Some media support for my stay in Winnipeg was provided by Tourism Winnipeg and Travel Manitoba. All opinions expressed are my own.

The great Canadian prairie road trip: Calgary-Saskatoon-Regina-Winnipeg

by Alex Robertson Textor on

This road trip had its genesis in idle travel fantasy chat, as so many journeys do. A few months ago my friend Melissa and I discussed how much we wanted to do a road trip together over the summer, and we cranked out a number of ambitious itineraries. The craziest of all involved Melissa driving 18 hours by herself from Colorado to Alberta to pick me up prior to an eastward run across Canada. Perhaps it’s best, all things considered, that this particular itinerary did not work out.

Time and other constraints meant that we had to curtail our ambition just a bit. We settled on a four-night Calgary-Winnipeg itinerary, with stops in Drumheller, Saskatoon, Moose Jaw, Regina, Brandon, and Portage La Prairie, a distance of 1486 kilometers or 912 miles.

Sounds great, right? Not so fast, cowboy. It turns out to be difficult to orchestrate a Canadian prairie road trip with a rental car. One-way car rentals are scarce in Canada. In fact, we were unable to find a single car rental company that would let us pick a car up in Calgary and drive it to Winnipeg.

After exhausting online booking site options, I turned to Twitter. The ever-generous travel writer Eva Holland suggested we take a look at Rent-A-Wreck. We did, and were disappointed to discover that the outfit doesn’t operate in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The rather less literally helpful Grant Martin suggested that we purchase the PaceSaver Plus III Electric Scooter that he so kindly found on Craigslist.

We even looked into the possibility of renting a U-Haul, rejecting that option because it was too expensive. Thinking that there might have been some secret I’d missed, I even checked in with the very helpful logistics team at Travel Alberta. Again, no dice.

Disaster! How would we ever consummate our Canadian prairie road trip?
Fairly easily, as it turns out. Once we started scrambling everything fell into place quickly. We found a one-way Winnipeg-bound car rental originating in Saskatoon. And then we found a cheap one-way fare on WestJet between Calgary and Saskatoon. (A silver lining was already emerging, as I’ve wanted to fly WestJet for some time.)

Cutting out the first day on the road means that we’ll miss some beautiful territory across Alberta and Saskatchewan, Drumheller in particular. In place of that first day on the road, we’ll spend a morning exploring Calgary and a long afternoon and evening in Saskatoon. With the replacement of Calgary by Saskatoon as the point of our road trip’s origination, our road trip will shrink to 873 km, or 542 miles. Here’s the itinerary breakdown. Day 1: Nighttime arrival in Calgary. Day 2: Calgary and Saskatoon. Day 3: Saskatoon to Regina by way of Moose Jaw by car. Day 4: Regina to Winnipeg by way of Brandon and Portage La Prairie by car.

In addition to my posts here, I’ll be tweeting about my Canadian prairie road trip with the hashtag #cdnprairieroadtrip for the next few days. Our road trip will deliver me to Winnipeg, where I’ll spend the following five nights reacquainting myself with the Manitoban metropolis.

Read the entire road trip series here.

Some media support for this road trip was provided by Travel Alberta and Tourism Saskatchewan. All opinions belong to the author.

(Image: Flickr / Space Ritual)

Top ten art museums you haven’t been to

by Andrew Evans on

If you wanna see inside someone’s brain, stick ’em in an art museum and then leave them there for an hour. Some will feign interest for at least 10 minutes and then start looking for the bathroom. Others will politely wander or become transfixed by a certain wall and never leave, others will head straight to the gift shop to try on silly hats. Big or small, art museums offer the truest personality test on the planet.

Because art is famous and expensive (and sometimes meaningful), the world’s most famous art museums have become iconic travel destinations unto themselves. Cultured people the world over have exhausted the Louvre in Paris, burned hours in the corridors of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, and nodded through Madrid’s Museo del Prado (Tick, tick, tick). There are few things Americans will wait hours in line for, but the Musée d’Orsay‘s French impressionism is right up there with Super Bowl tickets and some mattress outlet’s Midnight Madness sale.

It’s nice to know that art still matters, even when the world’s most well-known museums have become their own top ten of cheesy travel status symbols. But true art lovers need not despair–humans have managed to collect art the world over and many a hidden gem are lying in wait for your art-loving eyes to arrive on the spot.

The following list highlights a selection of some of the world’s best art destinations with the least amount of fanfare. (Disclaimer: Just like any person’s taste in art, this list is entirely subjective). What the following museums share in common are their high-quality collections and their pleasant lack of lines going out the door:

  1. Sarjeant Gallery, (Wanganui, NEW ZEALAND) You don’t expect it in small town New Zealand, but Wanganui is the quintessential art haven, with nearly a dozen galleries, live artists’ studios and stately museums. The Sarjeant collection is the largest and most impressive, well worth a day spent in this expressive riverside hamlet.
  2. Philips Collection, (Washington DC, USA) America’s “First Museum of Modern Art” opened in 1921 and houses a bold collection spanning Van Gogh to O’Keeffe. The intimate Rothko Room represents the first collective public showing of Mark Rothko’s famous multi-form paintings. In museum-heavy Washington, DC, the Phillips often gets overlooked by out-of-town tourists. It’s their loss.
  3. Musée Fabre, (Montpellier, FRANCE) You would expect a far more traditional art gallery in southern France, but the Fabre keeps visitors on their toes with a wonderful 500-year spectrum of art, including one of the world’s greatest collections of 20th Century Fauvist art. Like so much architecture in France, the museum itself is a well-preserved work of art.
  4. National Gallery of Art, (Reykjavik, ICELAND) For a country of just 300,000 people, Iceland has a lot of art museums. The largest of these collections is shown in an elegant old ice factory with several floors of soul-stirring Nordic art. It would take you a week to visit all of Reykjavik’s art galleries, but if you only have a day, this is the one to patronize.
  5. Museum of Latin American Art, (Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA) Oh wow, where to begin in Buenos Aires? There’s so much going on in this city, it’s hard to decide, but MALBA is like the ultimate megaplex of Latin American art, helping you realize how little you actually know about world culture. The museum’s gigantic size and vertigo-inducing design adds a punch of awestruck to your gut, whereas the art on the walls will leave you either with dreamy hallucinations or Borges-type nightmares.
  6. Toledo Museum of Art, (Toledo, Ohio, USA) Born from a private collection of local glass industrialist Edward Drummond Libbey, the Toledo Museum is home to an astounding number of high-profile works by 19th-Century European and American greats. The impressive glass collection adds a unique twist to the visit. (Pssstt: I grew up going to this museum at least once a year, and I still consider it one of the best in the world–right up there with any in Paris.)
  7. Heide Museum of Modern Art, (Bulleen, Victoria, AUSTRALIA) Australians are crazy about art, especially in Melbourne. The “Heide” is just a 15-minute ride outside downtown Melbourne, but that’s apparently too far for most tourists. What they’re missing is a creative collection of old Australian houses set up as galleries, bizarre outdoor installations and some downright funky art. Check it out.
  8. Kharkov Art Museum, (Kharkov, UKRAINE) An appreciation for Soviet art is regaining strength both in Ukraine and abroad. While most visitors hit the capital sights in Kyiv, it’s the industrial city of Kharkov that managed to preserve the country’s rich art heritage, from old Orthodox icons to propagandist block prints, epic oil paintings and tender Ukrainian folk art. Honestly, it’s probably the best art museum in the country.
  9. Winnipeg Art Gallery, (Winnipeg, CANADA) Canadians reign supreme in feelgood art experience and the “WAG” (an unfortunate acronym) is no exception. Manitoban art abounds and aren’t you curious to find out what that is? Housed in a sharp and angled stone triangle, the WAG also boasts the largest collection of Inuit art in the world, something the world-famous Louvre generally lacks.
  10. Guangdong Museum of Art, (Guangzhou, CHINA) Despite all the art that got stolen by foreigners and/or ruined by the Cultural Revolution, there is still some Chinese art left in China. In fact, even as you read this, new Chinese artists are producing new Chinese art . Shanghai and Beijing and Hong Kong are more famous and perhaps more impressive, but the Guangdong in Guangzhou is gaining worldwide notoriety for its fresh repertoire and independent spirit. (Why do the industrial cities get the good stuff?)

OK, I realize there are a lot more wonderful and obscure art museums out there (feel free to add your suggestions in the comments). The point is, when adding art museums to your bucket list, think outside the box. Some of the world’s greatest paintings are not in London or Paris. They’re in Winnipeg or Toledo.

(Photo: Flickr Henry Bloomfield; 2 Dogs)

Canada can’t handle the The Beaver

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Okay, so Canada finally got the joke. The country’s second-oldest magazine, The Beaver (yes, it is SFW), is changing its name. Apparently, according to Reuters, the name has an “unintended sexual connotation.” It’s more than just the jokes, though. Internet filters have blocked access to the history journal because the vast majority of people associate The Beaver with … well, you know.

The Beaver first came to Canada in 1920, published by the Hudson’s Bay Company, which was a fur trader at the time (now it’s a department store chain). Since then, The Beaver has found broader appeal by stretching to include other issues. To reflect this new focus — and get people to stop snickering — the publication’s name will be Canada’s History. This will commence with the April issue of the magazine.

The name change could also come with an increase in circulation. According to Mark Reid, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, “Market research showed us that younger Canadians and women were very very unlikely to ever buy a magazine called The Beaver no matter what it’s about.”

Duh, Mark. Of course they won’t buy a magazine called The Beaver. They’d read it online.

[Photo by stevehdc via Flickr]%Gallery-73517%

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