ABOYNE – The Wellington County Museum and Archives is full of colour as it launches the new “Spectrum” exhibit in the main hall this month.
Opening on Oct. 16 and running until March 20, the exhibit will allow colour-curious visitors to immerse themselves in the vivid world of colour; discovering colour theory and experimenting with coloured lights and shadows to understand the light spectrum.
Rare and never-seen-before artifacts, playing into the exhibit’s colour theme and selected from the museum’s collection of over 20,000 items, will also be on display.
Visitors will see artifacts arranged into primary and secondary colour groups throughout the gallery and learn of the history behind them.
“The majority of the items are sort of clothing and textile-related, because those are the items that tend to have these bright colours within our collection,” museum curator Hailey Johnston told the Advertiser.
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Some of the previously-veiled treasures to be displayed include a “poisonous” arsenic-dyed emerald green petticoat from the Victorian era, a purple striped wedding dress, and a red street organ constructed by Frank Speers of Elora’s Speers Electric.
The striped wedding dress, donated in 2017, sticks out to Johnston.
“It was worn at a wedding in October 1877,” she said.
That’s about the time when the finishing touches were being put on the Poor House, where the museum now lives.
“When the finishing touches were being put on that dress, so was the space being finished, so it’s really neat,” Johnston said.
Themes surrounding colour are a bit of a tradition at the museum, with red and white and black and white exhibits in past years.
“We have so many artifacts in our collection that are also colourful and they don’t necessarily all have anything to do with one another, so this is a way that we can—looking just at the colour of the artifacts—get to bring out some really rarely seen and never-before-seen items from the collection,” Johnston said.
There are also interactive options involving shining lights to create colourful shadows and primary-coloured lights to mix, creating a gamut of different colours.
All museum visitors aged 12 and older need to provide proof of vaccination, pass symptom screening and provide personal information for public health contact tracing.
Admission is by donation (cash or card) and hours of operation are: 9am to 4:30pm on weekdays and 1 to 5pm on weekends.
