RE-LENSING THE CITY: ALUMNI CHECK-IN WITH BRUCE BEATON

 Alumni Check-In | Elizabeth Cytko

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Bruce Beaton.
Photo courtesy of Bruce Beaton.

Bruce Beaton is an Acting Museum Program Officer with the City of Toronto. Beaton is a theatre professional who graduated from the Master of Museum studies in 2013. He is a co-creator and presenter of Hands On Inquiry, where he visits high school classrooms with a suitcase of artefacts, and builds a narrative with students about The Great War. Beaton volunteers on the Board of Directors for the Kensington Market Historical Society.

What inspired you to move from theatre to museums?

My work in theatre was becoming more heritage-based. One of the prime drivers that I was running into again and again was the moment where you go, “Wow, that happened here” and this is not a theatrical conceit. It's an immediate response to something that happened. Theatre can do this, but it does it through sort of a make-believe lens. I just found it more interesting to go onto Spadina with a bunch of people rather than to write a play about it and perform it in the theatre.

There's an immediacy of experience that museums can wonderfully offer visitors. There's a kind of a jolt that occurs when you're there where something actually happened. That's one of the reasons that I crossed over. My museum work is basic storytelling where place is the “artefact” that helps tell a story rather than the way a script scaffolds and tells a story.

Everyone's got their own little sort of historical mental map. What is interesting is when you can take a group of people through a re-lensing experience where they have maybe a few ideas about something but you re-lense an urban landscape in a way that maybe they didn't know. That's part of the fun thing about what we do. We facilitate discovery.

How is heritage presentation incorporated into your work with the Kensington Market Historical Society?

There's kind of a continual movement in Toronto to just knock stuff down and try and start again. I live in Kensington Market. There was a big report that happened in the 1960s that suggested that city council should just knock it all down and start again, but luckily that didn't happen.

I think people come to Kensington because it doesn't work by design. You couldn't design a Kensington Market today. It works by accident and I think that people are hungry for that. People want to be in landscapes that aren't designed by people who want them to shop. Compare Kensington Market to the Eaton Centre, for instance. The Eaton Centre is designed for a very specific reason. Kensington Market has a ramshackle, anarchic quality that is something people hunger for. And sharing or revealing the history of the site directly relates to the experience of the contemporary street-scape.

How do you measure the success of a place like Kensington? Well, you can measure it by the amount of money that goes into somebody's pocket after they built a new multi-storied building here; or you can measure it by people's experience. I think that often the actual measurement of someone's visceral responsive experience is something that doesn't have a lot of swing when it comes to moving big wheels in a big city.

Cities are complex terrains, and urban memory is short. I'm interested in expanding and sharing urban memory, the memory of a city, the memory of a house, the memory of an urban landscape.

What inspired you to fit graffiti into a heritage interpretation of Evergreen Brickworks?

This was my final exhibition project while I was doing the MMSt program. I was familiar with the site from working with MOVE Expo and doing my internship there. Graffiti is curious. It's ephemeral. It's unknown to outsiders. And the graffiti at the Brickworks is the only artifact for about 20 years of this history of that site. If you're going to tell the whole history of the site, you can tell the brick making portion of its history, you can tell the current environmental charity chapter of the site but there's 20 years there when the site was abandoned, and without an artifact to share, how do you tell that story?

My co-creator Shannon Todd and myself, thought this might be an interesting way to share that chapter of the history of the site. It's vibrant and it’s everywhere down there. Our exhibit included an introduction to graffiti, a basic Graffiti 101 - what is a tag? What is the difference between graffiti and street art? Who worked the walls here? We included information about how the site changed and how it was used by graffiti artists as a blank canvas and why it's now preserved. There's heritage designation of that graffiti, the abandoned buildings there provided a safe space for graffiti artists to do their stuff. The place is sheltered, there aren't a lot of police around, and they could do what they wanted. There were also a lot of parties down there and there was a pig roast at one point. It was sort of like an abandoned urban playground, a dangerous but blank canvas.

What have been some of the greatest challenges in your career?

At Mackenzie House Museum we present a variety of programs about the lives of Black Victorians. I am an older white male, and it is challenging, rightfully so, for me to speak of black history within the city. How do I speak about black lives in 1840 here? The only way that that I believe this can work for me is to do my homework. When you're talking about what it was like here for a particular community in the 1840s even though you're not part of that community, even though you’re not from the 1840s, even though I have no way to experience the systemic oppression that has been foisted upon the community, being able to speak of that, in front of the community, is a challenge and an honour. There are risks associated with the telling difficult history and challenging history within a museum setting. Those risks I think are worth it. I think we have to speak about those difficult histories. I also have to be prepared to get it wrong. I am continually learning and I am grateful to have the opportunity to share what I have learnt with the curious publics that visit the museums where I work.

What advice can you give to museum professionals entering the field?

I would say that any involvement in any community organization is something that you should seriously consider. This can't just be about what you will get for your résumé from being involved. It has to be something that you are truly devoted to and something that you will commit some time to. Community involvement is something that will serve you very well, in terms of your own curiosity and your own sense of giving something back to whatever organization you volunteer with. There are certain skills that you have coming out of the MMSt program that community organizations can certainly benefit from.