World
Tea Party, Victoria
Community Partners:
The World Tea Party Society, Vancouver BC.
http://www.worldtea.net
Project Directors:
Bryan Mulvihill, World Tea Party Society
Email: teahouse@istar.ca
Dr. Judith Patt, Department of History in Art, University of Victoria
Email: japatt@shaw.ca
Student Researchers:
CURA Student Assistantships: Sandy Bligh, Christine Currie and
Cynthia Foo, History in Art; Sheila Connolly, Cultural Resource
Management; Eve Millar, graduate student, History in Art
HRDC Summer Career Placement: Christina Smylitopoulos, History
in Art
UVic Work Study: Christina Smylitopoulos, Cathleen Thom and Carla
Yarish, History in Art
Collaborator:
Pierre Arpin, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
The World Tea Party, Victoria project is examining the influence of the simple
act of drinking tea on various artistic and social cultures represented by
objects in collections in British Columbia. The project provides a multidisciplinary
approach to looking at collections, revealing how something as
simple and common as meeting over a cup of tea can reveal an interconnection
between visual art, decorative arts, architecture, archival photography
and materials, social meeting rituals, multicultural activities
and contemporary cultural production.
The research is archives and collections based and includes
the cataloguing of relevant public and private collections. The
main public collections of interest are housed at the Art Gallery
of Greater Victoria (AGGV), the Maltwood Museum and the Royal
BC Museum. The project will culminate in an exhibition at the
AGGV in June-July, 2004, of art and artifacts related to the many tea cultures
from around the world represented in British Columbia as well as examples of
contemporary British Columbia art that highlight tea culture as a living tradition.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of community events
in the gallery and throughout Greater Victoria venues. The research
and exhibition will be documented in a publication, BC Tea Culture.
To provide additional access to the project, the Victoria tea
party event will be added to the current World Tea Party website.
