The Glenbow Museum is an art and history regional museum in the city of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The museum focuses on Western Canadian history and culture, including Indigenous perspectives. The Glenbow was established as a private non-profit foundation in 1955 by lawyer, businessman and philanthropist Eric Lafferty Harvie with materials from his personal collection.
The museum moved to its current facility in downtown Calgary in 1976, and is funded by the governments of Calgary, Alberta and Canada, private donors, as well as an endowment provided by Harvie. In 2019, the Glenbow had a total of 148,668 visitors. The museum closed temporarily for renovations in 2021, and will re-open in 2024.
Admission to the museum is free as of February 2022, due to a $25 million donation by the Shaw Family Foundation. $15 million of the donation will be placed in an endowment fund for admissions, and $10 million is earmarked for the new JR Shaw Institute for Canadian Art.
History
Early history
The Glenbow Museum's origin begins with Alberta lawyer and businessman Eric Lafferty Harvie. Harvie was active in the oil and gas industry in the 1920s–30s serving as director of the W. S. Herron's Okaita Oils, and solicitor for British-American Oil's operations in Turner Valley. Beginning in 1941, Harvie purchased mineral rights in the Edmonton region and leased the rights to the Imperial Oil Company which drilled Leduc No. 1, a major oil discovery. Harvie became a millionaire overnight, and after other strikes on his mineral rights in Redwater, Harvie's fortune continued to grow.
Harvie founded the Glenbow Foundation, named after Harvie's ranch and the Canadian Pacific Railway station 1.9 miles east of Cochrane, in 1955 with the goal of promoting a better understanding of the history and heritage of Western Canada, primarily through collecting and preserving art, documents and artifacts. The original goal of the organization was to collect artifacts and rely on partnerships and other museums to exhibit the collection. The foundation was headquartered in the William Roper Hull Ranche House, the former home of prominent businessman and meatpacker William Roper Hull. The early foundation consisted of a library, archives, art collection, Historical research division and the Luxton Museum in Banff, but later expanded to include photography, archaeology, ethnology and a museum division. As the Foundation, the institution funded archeological projects including that of Richard Forbis in 1958-59 at Old Women's Buffalo Jump.
Harvie sought to collect elements of Western Canadian culture and history, which were not highly sought after at the time, allowing the collection to grow quickly with donations deemed by their owners to be "junk", and low cost purchases for the foundation. The foundation's collection quickly outgrew the Hull Ranche House, and collections were moved offsite, including the archaeology division to the University of Calgary when the school founded an archaeology department. Harvie was especially interested in collecting artifacts from Indigenous peoples of North America, which was reflected in his choice of first director of the foundation Douglas Leechman. While the foundation focused on collecting Western Canadian artifacts, Harvie continued to collect artifacts that interested him from all around the world, leading to the foundation to describe two types of collections, Canadiana and Harvieana. After meeting German-American wildlife artist Carl Rungius, Harvie sought to acquire as many of his works as he could, purchasing his entire studio in Banff, and sending employees to New York to purchase any other works they could find, eventually reaching a size of 2,600 works by Rungius. Harvie used his fortune to commission works and bring artists to Alberta from across the world, including John Gilroy and Pilkington Jackson.
Creating the Glenbow–Alberta Institute
In 1964, with the assistance of the Government of Alberta, the Glenbow Foundation - Alberta Government Museum opened with the foundation supplying the exhibits, personnel and expertise, and the Government of Alberta providing the old Calgary courthouse and maintenance costs. The courthouse was found to be too small for the foundation and the exhibits, so later in 1965 the archives and library portion of the foundation moved to the Calgary Public Library Building.