First, a young queen flies two to three kilometres from her hive. It’s a rare moment of solitude—the only time in her life she’s alone. Aside from this flight and to swarm, she never leaves the hive. If she dies, her hive risks dying too, each generation depending on her to reproduce; aside from a few exceptions, the queen is the only reproductive female bee in the hive. Once she reaches the drone gathering area, usually open airspace above a visibly-distinct landmark (perhaps a boulder or a steeple) she mates with ten to twenty drones, or male bees. With this act, the queen packs a lifetime of sperm into her spermatheca — a small pearl-shaped organ located just above her poison sac and stinger. She never has to mate again and, over her two-to-five-year lifespan, will lay 150,000 eggs from spring to fall, hatching into about 1,500 bees per day. During sex, the drone’s phallus explodes, killing him immediately. His purpose singular and disposable, his role complete.

I don’t want sperm delivered like UberEats or bartered for a bottle of rosé on local trade groups — but I do wonder about creating a more collective model of sperm and egg donation. Like my own potential family, honeybees also select one individual to reproduce on the families’ behalf — millenia has taught bees that it is advantageous to divide up this labour. The queen becomes a queen by being fed extra royal jelly: a protein-rich secretion made from digested pollen and honey. These extra delicious helpings let her reproductive system fully form, unlike worker bees, which don’t have complete reproductive systems. They share the rest of the labour. In Canada, queer men are prohibited from donating sperm in the same way that they were banned from donating blood — no dice unless you’ve been abstinent for three months, even if you’re in a long-term monogamous relationship. This denial seems like a missed opportunity — there is a long history of queer people helping each other start families, a sense of reciprocity and generosity that goes beyond heteropatriarchal norms.

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Long before the 1947 Roswell incident brought “little green men” into the public consciousness and prompted an explosion in UFO sightings, writers and scientists have speculated about the existence of life beyond our planet. H. G. Wells laid the groundwork for modern science fiction with novels like The War of the Worlds (1898), one of the first books to imagine an extraterrestrial invasion. Before Wells, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) sparked the imagination by discovering “canals” on Mars. But for the first recorded instance of humanity pondering the possibility of alien life, we have to go all the way back to ancient Greek and Roman times. In the first century B.C., Roman poet Lucretius wrote, “Nothing in the universe is unique and alone and therefore in other regions there must be other earths inhabited by different tribes of men and breeds of beast.” Not exactly a controversial supposition; still, whether or not such tribes have come to our planet remains impossible to prove, and those who claim to have encountered alien beings have long been dismissed.

That said, in recent years, the concept of otherworldly visitors has begun to shift toward the mainstream. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the latest governmental entity devoted to investigating unexplained sightings. Even the term of choice, “UFO,” has given way to “UAP”—unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomenon. And just this June, former U.S. Air Force officer and intelligence official David Grusch claimed that the U.S. government had retrieved remains of several aircraft of “non-human” origin. The fallout from Grusch’s claims is yet to be determined—as is their veracity—but it seems likely that, in the end, the world will settle back into the binary of believers and skeptics, with no concrete evidence to settle the debate. Regardless of which camp you fall into, some of us will always look skyward with hope; we may never be able to scour the entirety of the universe, but it’s hard not to thrill to Lucretius’ logic. In the meantime, the longform articles collected here offer a fascinating glimpse into the UFO community and the stories that have shaped our modern understanding of the topic.

I Want To Believe (Brad Badelt, Maisonneuve, July 2021)

For me, what makes alleged alien encounter testimony so compelling is that—regardless of whether I believe the person’s interpretation of events—the incident had an undeniable and profound effect on their lives. This may not be true in every case, but even if you write off many accounts as delusion or whimsy or simply fiction, you’re still left with a legion of people who have been dramatically changed by their perceived experiences. It’s comforting to know, then, that for those such as Jason Guillemette, a character in this piece about amateur ufologists, communities exist where one can share their experiences without judgment.

In Guillemette’s case, that community is the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a non-profit, volunteer-run organization active in more than 40 countries—and one whose members are as rigidly skeptical as Guillemette. For most MUFON alumni, this is a quest for truth, not validation; members work rigorously to find earthly explanations for reported sightings. And as Badelt widens his scope to other folks in other organizations, you can’t help but be moved by people’s stories. After all, if you were to have a life-changing close encounter, with whom would you share that knowledge?

Most of the time, he’s able to find an explanation, he says. He often sends videos to other volunteers at MUFON who specialize in analyzing computer images. He refers to websites that track the flight patterns of satellites and planes and the International Space Station—the usual suspects when it comes to UFO sightings, he says. Guillemette described a recent case in which a couple reported seeing strange lights hovering above a nearby lake. The lights circled above the lake and then dropped down into the water, only to rise up a moment later and zip away. It turned out to be a plane, he says—filling up with water to fight a nearby forest fire. “Not everybody likes what we come up with,” he says, “but sometimes it’s really evident.”

Crowded Skies (Vaughan Yarwood, New Zealand Geographic, April 1997)

The history of UFO sightings in New Zealand dates back to the early 20^th century. It seems such a tranquil and unassuming country—cinematic hobbit history notwithstanding—which perhaps makes the events recounted here even more unsettling. These are all-too-human tales of altered lives. Some cases, such as that of Iris Catt, a self-proclaimed alien abductee whose nightmarish encounters go back to her childhood, are heartbreakingly tragic. Others follow more positive narratives, believing that aliens are beaming down rays of positivity and openness, gradually bringing humanity to a point where it is ready for formal communication.

When I was at university in the 1990s, “regression therapy”  became big news, with countless stories of trauma-blocked memories and past-life remembrances unearthed through hypnosis. Just as suddenly, regression therapy drowned in a flood of peer-reviewed criticism, relegated to yet another pseudoscience. The concept never went away entirely and it pops up again in Vaughan Yarwood’s story, cautiously approved by academic institutions for its utility in specific circumstances. It’s complex territory, but Yarwood navigates it with clarity and sensitivity.

Iris Catt, a mild-mannered, unprepossessing woman in her 40s, then introduces herself. She is an abductee. It appears certain aliens have had their eye on her from an early age. She recounts her night horrors calmly, the way people do who have learned to accept their scars, to make their hurt and anguish a part of themselves.

“It is happening every day, and it is happening in New Zealand,” says Iris. “It is not going to go away. I truly believe that more and more people are beginning to remember what is happening to them because the time is getting closer when we are going to have to recognise that we are not the only intelligent form of life in the universe.”

Her audience understands. She is among friends.

Alien Nation (Ralph Blumenthal, Vanity Fair, May 2013)

Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Edward Mack spent many years engaging with people who claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials, in the process becoming a pioneer in his field. Not surprisingly, he attracted resistance from the scientific community—less because of his work than because, over time, he came to the startling and highly controversial conclusion that a number of alleged abductees were telling the truth. Mack’s research may be little remembered by his profession at large, but his warmth, humanity, and faith continue to inspire hope in a small community that gathers annually in Rhode Island. They prefer the term “experiencer” to “abductee,” and in this Vanity Fair feature Ralph Blumenthal interweaves their stories with Mack’s.

Once again, for me, the fascination of this piece lies in the stories of these everyday folks. To some degree, it doesn’t matter what they actually experienced. What counts, as Mack understood, is they have experienced something, and that something left a profound mark on their lives. In seeking to apply rigor and structure to the stories he was collecting, Mack plowed a hard path with poise and compassion. As this piece eloquently shows, his work was not in vain.

“Nothing in my nearly 40 years of familiarity with psychiatry prepared me,” Mack later wrote in his 1994 best-seller, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. He had always assumed that anyone claiming to have been abducted by aliens was crazy, along with those who took them seriously. But here were people—students, homemakers, secretaries, writers, businesspeople, computer technicians, musicians, psychologists, a prison guard, an acupuncturist, a social worker, a gas-station attendant—reporting experiences that Mack could not begin to fathom, things, he reflected, that by all notions of reality “simply could not be.”

One Man’s Quest to Investigate the Mysterious “Wow!” Signal (Keith Cooper, Supercluster, August 2022)

I have long been fascinated with the so-called Wow signal, received in 1977 by Ohio University’s Big Ear radio telescope, which was then being used to search for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. The tale of the signal makes for a great story in itself, but Keith Cooper’s piece sees that as merely a starting point. His narrative finds a central character in a man named Robert Gray: While the scientific community, including SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), gradually lowered the Wow signal to the status of “interesting curio,” Gray remained convinced that there was more to uncover.

Gray’s tenacity and belief in the face of mounting opposition is remarkable. Struggling for funding, unsuccessfully attempting to enlist help, and bartering for much-needed time on a limited number of radio telescopes, the frustrations he must have experienced make the twists in his story all the more poignant. Just when his enthusiasm began to wane, his work seemingly at a dead end, an exoplanet scientist reached out to Gray with a fresh idea, breathing new life into the man’s relentless quest. There is no neat, satisfying definitive end to this tale, but perhaps therein lies the true glory of Gray’s work. In the face of uncertainty, he carried on until the very end.

Nobody knows what the Wow signal was. We do know that it was not a regular astrophysical object, such as a galaxy or a pulsar. Curious the frequency that it was detected at, 1,420 MHz, is the frequency emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms in space, but it is also the frequency that scientists hunting for alien life listen to. Their reasoning is that aliens will supposedly know that astronomers will already be listening to that frequency in their studies of galactic hydrogen and so should easily detect their signal – or so the theory goes. Yet there was no message attached to the signal. It was just a burst of raw radio energy.

If SETI had a mythology, then the Wow signal would be its number one myth. And while it has never been forgotten by the public, the academic side of SETI has, by and large, dismissed it, quite possibly because it hasn’t been seen to repeat, and therefore cannot be verified—the golden rule of a successful SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) detection.

How Harry Reid, a Terrorist Interrogator and the Singer from Blink-182 Took UFOs Mainstream (Bryan Bender, Politico, May 2021)

Celebrities who have copped to believing in UFOs are numerous enough to populate a listicle. Politicians? Not so much. Yet, the U.S. Congress’ House Oversight Committee has announced plans for a hearing regarding UAP reports, and if you trace the conversation  back a few years, you’ll find that this shift is at least partly thanks to the protagonists in this story: former U.S. senator Harry Reid and Tom DeLonge, a founding member of pop-punk band Blink 182.

There’s a lot to digest here. It’s a wonderful example of hidden history: a small group of like-minded individuals working behind the scenes to advance their cause, with potentially wide-ranging repercussions. That history would be far less engaging, however, were it not for Tom DeLonge’s gregarious personality and indefatigable belief in alien visitors. His company, To The Stars, devotes considerable time and money to researching UAPs and extraterrestrial matters in general; Bryan Bender’s feature tells the story of how the singer managed to recruit experts and politicians to his cause.

Hanging on DeLonge’s wall was what might be considered the medals he’s collected in his struggle: a display case filled with dozens of commemorative coins from his meetings with generals, aerospace contractors and secret government agencies. They trace his visits to the CIA, to the U.S. Navy, to the “advanced development programs” division at Lockheed Martin’s famously secretive “Skunk Works” in Southern California, where some of the world’s most advanced spy planes were designed.

Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.

Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy Editor: Krista Stevens

I can’t tell you what my partner sees when they look at my body, nor what my coworkers see when I turn on my Zoom camera. I struggle to build my digital avatar. Yes, I have brown hair and brown eyes. No, I am not very tall. Beyond that—the shape of my face, the width of my hips and thighs—is a mystery to me. I’ve searched for myself in puddles and in bathwater, in dressing rooms and at golden hour. Pictures and videos show me someone brand new, so I look harder; not for beauty, not always, but for some consistent self-outline.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Sam Biddle, Leah Sottile, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Megan I. Gannon, and Justin Brake.

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1. The Future Dystopic Hellscape is Upon Us

Sam Biddle | The Intercept | July 5, 2021 | 12,142 words

“The rise and fall of the ultimate doomsday prepper.”

2. How a Trail in Rural Oregon Became a Target of Far-Right Extremism

Leah Sottile | High Country News | July 1, 2021 | 6,150

“A story about a community divided, about extremism and bigotry, about powerful people who try on a working-class identity like a costume.”

3. The Endless Robbing of Native American Graves

Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson | The Washington Post Magazine | July 12, 2021 | 6,114 words

“We have taken Native lands and tried to eradicate Indigenous societies, yet it’s not only what we’ve done to the living that is so deplorable. It’s what we’ve done, and continue to do, to the dead.”

4. Hot Streak

Megan I. Gannon | Popular Science | June 29, 2020 | 2,620 words

Venus is similar to Earth in size and composition, but extreme conditions made it a hellscape. Devoted researchers want to know what caused the planets’ wildly divergent paths. Now they finally have their chance.

5. KTAQMKUK

Justin Brake | Maisonneuve | June 29, 2021 | 7,269 words

“TallBear, a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota, says thinking about building healthy relations instead of solidifying an identity is a more ethical approach for those trying to make sense of their Indigenous ancestry.”

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen, and Paul Kiel, Arno Kopecky, Isaac Würmann, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, and Laura Spinney.

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1. The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax

Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen, Paul Kiel | ProPublica | June 8, 2021 | 5,717 words

“ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.”

2. Three Days in the Theater of Old-Growth Logging and Protest

Arno Kopecky | Hakai Magazine | June 1, 2021 | 6,100

“A drama 150 years in the making is playing out as logging companies and police clash with First Nations and protesters over one of British Columbia’s last remaining stands of unprotected old-growth forest.”

3. The Men in Apartment 4C

Isaac Würmann | Maisonneuve | May 11, 2021 | 5,738 words

“When Isaac Würmann’s relationship began to crumble, he started seeking out examples of queer love elsewhere. It turns out, he didn’t have to look far.”

4. La Cancion de la Nena

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal | Oxford American | June 1, 2021 | 6,937 words

“He sits on the edge of the bed to compose and work through songs, facing an amp, while I curl into his velvet-lined guitar case and listen…I have called up this memory so many times I feel the gauze of fiction starting to overlay its details. But it is a memory so dear, I reanimate it against the heaviness of the present—my father, full of promise and possibility, years before the shell he would become, now shut away in my childhood bedroom in the graying light of ever-closed blinds.”

5. The Elephant Vanishes: How a Circus Family Went on the Run

Laura Spinney | The Guardian | June 8, 2021 | 5,455 words

“Today, many circus elephants in Europe are reaching old age. Campaigners want them placed in specially built sanctuaries, where they can enjoy retirement with their own kind. But their owners insist that for the elephants, being separated from their human “families” would be traumatic.”

This week, we’re sharing stories from Breai Mason-Campbell, Simon J. Levien, Paola Capó-García, Emma Gilchrist, and Liam Boylan-Pett.

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1. Seeing in the Dark

Breai Mason-Campbell | Pipe Wrench | April 13, 2021 | 5,129 words

“I have to wear all of these dolls, you see, so that Whiteness does not have to wear any.”

2. The Crimson Klan

Simon J. Levien | The Harvard Crimson | March 25, 2021 | 4616 words

Exploring the history of the Ku Klux Klan’s presence at Harvard University.

3. Making Sense Of It All: High School Poetry in the Age of Zoom

Paola Capó-García | Teachers & Writers Magazine | April 5, 2021 | 2,260 words

“I believe that one of our most important roles as teachers is to provide authentic opportunities for young people to heal.”

4. Genetic Mapping

Emma Gilchrist | Maisonneuve | April 12, 2021 | 6,900 words

“Here’s what I know for sure: I have three fathers who love me. One is my true dad—the man who raised me and has always told me ‘the more people who love you the better.’ One has the softest heart and shares my experience of being adopted. And one feels like a soulmate even though we’ve never met.”

5. Ready

Liam Boylan-Pett | Lope | March 29, 2021 | 2,900 words

“On the start of a cross-country race.”

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Cleaning our basement recently, I found a box of old Canadian magazines. The covers were crisp, the bindings intact. Published between 2011 and 2013, I’d gathered these issues of The Walrus and Maisonneuve as research for an abandoned book project. Curious about what was inside, I sat down with them and a pot of very British black tea — the kind The Empress Hotel serves with tiny sandwiches in Victoria, British Columbia.

People call The Walrus the Canadian New Yorker. Maisonneuve was named Magazine of the Year in 2005, 2012, and 2016. Between their striking glossy covers I found the stylish, substantial writing these magazines are still known for, and stories both evergreen and of their time: stories about food, sex, drugs, immigration, politics, Indigenous rights, art, and the environment.

Thumbing through old magazines can be fun. Dated advertisements reveal bizarre worldviews and outdated thinking, like the doctors who famously preferred Camel cigarettes, and a mid-century ad I found featuring two poodles smoking the Old Gold brand. Those were the days. Back issues also capture a country’s struggles, its psyche, mythology, and national narratives, and these Canadian issues returned me to a particular time in my own life.

Years ago, I pitched an idea for a book called Canphilia to a literary agent. Philia is a suffix denoting love or an affection for something, and I loved Canada. The title was too scientific for a first-person narrative travelogue in search of the Canadian national identity, but I was younger then, and that was the best I could come up with.

Covering 3,854,085 square miles, Canada is the second-largest country in the world. Canada and the United States share the world’s longest international border, yet few Americans can name half of the 10 provinces let alone name beloved Canadian icons or defining cultural characteristics. “To outsiders,” my proposal said, “Canada seems like the perfect country: scenic, peaceful, friendly, progressive. Its national parks are the envy of the developed world. The country has one of the highest standards of living on earth, a functioning public health system, and it’s the only G8 country with balanced books. Canada legalized same-sex marriage in 2005, outlawed the death penalty, and operates North America’s only federally authorized drug injection site. Naturally, when people talk about it, most utter some variation of, Ah, I love Canada. But beyond vague notions of Britishness, hockey, and maple syrup production, what do we really know about it?” One thing I knew was that living next to one of the most loud-mouthed, aggressive, arrogant countries in history could make any neighboring country appear quiet, peaceful, and humble. Or maybe their voice was drowned out by all of our patriotic, idiotic, saber-rattling nonsense.

The vast majority of Canada’s 38 million inhabitants lived in larger urban centers within 125 miles of the US border, so I planned to drive, hike, and ferry across the entire country, from west to east, sticking to the border, to investigate. “More importantly,” my proposal said, “do we even know what makes a Canadian a Canadian? What they stand for? How they think and act? And what do they think of us, anyway?”

I was ambitious and slightly bananas, and I wanted to do for Canada what Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones did for China, and Ian Frazier’s The Great Plains did for the American Midwest: write a vivid, nuanced, humorous portrait of a people and their homeland, that would appeal to a general readership and enlighten myself as much as my fellow Americans. In addition to Canada’s national character, I would interrogate my own interest, search for the reasons so many of us disgruntled Americans fall under the country’s spell. Obviously Canada wasn’t perfect, with its clear-cut logging and historically egregious treatment of Indigenous people. I wanted to examine Canada’s contradictions, and debunk popular stereotypes. I wasn’t interested so much in defining “constitutional monarchy” or “parliamentary democracy” for American readers, or helping them reconcile Canada’s independence with its connection to the Queen. I was interested in profiling the personality of the Canadian people and their culture while trying to figure out why I longed to live somewhere I knew so little about.

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The agent loved the idea, but we never shopped it to publishers. I couldn’t afford to take enough of the trip to write any sample chapters, and supposedly, Americans don’t care enough about Canada to read books about it. I filed “the Canada book” away in the back of my mind as I developed other niche book ideas that never sold, because that’s the kind of writer I am. As I moved around, my Canada books and back issues came with me.

After reading these issues, I thought it’d be fun to assemble some of their stories, which reveal new sides of Canada to outsiders like me (and maybe you). This is not meant as a definitive Canada reading list. It’s a sample of what I pulled from one stack of issues from 2011 — 2013. That makes this collection more of a tiny time capsule, an incomplete portrait of a particular place in time. Actual Canadians can gather more wide-ranging, complete lists that capture the totality of Canada, its breadth and depth. These older stories also provide an interesting baseline to compare Canada now with Canada then. After reading them, I wondered: Has Canadian secondary education improved? Is Kraft mac ’n cheese still Canada’s national dish? What happened to that hyped comedy troupe Picnicface? Here they are in chronological order, with their subheads included as description. None of these stories feature hockey or The Tragically Hip, but one is about Labatt beer. Part of Canada’s identity involves outsiders’ reliance on cliché. Enjoy, eh?

* * *

“Going Viral” (Maisonneuve, Kaitlin Fontana, Summer 2011)

“This fall, the sketch comedy group and online-video machine Picnicface will simultaneously launch a feature-length movie, a TV show, and a book. Can eight nerds from Halifax resuscitate Canada’s ailing comedy scene?”

In Halifax, far from the showbiz machine, Picnicface has been free to both develop a unique voice in front of a warm audience, and to cultivate a show without fear of high-profile failure. McKinney likes that the group is from Halifax—it reminds him of his early days in Calgary, before he moved to Toronto. “If they’d been born in LA, they’d have all been poached before they could create this voice that develops between like-minded people, this ecosystem that happens in smaller places,” he says. Halifax, for Picnicface, is an incubator. Little goes further: “We’ve done some garbage here, but I’m really happy we did, because it helped mold us.”

“Canada’s Most Unwanted” (The Walrus, Jasmine Budak, December 2011)

“Domestic adoption is rarely the first choice for prospective parents. But with rising infertility rates and the availability of foreign infants declining, some 30,000 children in government care have a better shot at finding a family.”

Canadians have long adopted from abroad, but largely for humanitarian reasons, in spurts and small numbers: orphans of the Irish famine, World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars; and, later, in the mid-’70s, from orphanages in Cambodia, Bangladesh, India, and Latin America, through Ottawa’s newly established national Adoption Desk. But over the next two decades, as adoption became normalized and the supply of domestic infants began to wane, inter-country adoption became less about finding parents for destitute babies and more about finding babies for hopeful parents. It was no longer motivated by goodwill, but rather became a transaction in the business of fulfilling the developed world’s growing demand for infants.

“Visions of the Future” (Maisonneuve, Chandler Levack, Summer 2012)

“A twenty-four-year-old singer named Grimes is the world’s hottest independent pop star, and her fame has cast Montreal into the spotlight yet again.”

Grimes’ success and the exposure she’s brought her Arbutus label-mates—Sean Nicholas Savage, TOPS and TONSTARTSSBANDHT, among others—have made Montreal a high-profile indie-rock hotspot once again, reminiscent of the time, several years ago, when Arcade Fire attracted the world’s attention to the city. Although Montreal has plenty of other worthy independent labels, like Secret City and Alien8, the rise of Grimes has made Arbutus a litmus test for the promise of the city’s young musicians. Today’s tastemakers are fickle, and too much hype can cause a community to cannibalize itself—especially one as small and tight-knit as Montreal’s music scene. As Morrissey once said, “We hate it when our friends become successful.”

“Calgary Reconsidered” (The Walrus, Chris Turner, June 2012)

“Six truths about the city that’s no longer, simply, Cowtown.”

Even if you love the city deep down, you sometimes feel as if you’re merely putting up with it, waiting for it to grow all the way up and become what it pretends to be. Calgary is an overnight millionaire fresh from the sale of a gas exploration company, complaining about the greed of all those farmers who jacked up the lease rates. Calgary is the home riding of the prime minister abutting the home riding of the premier, and still insisting that it doesn’t get a fair shake in Ottawa or Edmonton. Calgary is the highest per capita income in Canada in a province with no sales tax, indignant that its property taxes are going up. Its conservatism sometimes scans as a youngster’s I-got-mine insolence. Its emerging power and prominence come across from some angles as pure teenage bluster.

“The Hunter Artist” (The Walrus, Sarah Milroy, July/August 2012)

“In Cape Dorset, Nunavut, a new generation is redefining Inuit art, preserving northern traditions as it adapts to southern ways of life. One of these artists is Tim Pitsiulak.”

Whites imagine Inuit, and Inuit imagine whites; Inuit art is where their fantasies meet, but the interface is changing. Kinngait continues to release its annual portfolio of about forty prints, as it has for more than fifty years. Despite stars like Kenojuak, prices for the prints have remained fairly consistent and modest, in the $500 to $2,500 range. But one-of-a-kind drawings are gaining a following and, as with the prints, the prices are regulated by Dorset Fine Arts, the co-op’s Toronto distributor, which sends the art to dealers across Canada and around the world, who then charge what the market will bear. Pitsiulak’s largest and best drawings can now sell for as much as $12,500, making him one of the most successful artists in the North. His aunt Kenojuak’s best works sell for around $16,000. Shuvinai Ashoona’s prices are close behind Pitsiulak’s and rising fast. This phenomenon of individual artists’ commanding widely differing levels of remuneration could someday lead to a break with the old co-op way of doing things, in which the revenue from higher-priced artists supports the costs of maintaining the studio and distribution, helping to fund the production of those artists who are less likely to sell. Inuit artists in Cape Dorset may hesitate to abandon a system that has afforded them predictable prices for pieces on completion (as well as studio space and material costs), irrespective of the vagaries of the southern art market.

“Manufacturing Taste” (The Walrus, Sasha Chapman, September 2012)

“The (un)natural history of Kraft Dinner — a dish that has shaped not only what we eat, but also who we are.”

The point is, it’s nearly impossible to live in Canada without forming an opinion about one of the world’s first and most successful convenience foods. In 1997, sixty years after the first box promised “dinner in seven minutes — no baking required,” we celebrated by making Kraft Dinner the top-selling grocery item in the country.

This makes KD, not poutine, our de facto national dish. We eat 3.2 boxes each in an average year, about 55 percent more than Americans do. We are also the only people to refer to Kraft Dinner as a generic for instant mac and cheese. The Barenaked Ladies sang wistfully about eating the stuff: “If I had a million dollars / we wouldn’t have to eat Kraft Dinner / But we would eat Kraft Dinner / Of course we would, we’d just eat more.” In response, fans threw boxes of KD at the band members as they performed. This was an act of veneration.

“John Cage’s Canada” (Maisonneuve, Crystal Chan, Fall 2012)

“The twentieth century’s most important avant-garde composer may have been American, Crystal Chan writes, but he found his greatest inspiration north of the border.”

On a Thursday night in August 1961, Cage took the podium at Montreal’s Théâtre de la Comédie-Canadienne and moved his arms in a circle, imitating the hands of a clock. In response, eighteen musicians began to play. The piece, called Atlas Eclipticalis, was Cage’s first Canadian premiere, and he had written it by matching notes to star positions in an astronomical atlas. At the time, the whole world had its eyes on the stars; earlier that spring, a Soviet cosmonaut had beaten the Americans to space. Composing music with the help of astronomy was still an eccentric method, though, and one that marked an important shift in Cage’s career. After Atlas Eclipticalis, Cage moved away from writing music with notes, rests and other conventional symbols. Instead, he went on to create graphic scores—essentially, drawn music—and write textual instructions. He started to see himself as a creator of experiences through sound, rather than a composer of music.

“The Place Where Art Sleeps” (Maisonneuve, Chris Hampton, Fall 2012)

“The vast majority of the art gallery of Ontario’s priceless collection isn’t on display — it’s tucked away in high-security, top-secret vaults.”

Of the AGO’s eighty-five-thousand-piece permanent collection, only about 3,900 works are on display right now. At any given time, 95 percent of the collection is in storage. Paintings, sculptures and installations account for roughly eleven thousand pieces in the vaults, while photography and works on paper make up the other seventy thousand. This isn’t unique to the AGO. Art institutions are a bit like icebergs; the public sees less than a tenth of their holdings. But that may finally be changing. While security and conservation remain top priorities, galleries are beginning to experiment with new ways for the public to engage with their broader collections. Visitors increasingly want to see everything—including what’s behind the scenes.

“Doppel Gang: Why Canada Needs Quebec” (The Walrus, Mark Kingwell, January/February 2013)

“Why Canada needs Quebec.”

Yes, there it is. Quebec is Canada’s familiar-strange double, a return of the repressed, so like the rest of the country and yet so minutely, eerily different. Are they plotting something large and secretive, some kind of surprise secession? Probably not. No, they probably just want things to go on like this more or less forever, teetering between passive entitlement and passionate outrage, sketching a glorious future free of any reality principle.

“Unmasked” (Maisonneuve, Andrea Bennet, March, 2013)

“Before the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto, police infiltrated activist communities as part of a massive, costly campaign that resulted in high-profile arrests and prosecutors. Who were these undercovers, and how did they avoid scrutiny?”

Guelph was also home, in the lead-up to the G20 summit, to a branch of one of the largest undercover police operations in Canadian history. The $676 million security bill for the G20 summit and its G8 counterpart—which was held on June 25 and 26 in Huntsville, Ontario—included funding for an eighteen-month-long infiltration of activist communities, from January 2009 through June 2010. The Joint Intelligence Group, a well-staffed network of OPP and RCMP officers based in Barrie, Ontario, carried out this investigation. According to the JIG Operational Plan, the effort included twelve “trained covered  investigators,” as well as commanders, managers, and technical and office support. Over the course of those eighteen months, JIG made $8 million worth of capital purchases and had a $297 million operational budget. It set up commander offices, a project room, workstations—and, during the G20 summit itself, an operational “War Room.”

“Fight of the Bumblebee” (The Walrus, Sasha Chapman, March 2013)

“Honeybee colonies are collapsing around the world, putting food production in danger. We may need Canada’s indigenous pollinators to save the day.”

South of Detroit and Windsor, sandwiched between Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair, the flat lines of Essex County farmland carve the southern tip of Ontario into tidy rectangular parcels of fertile, well-drained soil. When you approach Leamington from Highway 401, it is difficult to imagine this area as the nearly impenetrable forest it once was, or that the fires lit by would-be farmers to clear the land once burned so brightly they could be seen 500 kilometres west in Chicago. Today the aerial view looks more like a semi-industrial park, because the area is dominated by gunmetal grey–framed greenhouses. With some 355 hectares under greenhouse vegetable production, more than anywhere else in North America, the region’s output is larger than the entire industry in the US, and growing much faster than other types of agriculture.

“First Do No Harm” (Maisonneuve, Ann Silversides, April 2013)

“Are doctors and drug companies to blame for the opioid-abuse crisis? After two shocking deaths in small-town Ontario, Ann Silversides reports from one of the largest coroner’s inquests in Canadian history.“

When the call came, Detective Tom Fournier had made it as far as the outskirts of Brockville on the ninety-minute drive home to his wife and daughters in Ottawa. He returned to the police station, called the coroner and headed to 89 King Street West. The scene at apartment C1 shocked him, and became the basis for one of the most extensive coroner’s inquests ever held in Canada—the first in Ontario to highlight the rising death rates from prescription painkillers and, in particular, OxyContin.

“Under the Influence” (The Walrus, Matthew J. Bellamy, June 2013)

“Beer is to Canada as wine is to France. How Labatt and its allies brewed up a nation of beer drinkers.”

Before the Black Christmas of 1936, Mackenzie approached J. Walter Thompson Co., a major global advertising agency. Mark Napier of the Toronto office had an uncanny feel for the cultural logic of the age, and wanted to portray brewers like Labatt as instrumental, not detrimental, to the nation’s development. In a series of advertisements published in the national monthly Canadian Homes and Gardens, he highlighted Labatt’s long, influential past. “It really all began 70 years ago,” read the text of one ad in 1937, under the tag line “Then As Now.” In others, he linked the company’s evolution to watershed moments in our history, such as Confederation and the Boer War, when “soldiers knew good ale.” As Canadians searched for uniquely Canadian ideas, events, experiences, and commodities—the makings of a national identity—Napier served up Labatt’s product as an age-old piece of Canadiana.

“The Marineland Dreamland” (The Walrus, Craig Davidson, July/August 2013

“Deconstructing memories of a scandal-ridden theme park.”

I worked at Marineland for eight summers. Brendan Kelly, six years. Phil Demers, twelve. It paid our rent and put beer in our fridges. Best summers of my life. To a man, we spoke those words.

It makes you wonder. What if, rather than fabrication, “The Tale of the Frozen Sea Lion” was an act of erasure? My unconscious mind embarking on a sly mission of disburdenment, of purposeful forgetting? If I forget enough, if my own story fills with holes, I can tell myself it’s a lie. And that’s easier, overall. Easier than holding on to the knowledge for twenty-plus years, doing nothing meaningful about it. Easier than remembering how I laughed as my supervisor kicked a dead sea lion.

In April 2020, Mark and Tammy Drysdale moved to the 2,500-person town of Grand Bend, Ontario and bought a shuttered roadside zoo. Then they started filling the property with lions, goats, lemurs, and various exotic animals. Unfortunately, their property was no longer zoned for zoos. It was now zoned residential. The outspoken owner, Mark, claimed his lions were basically domesticated cats, and local bylaws allowed domesticated animals. Certain neighbors said otherwise, and they worked to close down the zoo. For the Canadian quarterly magazine Maisonneuve, Kieran Delamont writes about the town’s struggle with the zoo, and what larger social and economic forces this resistence represents. Delamont sees the zoo as a barometer of town health, a way to measure the distance between the rich and poor, the past and the future, and the thin threads that often bind communities like Grand Bend, which only has one intersection.

None of it is enough, for Drysdale at least, so he keeps adding new animals to the mix like a roughshod Noah stocking his arc. In September, a baby zebra is born. In October, another lion cub arrives. These kinds of home-brew zoos have existed in Ontario for at least a hundred years—a network that, in the vacuum created by a lack of regulations, sprang up alongside the growing highway network. With a little ingenuity, and some cash on hand, these animals are not as hard to acquire as people imagine. Twice a year, an “Odd and Unusual” animal auction is held somewhere in southern Ontario, functioning like a trading post. Exotic cats are still a somewhat prized auction item, but someone could expect to see lynx, lemurs, llamas, reptiles, even wolves, up for sale. This exotic animal community is a tradition of rural Ontario, and Drysdale is deeply entrenched in it.

But if there’s no space for Drysdale in today’s Grand Bend, it’s at least partly because today’s Grand Bend is different from that old Grand Bend. The town has always been a place filled with lake people—its own Ontario character type, comprising enthusiastic cottagers and the more grizzly beachfront locals. Lake people earnestly own painted Adirondack chairs, insist on idiosyncratic house rules to various card games and probably have at least one nautically decorated bathroom. Every year since I was a baby, we lake people show up in Grand Bend for May Two-Four weekend and leave as late as we can on Labour Day.

It’s always been a culture of the leisured middle class, catered to by the labour of teenagers at the ice cream stand, supplied by travelling salesmen of the flea market, entertained by the hospitality of people like Drysdale who opened little roadside businesses and simply let the tourists come to them. But that kind of economic rejuvenation, it seems, may no longer be the kind people want.

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Almost six months after she was hired, the shop had an opening for a full-time mechanic. Layton wasn’t moved into the position, as she’d been promised. Instead, the store hired a young man who hadn’t gone to bike school, and whose experience came from volunteering at the same bike shop where Layton had previously worked. “On his first day,” she says, “he overtightened a seatcollar on a carbon seatpost and cracked it, smashed it. I fucking would have known not to do that.”

Layton was never explicitly told that she wasn’t going to be moved into the full-time mechanic position. Instead, her bosses “hired around” her, evading her questions when she pressed them about when she’d get to start working on bikes. While she doesn’t hold a grudge against the mechanic who broke the seatpost, she’s irked that the shop manager and owner weren’t upfront with her about what they thought her capabilities were. “I took a huge pay cut, making a quarter of what I was making to work there, because I was promised that I would be hired as a mechanic,” she says. “And I never once had a bench of my own to work on.”

In Maissoneuve, journalist Andrea Bennett writes about the ways Canadian female bike mechanics are dismantling cycling’s highly stratified, male-centric culture and increasing access for female cyclists.

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Nadim Roberts | Maisonneuve | Spring 2015 | 12 minutes (2,885 words)

The following Longreads Exclusive comes from journalist Nadim Roberts and Montreal-based Maisonneuve magazine.

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One morning in March 2014, shortly after returning to his home in Iran, sculptor Parviz Tanavoli awoke to the sound of his daughter’s screams. About twenty men had broken the locks on his front door and entered his house. It looked like the clumsiest art heist in history, but this ragtag group worked for the municipality of Tehran. They were there on strict orders to confiscate Tanavoli’s artwork.

The men ignored Tanavoli’s plea to show some identification or documentation. They carried millions of dollars worth of sculptures to the front door, where cranes waited to lift them onto trucks. One of the heaviest pieces, a bronze rectangle inscribed with indecipherable calligraphy, was hoisted on a rotting wooden pallet. The platform groaned as it cracked under the weight of the sculpture. “Bring it higher,” said one of the men. With a feeble thud, it hit the pavement. The works, many of which were damaged, were driven to city-owned warehouses, places where things go to disappear.

Twelve years ago, Tanavoli partnered with Tehran’s municipal government to create a museum in his name. His work is displayed in the world’s greatest galleries, including the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but he had always dreamed of having a permanent Iranian home for his sculptures.The city purchased and displayed fifty-seven pieces. The museum was open for nine days. On the tenth, following the orders of Tehran’s newly appointed mayor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a group of men shut it down and appropriated every sculpture.

Tanavoli took the city to court to get his works back. Only eleven of the fifty-seven pieces were returned and then the municipal court of Tehran reversed its decision without explanation.

From the moment Prophet Muhammad smashed the idols at the Kaaba, sculptures have been a controversial art form in the Middle East. In 2001, the Taliban declared that two ancient Buddha statues carved into the side of a cliff in central Afghanistan were idols. They were promptly blown up with dynamite.

Tanavoli was the first person to mount a solo sculpture exhibition in modern Iran. His sales at auction in the past eight years total over $8 million US.

A decade after Iran’s 1979 revolution, Tanavoli left the country that had inspired his greatest work. The artist, now seventy-eight, spends most of the year in his West Vancouver home overlooking the Howe Sound. He works out of a small studio attached to his house, with posters from his many international exhibitions displayed on the walls. Tanavoli’s hair is still thick, many shades lighter than his dark eyebrows. His is the compact body of a man who has spent six decades on his feet, working with his hands.

There is a system of politeness in Iranian culture called taarof. Iranians protest any compliment and belittle any accomplishment so as to appear humble and meek. Every Iranian knows that it’s all a big spectacle, but they all still play along. In the many hours I spend with Tanavoli, he doesn’t taarof once. His humility is not contrived or manufactured. Reflecting on his life, Tanavoli thinks of himself as both a skilled craft worker and a world-renowned sculptor. One title he has given himself is that of the heech-maker: the maker of nothing.

The heech is depicted in Tanavoli’s most iconic sculpture. It is composed of three letters in calligraphic form which spell “nothing.” He has been making versions for fifty years. Through the dramatic changes that successive regimes have wrought on his home country, Tanavoli and his heech have survived. Artists, Tanavoli says, “are born to analyze whatever is experienced in life. Art is the most honest phenomena of our time.”

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Tanavoli was born in 1937, a few years before Tehran’s ancient walls and gates were replaced with wide streets influenced by the gridiron plans of modern cities. The new shah was eager for Iran to catch up to the west, and that meant more than urban planning: he invested in culture, founding Iran’s first arts high school. Tanavoli’s parents were part of an emerging, less-traditional middle class. At sixteen, after reading a book about the life of Michelangelo, Tanavoli became one of the first students at the school. There was no one in the country who could teach sculpture, so a painter was hired instead. By the time Tanavoli graduated, he was eager to learn more. He found a spot on a cargo plane and, armed with two dictionaries (one Persian-English and one English-Italian) he headed to Carrara, Italy. Carrara marble had been used to build everything from the Pantheon to Michelangelo’s “David.” Here, Tanavoli was known simply as the “Persiano.” Tanavoli jokes that no one had seen an Iranian in Carrara since the time of the Romans. It was his first time travelling to the west, and while it opened up countless new avenues for him to learn his chosen craft, he missed Tehran. He found solace in his art and a book by the Sufi poet Rumi.

Within a year, Tanavoli ran out of money. His parents sent him silk embroideries from Iran that he could sell in Carrara, but he soon had to return to Tehran. He arrived home in 1958 with a plan: he would set about creating the country’s first solo sculpture exhibition, and with the money made from the sale of his work, he would return to Italy.

Tanavoli compares his discovery of south Tehran’s blacksmith and welders’ workshops to El Dorado. But it wasn’t gold that Tanavoli found, it was scrap metal. Using the materials, he began weaving together historic figures from Persian folklore. One piece reimagined King Darius the Great in irregular dimensions. When Tanavoli mounted the works, patrons became enraged at seeing beloved characters depicted like broken robots. Heated debates filled the exhibit halls. Some of the sculptures were smashed. “Iranians believed in fine art, fine silk and fine carpets,” Tanavoli says. “They did not expect me to take their heroes and love stories and present them using junkyard metals.” He only sold one or two pieces, but to Tanavoli, the exhibit was a success. His work had provoked the conservative cultural scene.

Tanavoli fell into debt after the exhibit, and there was little hope he would return to school abroad. But a few days later, some optimism appeared on the front pages of Iran’s newspapers. The Shah decided that his mission to modernize the country required a new strategy. Scholarships in one hundred fields from medicine to liberal arts would be offered to Iran’s brightest students so they could attend elite universities in the west and return home to educate an entire generation. Sculpture was one of the areas of study considered essential for the country’s future. Tanavoli received a scholarship and went back to Italy, this time to Milan.

Brera Academy, where Tanavoli would study, was home to some of Italy’s finest sculptors. But the city lacked the excitement of the workshops in south Tehran. “In Iran, I had access to all sorts of resources: the bazaars, the mosque, the shrines. And every day I came back with some ideas,” Tanavoli says. During this period, there was one character he kept recreating. It was a man, stretched out horizontally, stiff and motionless.

The subject would remain with Tanavoli for many years. His name was Farhad the Mountain Carver.

* * *

The tale of Farhad, a young sculptor who worked in the court of King Khosrow II, is one of Tanavoli’s favourites. Farhad was hopelessly in love with an Armenian princess named Shirin, who also happened to be the King’s love interest.

When Khosrow learned of Farhad’s love for Shirin, he sent him to Mount Behistun and struck a deal. If Farhad could sculpt a tunnel through the mountain, he would be allowed to marry Shirin. For years Farhad chiseled his way through unyielding rock. When it seemed he may actually complete the challenge, Khosrow sent a messenger to fool Farhad into thinking that Shirin had died. Farhad climbed the summit of the mountain and fell to his death. Shirin was heartbroken when she learned of the sculptor’s fate. “Farhad is a lover who remained faithful in his love,” says Tanavoli. “He is also a man of resistance who made the impossible possible.”

Not long after the sculptor’s fall from the mountain, the King received a letter from a man who claimed to be a messenger of God. The missive asked Khosrow to embrace a new religion called Islam. Khosrow, a Zoroastrian, tore the paper to shreds and commanded his governor in the province of Yemen bring this messenger, Muhammad, before him. Muhammad refused and, instead, predicted that Khosrow would soon lose his throne and his empire. The words came true. “Farhad falling off the mountain was the death of the art of sculpture in Iran,” Tanavoli says. “After Farhad’s passing and the spread of Islam, all sculptures were banned.”

Tanavoli began to see himself as a resurrected Farhad, risen from the grave to revive an art form that had been lost for a millennium. By sculpting the Mountain Carver over and over again, Tanavoli was chiseling off the influence of every teacher and government official who had ever criticized or tried to direct his work. He was creating a new tradition of sculpture in Iran, and finding his own unique voice.

* * *

At the Tehran Biennale in 1960, Farah Pahlavi, Iran’s young and glamorous new queen, took notice of Tanavoli’s sculpture of Farhad, and he made his first major sale. Pahlavi was an architecture student living in France when she first met the Shah in 1958. “Art for me was very important,” says Pahlavi, who now lives in exile in Potomac, Maryland and Paris. “I believed that a country could not move ahead without culture. Our poets, painters, sculptors and filmmakers were just as important to modernization as our economy or infrastructure.” While her husband went about building roads and the military, the Queen brought back thousands of historic Persian artifacts from private collections and galleries and built scores of museums to house these recovered artifacts.

In the 1970s, when the country’s oil revenues increased, Pahlavi founded the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Here she displayed what would eventually become the most expensive collection of modern art outside Europe and North America, estimated to be worth over $2.8 billion US. It included over one hundred works by artists such as Bacon, Gaugin, Johns, Lichtenstein, Magritte, Picasso and Pollock. Most important for the Queen, however, was that the works of the great artists of the west should sit next to those by Iranian artists such as Tanavoli.

The Queen’s eight-thousand-square-foot private library at Niavaran Palace was home to a collection of twenty-three thousand books and more than 350 paintings and sculptures from her personal collection. One of her favourite pieces sat in the corner: a two-metre-tall bronze heech sculpture by Tanavoli.

Tanavoli has compared his heech with the blank canvases of Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans. When asked about his images of the cans, Warhol replied, “I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and that was it.” For Tanavoli, heech is the nothingness through which life and ideas come to be. “Great poets like Rumi, Khayyam and Hafez had all looked at heech, and it is not a concept to underestimate,” Tanavoli says. “Nothing is the other side of everything.” Over seven hundred years ago, Rumi wrote, “Become nothing, And He’ll turn you into everything.”

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Only two years after Tehran’s world-class museum was inaugurated, Iran was in the throes of a violent revolution. The Shah’s regime was seen by Iranians as oppressive and corrupt—overly ambitious programs had also led to economic bottlenecks and inflation and stories of torture at the hands of the secret police were common knowledge. As demonstrations against the monarchy continued and riots became more frequent, the Shah and his wife fled the country. They would never again return, and before the end of 1980, the Shah was dead. Pahlavi’s home in Potomac has none of the art that once adorned Niavaran Palace.

On her finger, however, is a ring. A gold heech, designed by the sculptor whose career she helped launch. It rests on her left ring finger, touching her wedding band.

For Tanavoli, the Islamic Revolution meant a different form of exile. Public works of art, including his own, were torn down and destroyed. At the time, he was teaching sculpture at the University of Tehran, but art schools were soon shuttered. “The revolutionary artists took over everything,” Tanavoli says. “They were making art which glorified war and blood. It had no value artistically, but politically it did, so it was encouraged.” Tanavoli refused to begin repurposing his art for political aims. His studio closed and he was banned from exhibiting and selling his work. Tanavoli describes these years as the darkest of his life. Because of his former connection to the Queen, Tanavoli was blacklisted by the new regime. In many ways, he was lucky that it wasn’t worse for him following the revolution. Many Iranians with ties to the royal family were thrown into prison or executed. By 1989, Tanavoli was almost broke. He could no longer make a living as an artist in Iran. He sold most of his collection of art and many of his properties and, with his wife and three children, immigrated to Canada. Once in Vancouver, he started all over again, from nothing.

Gradually, wealthy Iranians, many of them also living as expatriates in the west, began purchasing Tanavoli’s sculptures, and soon were inviting him to show his work in New York, Paris and London. In 2008, a sculpture by Tanavoli set a new auction record for a Middle Eastern artist at Christie’s international art sale in Dubai. The piece, titled “The Wall (Oh, Persepolis),” was nearly two-metres tall and covered in figures that look like hieroglyphics. It fetched $2.84 million US. After the sale, his work was in such high demand that he had to unplug his phone for a week.

In 2013, Tanavoli’s pieces were displayed as part of the Iran Modern exhibit at the Asia Society Museum in New York City. Spanning three decades, the works on loan from the United States, Europe and the Middle East told the story of the modern art scene and its pioneering years. Dr. Layla S. Diba was one of the curators of the exhibit. She describes Tanavoli as a “cultural impresario” in Iran. Beyond his own art, he was a devoted collector and teacher who worked tirelessly to push forward government support of the arts. “Parviz is also a patriot. He loves his country, but as much as one loves Iran, whether in the past or present, you are under a state-controlled art scene,” she says, speaking of the country’s museums. According to Diba, Iranian art has always been an “art of allusion” that one must learn to read.

Though Tanavoli’s work seems to be about subjects based in the past, such as Farhad, it is a reflection of the present. Tanavoli’s Wall series, large bronze monoliths that commemorate Persepolis, were created in this vein. “I have seen this beautiful country deteriorate day by day,” says Tanavoli. “Picasso said ‘art is a lie that makes us realize truth,’ that is a nice way of putting it.”

Tehran City’s Cultural Organization, which supervises many of the municipality’s museums, announced recently that it would “cleanse venues of works that do not comply with the spirit of the museums.” One target, according to news reports from Iran, is the Imam Ali Museum, where a number of works by Tanavoli are currently on display. In a recent interview with the Iranian Students’ News Agency, national arts expert Asghar Kafshchian Moghaddam stated, “I think what the Imam Ali Museum managers mean by cleansing is just the elimination of Tanavoli’s works from the museum collection.”

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In an open letter to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in May 2014, Tanavoli wrote that “in accordance with civil, religious and customary laws,” the artworks taken from his home should be returned to him. “I will fight for them with all my power as long as I am alive,” Tanavoli wrote. “And after I go, I ask my children to keep after them until they are returned to their rightful owner.”

Tanavoli’s bronze heech still sits in its same spot in the Queen’s library in Niavaran Palace, which is now a museum. It has been fifty years since Tanavoli produced his first heech. When he began making them, he imagined that one day a heech would adorn every home in Iran and be accessible to anyone, regardless of financial status. It was never his intention for them to be exclusively exhibited in palaces and the world’s best museums. He wanted his creations to be sold in supermarkets, and held the dream of one day opening a factory that would mass- produce heeches. This never came to pass, though poor-quality knock-offs can be purchased on the streets of Tehran. Instead, in his small studio ten thousand kilometres away from the place of his birth, the sculptor continues to make nothing.

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Originally published in Maisonneuve, Spring 2015. Subscribe.