Glanmore House uses cat-themed video to win the hearts and votes of the public

Glanmore House used its collection of cat portraits as inspiration for a new video. “”That’s one of the great things about those animal paintings – they do capture the personality of the pet,” says the museum’s education and marketing co-ordinator, Melissa Wakeling. Photo by Stellios Pappas, QNet News

By Stellios Pappas

BELLEVILLE –  Historical artifacts, furniture, dancing cats?

Local museum Glanmore House‘s dance video entry, Glanmore Loves Cats, beat out three other museums’ videos to claim the Eastern Canada division title of the Museum Dance Off 4 competition. The competition is organized by whenyouworkatamusem.com to break the stereotype that museums are boring and stuffy. A record 41 museums from around the world have put videos in the competition.

After winning the regional competition thanks to votes form the public, Glanmore House will continue to the finals, where other dance videos showcasing museums will be competing for bragging rights and a trophy.

The Glanmore video shows off the various rooms and cat paintings throughout the house, from a cat’s point of view.

Melissa Wakeling, the education and marketing co-ordinator for Glanmore House, said the idea for the video came from her co-worker’s wife. They chose the theme because “cats and the Internet – they kind of go well together, don’t you think?”

Another deciding factor was the collection of Victorian animal paintings displayed in the museum. They were all painted by Englishman Horatio Henry Couldery (1832-1918) and were donated to the museum in the ’50s as part of the Couldrey Collection.

Couldrey was considered to be one of the leading animal artists in the Victorian time period.

Wakeling said the video has gone viral, which has helped attract more people to Glamore’s Facebook page and Youtube channel.

“It’s really garnering a lot of attention, which is good – it gets people talking about the museum, gets them thinking about us maybe in a different way.”

She said the video is about bringing awareness to how fun museums can be and breaking the stigma around them.

“The idea of the video is to break those stereotypes people have about museums, maybe challenge you to think of us in a different way, but also to highlight what we have here,” Wakeling said.  “So the idea of the cats fit that really well, because we could show off our paintings of cats.”

Here’s the video: