About the Museum

The Museum of Vancouver (MOV) (formerly the Vancouver Museum and prior to that the Centennial Museum) is a civic history museum located in Vanier Park, Vancouver, British Columbia. The MOV is the largest civic museum in Canada and the oldest museum in Vancouver. The museum was founded in 1894 and went through a number of iterations before being rebranded as the Museum of Vancouver in 2009. It creates Vancouver-focused exhibitions and programs that encourage conversations about what was, is, and can be Vancouver. It shares an entrance and foyer with the H. R. MacMillan Space Centre but the MOV is much larger and occupies the vast majority of the space in the building complex where both organisations sit as well as separate collections storage facilities in another building. The Museum of Vancouver states that its mission is to "be a gathering space that fosters connection, learning, and new experiences of Vancouver’s diverse communities and histories." MOV has approximately 80,000 objects in its collection, roughly 90% of which are photographed and accessible through the museum's online database. The museum actively works to repatriate objects in its collection associated with Indigenous Peoples, establishing an official repatriation policy in 2006 that was later updated in 2020. MOV launched an exhibition in 2025, entitled The Work of Repair: Redress and Repatriation at the Museum of Vancouver, that focuses on how the museum is working towards repatriation, community engagement, and research that reconnects Indigenous belongings to their histories.