Not seeing 'Death' in Toronto; Mount Pleasant Cemetery

There were two things I wanted to do on a recent trip to Toronto; the first was to visit Mount Pleasant Cemetery, the second to see an exhibition called ‘Death; Life’s Greatest Mystery’ at the Royal Ontario Museum. The exhibition, initially organised by and shown at the Field Museum in Chicago, explores “death through culture, science, and art, with an examination of the diversity of cultural practices and the myriad ways death is observed in the natural word” according to the Royal Ontario’s chief curator. There were no problems visiting the cemetery but the exhibition closed after being open for just one day. When I tried to buy a ticket the admission staff were cagey, telling me that an unforeseen issue had led to the closure of the exhibition until further notice. As we were only there for a few days that was my chance to see it gone. Only later did I find out what had been the problem; a Palestinian American artist, Jenin Yaseen, had staged a sit in at the museum in protest at “censorship and alteration” of one of her paintings which features in the exhibition. The museum had promptly closed the exhibition, presumably in an effort to minimise adverse publicity. This didn’t work of course as the story was soon all over social and traditional media and within 24 hours the museum had backed down and reinstated Yaseen’s work, uncut. 

What was all the fuss about? Yaseen says that two days before the exhibition was to open senior museum staff invited her, and three of her collaborators, to a Zoom call to discuss changes they wanted made to the display they had worked on which showed Palestinian burial practices. The museum was concerned that the display had become politically sensitive following the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October and the subsequent Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Amongst other changes the museum wanted to remove the words ‘Palestine’ and ‘exile’ and wanted to crop part of an image of Yaseen’s painting which showed two Israeli soldiers and a traditional Palestinian embroidery motif symbolising burial and death. The four were told that if they did not agree to the changes the whole display would be pulled along with a display concerning Jewish burial rites “to be fair to both sides”. Yaseen and her collaborators flew to Toronto from Michigan the following day and attended the opening of the exhibition. Unhappy at the changes they decided to stage a sit in. The Museum’s ham-fisted attempt to avoid controversy had spectacularly back fired. The story was now all over the media and the museum quickly capitulated and reinstated the original display. But not quickly enough for me to see the exhibition, alas. 

What struck me most forcibly about Mount Pleasant Cemetery was how immaculately kept it is. Its lawns are closely cropped, its paths rut free, its trees well maintained and its memorials almost miraculously well preserved. There were no areas taken over by wilderness, no collapsed trees, no impenetrable thickets of bramble and dog rose and no notices warning that memorials are liable to topple over and kill the unwary. No historic cemetery in London is this well looked after. Luckily our unkempt and neglected burial grounds have acquired an aura of romantic abandon that helps disguise the truth that they are shockingly neglected. Mount Pleasant was opened in 1876, its gardens and landscape designed by Henry Adolph Engelhardt. The 200-acre site was laid out with more than 12 miles of carriage drives. The legal status of the cemetery is controversial – it is owned and run by the Mount Pleasant Group of Cemeteries, an organisation which says that it is an independent non-profit corporation. Others disagreed and said that the cemetery group is a public trust and the property of the citizens of Ontario, as a result of the original founding law passed in 1826. A six year legal campaign sought to bring the cemetery group back into the public sector and in 2019 a judge agreed with the campaigners, designated the group a trust and ordered that the directors be renamed trustees.

There are fewer interesting graves than you might expect in what is probably Canada’s premier cemetery. Ones that caught my eye were Harry Judson Crowe (1928) with its half-naked warrior resting on one his sword and one knee, and the memorial to Thomas Moor Junior and Isaac Hughes who died fighting against the Métis people of the District of Saskatchewan in the North-West Rebellion of 1885. The memorial in the form of a bench flanked by two semi naked women on the Cutten grave is pretty memorable. It is Mount Pleasant’s mausoleums which are most spectacular. Department store founder Timothy Eaton built an enormous Greek revival temple guarded over by two life size bronze lions. Most famous of all is the Massey family’s Romanesque tower built in 1891 to a design by EJ Lennox, the architect responsible for many of Toronto’s landmark buildings (including the Old Town Hall and Casa Loma).