Canadian and Indigenous Art: From Time Immemorial to 1967
Canadian and Indigenous Art: 1968 to Present
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
June 15, 2017 – ongoing
Curated by Senior Curator of Canadian Art, Katerina Atanassova; Associate Curator of Indigenous Art, Christine Lalonde; Canadian Photography Institute Associate Curator of Photographs, Andrea Kunard; Associate Curator of Early Canadian Art, René Villeneuve; and Associate Curator of Canadian Art, Adam Welch, with the support of Curatorial Assistant of Canadian Art, Danuta Sierhuis and Curatorial Assistant in Indigenous Art, Heather Campbell.
I have been visiting the National Gallery of Canada since my school days, when the collection was lodged in a nondescript office building on Elgin Street in a dire space that seemed to reflect the little regard that most people had for the collection, heavily weighted as it was toward European art and dreary Canadian landscapes. The NGC moved in 1988 into an impressive glass and granite building opposite the Parliament Buildings and just down the river from the three islands called Asinabka (Victoria, Chaudière, and Albert Islands) – historically a site for trading as well as spiritual and cultural exchange for people of Anishinaabe, Algonquin and Haudenosaunee nations. I wonder what dialogues could occur between the triangulated locations, and how the contiguity of history and of nation-to-nation relationships could have been and can still be played out across the landscape and within the buildings.
In 2017 the NGC re-installed both its historical and contemporary Canadian collections, as part of a rethinking of art production, identity, and the relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. During the course of the re-hanging, the curators and educators actively built relationships with Indigenous artists, Elders, and community members across the country.
Throughout its history there have been a number of exhibitions of Indigenous art at the NGC. The anthropologist Marius Barbeau curated West Coast Art: Native and Modern in 1927, bringing together West Coast Indigenous carvings, textiles, masks, and paintings with paintings by Euro-Canadian artists. As Ruth Phillips (2011) stated, the intent was to position Indigenous art as a preamble to a history of Canadian art that culminated in the work of modernist painters such as Emily Carr, Edwin Holgate, and other settler artists. In the late 1960s, the NGC produced Masterpieces of Indian and Eskimo Art from Canada, the first major exhibition of Aboriginal art from across Canada, installed according to a modernist aesthetic. In 1992, a major survey of contemporary Indigenous art, Land Spirit Power, showed a broad range of visual art from Canada and the United States, intertwining aesthetic and political themes. On June 21, 2003, Art of this Land opened; this was an exhibition of work from the permanent collection supplemented with borrowed historical objects. According to Whitelaw (2006) the exhibition was significant on many levels: it brought historical Indigenous works into the NGC for the first time since 1927, it presented the works as having both aesthetic and historical value, and it “visually expanded” the notion of cultural production by attempting to bring Indigenous experience into the institution. While the above-mentioned exhibitions introduced visual and material culture and art by historical, modern, and contemporary artists, the Indigenous voice was rarely activated in either the exhibitions or the curatorial practices behind them.
In contrast, in the months leading up to the unveiling of the 2017 re-installation, the NGC established Indigenous Advisory Committees who counseled on the importance of welcoming, displaying, and caring for each of the works the gallery acquired, and on how best to consult with the communities and understand their specific protocols. These consultations are evident in many aspects of the two-part re-installation of works in the gallery. Beginning my visit in the contemporary galleries, I first encountered Rebecca Belmore’s (Anishinaabe) The Named and the Unnamed (2002). This work incorporates a video of Vigil performed in Vancouver as a wrenching commemoration of the many women who have gone missing in the downtown eastside. In the video, Belmore scrubs the sidewalk street corner or pulls roses through her teeth as she says the name of each woman, acknowledging the trauma evident in the many communities from which women have disappeared. Belmore is an artist who carries Indigenous sovereignty into whatever space she inhabits. Her work is foundational and unapologetic, and I found it a strong beginning for the contemporary section.
The contemporary gallery spaces following Belmore’s work, containing both Indigenous and settler art, were arranged around issues that are often central to Indigenous artists–the land, place, self-representation, systems of language, and culture. The viewer will now find works by Norval Morrisseau (Anishinaabe) and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (Coast Salish and Okanagan) together with B.C.-based artist Landon MacKenzie’s “land maps” and the collaborative work of General Idea with their poodle flags and portraits. In this section the curators have brought together artists who are engaging with personal approaches to place as a way to comment on social and political issues, addressing questions of representation, environmentalism, gender, sexuality, urban spaces, and Indigenous relationships to land and place.
Elsewhere, the placement of large-scale works alone in large open spaces allows them to speak for themselves. For example, Carl Beam’s (Anishinaabe) Voyage (1988) – the replica of Columbus’s Santa Maria – sits stranded in front of a large window. This work opened a space for Beam to re-evaluate Columbus’s arrival in the Americas – the white painted boat lying on its side is both vulnerable and beautiful, like the sun-bleached skeleton of a whale that has met an untimely death. In a gallery directly above the Beam is the soaring Shapeshifter (2000), a sculpture of plastic lawn chairs shaped by Brian Jungen (Dane-Zaa and Swiss) that suggests a creature of great spiritual power, one who can shift between worlds, while also speaking of magnificent whales, too often confined in marine shows.
The new installation of the NGC’s recent and contemporary collection, entitled Canadian and Indigenous Art: 1968 to the Present, is a very positive curatorial move towards reconciliation, as there has been a strong effort to transform a colonial space into one in which ordinary acts of resurgence are taking place, where Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing the world are accepted and available as a way of creating and moving forward. This exhibition changed somewhat in April 2018 to make space for the 2017 Governor General Award winners; even so, the centrality of the work by Indigenous artists as well as a more diverse selection of artists from across the country point to the broader conversations that can be had within the framework of the themes laid out room by room.
Unfortunately, this diversity isn’t as evident in the historical collection, though there are certainly positive developments. At the entrance to the first room of Canadian and Indigenous Art: From Time Immemorial to 1967, a wall text situates Indigenous people as art makers with practices that stretch back thousands of years, reminding us that for centuries, colonization and restrictive governmental policies left Indigenous peoples without the means to practice their traditions – notably the art forms integral to ways of being in the world. This and many other texts through the gallery are written in Anishinaabemowin or in one of seventeen other Indigenous languages as well as in English and French. The many new relationships built between curators and educators and the artists or their families were important in creating accurately written texts. In some instances, it was important to find community members who worked to create the texts or to help curators develop an understanding of the on-going life of the objects,
such as the regalia, composed of frontlet, sea otter skin bag, apron and leggings, made by carvers James Hart and Christian White and weaver Lisa Hagerman Yahgulanaas’ Yelth Koo (Raven’s Tail Weaving), that continues to be worn by hereiditary Chief 7idansuu (Chief James Hart) and therefore moves back and forth across the country as needed for ceremonies and feasts.
Another indication of the changing ethos of the gallery is the manner in which the curators have placed ancient ceremonial objects and contemporary works by artists of different nations together, giving viewers an opportunity to see how historic cultures impact contemporary Indigenous artists in a number of ways. For example, Luke Parnell’s (Haida/Nisga'a) work A Brief History of Northwest Coast Design (2007), eleven leaning wooden planks with Haida/Nisga’a designs, as well as Germaine Arnaktauyok’s (Inuit Igloolik area NWT) tapestry Combs of our Ancestors (2009), are placed in close proximity to both the Beaver Hill Petroglyph, borrowed from the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, and Qelemteleq, a five thousand year old seated stone figure representing an ancestor of the people from Katzie and Kwantlen First Nations of the Fraser Valley. The contemporary pieces act as a visual reclamation of the objects taken out of communities since first contact.
Throughout the historical section, there is evidence of the efforts the NGC made in this re-hanging. For example, to the right of the first room, artists Caroline Monnet, Michelle Latimer, Kent Monkman, and Jeff Barnaby were given access to over seven decades of National Film Board archives. Each artist used collaged footage and various forms of intercutting, montage, and juxtaposition to explore and deconstruct filmed stereotypes of Indigenous people, creating cohesive works that speak to the importance of self-representation and of telling the stories from an Indigenous perspective. Monkman’s Sisters and Brothers draws parallels between the destruction of the buffalo herds and the devastating impact of the residential school system. Monnet’s Mobilize draws on a collage of films for a fast-paced journey from the far north to the urban south through which she emphasizes Aboriginal people’s strength, skill and competence. Jeff Barnaby’s Etlinisigu’niet (Bleed Down) examines Canada’s history of strategies to “get rid of the Indian problem.” Michelle Latimer’s Nimmikaage (She Dances for People) uses archival footage as both a requiem for and an honouring of First Nation, Métis, and Inuit women.
However, despite such efforts, the gallery cannot erase the histories documented in the historic paintings, even though curators have attempted to re-narrate the stories. For example, George Reid’s Logging (1888), a brutal painting of a clear-cut forest, has been placed with ceremonial potlatch objects in an attempt to portray the different ideologies of Indigenous people, the government, and colonial enterprises. The reminder of the policies of assimilation and economic control that led to banning the potlatch until 1951 juxtaposed with the image of violent destruction of forested areas only reinforces the very different attitudes towards land and may leave the viewer thinking about the destructiveness of colonization. Similarly problematic are the inclusion of numerous landscapes devoid of people, as if Indigenous people never existed, such as Tom Thomson’s Northern River (1915) and portrayals of the progress of colonization such as Robert R. Whales’s View of Hamilton (1853), where evidence of the First Peoples are again absent. The largely chronological installation of the work continues to reinforce the western canon of art history, neglecting Indigenous teachings that tell us time is fluid and circular, and that objects like the Beaver Hill Petroglyph offer knowledge back and forth across time.
To counteract this linearity to some extent, examples of Indigenous art are interspersed in other rooms with both two- and three-dimensional works, creating a real dialogue between cultures and aesthetics and highlighting the crossovers that were taking place across Indigenous and Euro-Canadian cultures. Beautifully wrought handcrafted works like the Métis Octopus-style Pipe Bag, circa 1900, and a Beaded Tufted Bag are juxtaposed with Antoine Plamondon’s portrait of the Wendake artist Zacharie Vincent, The Last of the Hurons of Lorette (1838). The beaded footwear created by Indigenous artists Margaret Football (Dogrib), Joan Elise Tsetso (Fort Simpson Band), and Joyce Growing Thunder Fogarty (Assiniboine Sioux) are set in conversation with Emily Carr’s paintings of monumental carvings such as The Welcome Man (1913). Such instances also speak to the efforts the gallery has made to include a wider range of artists, notably women and Indigenous artists as well as Canadians of non-European descent.
One small note in regard to textile, beading and quillwork: I did wish that the curators could break their self-imposed cut-off year rule and include more work by contemporary bead and quill workers in the historical rooms, to show both continuity of the practice and the ways the art forms have changed and evolved over time. They have done this in some galleries; for example, in the room with the Emily Carr paintings, a contemporary Transformation Mask (n.d.) by Marvin Tallio (Nuxalk and Heiltsuk) overlooks beaded and quilled moccasins and mukluks.
Other combinations reflect further curatorial attempts to change the narrative. In the New France room an embroidered tabernacle cover borrowed from the Ursuline Museum in Quebec City is placed across from the abovementioned Plamondon portrait of Zacharie Vincent. I suggest this work was placed here as a reference to the artistic capabilities of Vincent as well as referencing the young Wendake women who contributed their knowledge of beading and textiles to the Ursulines. Despite the absence of any accompanying contextual material, the embroidery remains a valuable example of cross-cultural collaboration, as Aboriginal girls and women and the Ursuline nuns brought their collective knowledge and skills together in textile works such as this from the late seventeenth century onwards. Another example of altering the narratives comes with the placing of an early twentieth century Algonquin canoe with its decorated gunnel placed in the centre of a room, between Group of Seven landscapes and a salon-style wall of late nineteenth and early twentieth century paintings. Further on, Michael Belmore’s (Anishinaabe) The Lost Bridal Veil (2015), a draped and folded sculpture of copper and steel, expresses his commitment to listening to the land and water. His use of copper is important in that this material has a duality: it is reflective, but it is easily marked or marred and therefore, like the land, it needs to be cared for. The artist also addresses the Anishinaabe worldview of the universe being composed of layers that are in continuous motion, thereby acknowledging the power that exists in spaces, sites and states of being (Nahwegahbow, 2017). This work is situated in the Kroener Atrium with its glass-bottomed pool and skylight, and it is positioned across time and space to engage with a group of small-scale bronze sculptures of Aboriginal people: Alfred Laliberté’s Young Indian’s Hunting (1905), Louis-Philippe Hébert’s The Last Indian (1901), and the Suzor Cote’s Caughnawaga Women (1924).
There is no doubt the NGC has moved forward. I am thrilled to see not only more work by Indigenous artists, but more work by women, such as Frances Ann Hopkins’s Shooting the Rapids (1879), Charlotte Schreiber’s The Croppy Boy (The Confessions of an Irish Patriot) (1879), Ethel Seath’s The Gardener’s House (c.1930), Paraskeva Clarke’s well-known Petroushka (1937), and Rita Letendre’s (Abenaki) Tension on Black (1963). There is still much to be done. It was heartening to finally come upon the presence of a black figure in Henrietta Shore’s Negro Woman and Two Children (c.1916), but the title alone definitively constructs the woman and her children as other, and speaks to the need to tell a bigger, more diverse story of Canada. However, in these re-imagined galleries, both historical and contemporary, a new conversation has started.
Lori Beavis, PhD. is a curator, art educator and art historian based in Montreal. Identifying as being of Mississauga Anishinaabe & Irish-Welsh descent, she is a band member of Hiawatha First Nation at Rice Lake, Ontario.
Bibliography
Nahwegahbow, Alexandra Kahsenni:io (2017). mskwi•blood•sang Karsh-Masson Gallery, Ottawa (https://michaelbelmore.com/mskwi-blood-sang/ accessed August 27, 2018).
Phillips, Ruth (2011). Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums. Montreal: McGill-Queens Press.
Whitelaw, Anne (2006). Placing Aboriginal Art at the National Gallery of Canada. Canadian Journal of Communication. , vol 31. no1, p.197-213.
Canadian and Indigenous Art: 1968 to Present
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
June 15, 2017 – ongoing
Curated by Senior Curator of Canadian Art, Katerina Atanassova; Associate Curator of Indigenous Art, Christine Lalonde; Canadian Photography Institute Associate Curator of Photographs, Andrea Kunard; Associate Curator of Early Canadian Art, René Villeneuve; and Associate Curator of Canadian Art, Adam Welch, with the support of Curatorial Assistant of Canadian Art, Danuta Sierhuis and Curatorial Assistant in Indigenous Art, Heather Campbell.
I have been visiting the National Gallery of Canada since my school days, when the collection was lodged in a nondescript office building on Elgin Street in a dire space that seemed to reflect the little regard that most people had for the collection, heavily weighted as it was toward European art and dreary Canadian landscapes. The NGC moved in 1988 into an impressive glass and granite building opposite the Parliament Buildings and just down the river from the three islands called Asinabka (Victoria, Chaudière, and Albert Islands) – historically a site for trading as well as spiritual and cultural exchange for people of Anishinaabe, Algonquin and Haudenosaunee nations. I wonder what dialogues could occur between the triangulated locations, and how the contiguity of history and of nation-to-nation relationships could have been and can still be played out across the landscape and within the buildings.
In 2017 the NGC re-installed both its historical and contemporary Canadian collections, as part of a rethinking of art production, identity, and the relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. During the course of the re-hanging, the curators and educators actively built relationships with Indigenous artists, Elders, and community members across the country.
Throughout its history there have been a number of exhibitions of Indigenous art at the NGC. The anthropologist Marius Barbeau curated West Coast Art: Native and Modern in 1927, bringing together West Coast Indigenous carvings, textiles, masks, and paintings with paintings by Euro-Canadian artists. As Ruth Phillips (2011) stated, the intent was to position Indigenous art as a preamble to a history of Canadian art that culminated in the work of modernist painters such as Emily Carr, Edwin Holgate, and other settler artists. In the late 1960s, the NGC produced Masterpieces of Indian and Eskimo Art from Canada, the first major exhibition of Aboriginal art from across Canada, installed according to a modernist aesthetic. In 1992, a major survey of contemporary Indigenous art, Land Spirit Power, showed a broad range of visual art from Canada and the United States, intertwining aesthetic and political themes. On June 21, 2003, Art of this Land opened; this was an exhibition of work from the permanent collection supplemented with borrowed historical objects. According to Whitelaw (2006) the exhibition was significant on many levels: it brought historical Indigenous works into the NGC for the first time since 1927, it presented the works as having both aesthetic and historical value, and it “visually expanded” the notion of cultural production by attempting to bring Indigenous experience into the institution. While the above-mentioned exhibitions introduced visual and material culture and art by historical, modern, and contemporary artists, the Indigenous voice was rarely activated in either the exhibitions or the curatorial practices behind them.
In contrast, in the months leading up to the unveiling of the 2017 re-installation, the NGC established Indigenous Advisory Committees who counseled on the importance of welcoming, displaying, and caring for each of the works the gallery acquired, and on how best to consult with the communities and understand their specific protocols. These consultations are evident in many aspects of the two-part re-installation of works in the gallery. Beginning my visit in the contemporary galleries, I first encountered Rebecca Belmore’s (Anishinaabe) The Named and the Unnamed (2002). This work incorporates a video of Vigil performed in Vancouver as a wrenching commemoration of the many women who have gone missing in the downtown eastside. In the video, Belmore scrubs the sidewalk street corner or pulls roses through her teeth as she says the name of each woman, acknowledging the trauma evident in the many communities from which women have disappeared. Belmore is an artist who carries Indigenous sovereignty into whatever space she inhabits. Her work is foundational and unapologetic, and I found it a strong beginning for the contemporary section.
The contemporary gallery spaces following Belmore’s work, containing both Indigenous and settler art, were arranged around issues that are often central to Indigenous artists–the land, place, self-representation, systems of language, and culture. The viewer will now find works by Norval Morrisseau (Anishinaabe) and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (Coast Salish and Okanagan) together with B.C.-based artist Landon MacKenzie’s “land maps” and the collaborative work of General Idea with their poodle flags and portraits. In this section the curators have brought together artists who are engaging with personal approaches to place as a way to comment on social and political issues, addressing questions of representation, environmentalism, gender, sexuality, urban spaces, and Indigenous relationships to land and place.
Elsewhere, the placement of large-scale works alone in large open spaces allows them to speak for themselves. For example, Carl Beam’s (Anishinaabe) Voyage (1988) – the replica of Columbus’s Santa Maria – sits stranded in front of a large window. This work opened a space for Beam to re-evaluate Columbus’s arrival in the Americas – the white painted boat lying on its side is both vulnerable and beautiful, like the sun-bleached skeleton of a whale that has met an untimely death. In a gallery directly above the Beam is the soaring Shapeshifter (2000), a sculpture of plastic lawn chairs shaped by Brian Jungen (Dane-Zaa and Swiss) that suggests a creature of great spiritual power, one who can shift between worlds, while also speaking of magnificent whales, too often confined in marine shows.
The new installation of the NGC’s recent and contemporary collection, entitled Canadian and Indigenous Art: 1968 to the Present, is a very positive curatorial move towards reconciliation, as there has been a strong effort to transform a colonial space into one in which ordinary acts of resurgence are taking place, where Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing the world are accepted and available as a way of creating and moving forward. This exhibition changed somewhat in April 2018 to make space for the 2017 Governor General Award winners; even so, the centrality of the work by Indigenous artists as well as a more diverse selection of artists from across the country point to the broader conversations that can be had within the framework of the themes laid out room by room.
Unfortunately, this diversity isn’t as evident in the historical collection, though there are certainly positive developments. At the entrance to the first room of Canadian and Indigenous Art: From Time Immemorial to 1967, a wall text situates Indigenous people as art makers with practices that stretch back thousands of years, reminding us that for centuries, colonization and restrictive governmental policies left Indigenous peoples without the means to practice their traditions – notably the art forms integral to ways of being in the world. This and many other texts through the gallery are written in Anishinaabemowin or in one of seventeen other Indigenous languages as well as in English and French. The many new relationships built between curators and educators and the artists or their families were important in creating accurately written texts. In some instances, it was important to find community members who worked to create the texts or to help curators develop an understanding of the on-going life of the objects,
such as the regalia, composed of frontlet, sea otter skin bag, apron and leggings, made by carvers James Hart and Christian White and weaver Lisa Hagerman Yahgulanaas’ Yelth Koo (Raven’s Tail Weaving), that continues to be worn by hereiditary Chief 7idansuu (Chief James Hart) and therefore moves back and forth across the country as needed for ceremonies and feasts.
Another indication of the changing ethos of the gallery is the manner in which the curators have placed ancient ceremonial objects and contemporary works by artists of different nations together, giving viewers an opportunity to see how historic cultures impact contemporary Indigenous artists in a number of ways. For example, Luke Parnell’s (Haida/Nisga'a) work A Brief History of Northwest Coast Design (2007), eleven leaning wooden planks with Haida/Nisga’a designs, as well as Germaine Arnaktauyok’s (Inuit Igloolik area NWT) tapestry Combs of our Ancestors (2009), are placed in close proximity to both the Beaver Hill Petroglyph, borrowed from the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, and Qelemteleq, a five thousand year old seated stone figure representing an ancestor of the people from Katzie and Kwantlen First Nations of the Fraser Valley. The contemporary pieces act as a visual reclamation of the objects taken out of communities since first contact.
Throughout the historical section, there is evidence of the efforts the NGC made in this re-hanging. For example, to the right of the first room, artists Caroline Monnet, Michelle Latimer, Kent Monkman, and Jeff Barnaby were given access to over seven decades of National Film Board archives. Each artist used collaged footage and various forms of intercutting, montage, and juxtaposition to explore and deconstruct filmed stereotypes of Indigenous people, creating cohesive works that speak to the importance of self-representation and of telling the stories from an Indigenous perspective. Monkman’s Sisters and Brothers draws parallels between the destruction of the buffalo herds and the devastating impact of the residential school system. Monnet’s Mobilize draws on a collage of films for a fast-paced journey from the far north to the urban south through which she emphasizes Aboriginal people’s strength, skill and competence. Jeff Barnaby’s Etlinisigu’niet (Bleed Down) examines Canada’s history of strategies to “get rid of the Indian problem.” Michelle Latimer’s Nimmikaage (She Dances for People) uses archival footage as both a requiem for and an honouring of First Nation, Métis, and Inuit women.
However, despite such efforts, the gallery cannot erase the histories documented in the historic paintings, even though curators have attempted to re-narrate the stories. For example, George Reid’s Logging (1888), a brutal painting of a clear-cut forest, has been placed with ceremonial potlatch objects in an attempt to portray the different ideologies of Indigenous people, the government, and colonial enterprises. The reminder of the policies of assimilation and economic control that led to banning the potlatch until 1951 juxtaposed with the image of violent destruction of forested areas only reinforces the very different attitudes towards land and may leave the viewer thinking about the destructiveness of colonization. Similarly problematic are the inclusion of numerous landscapes devoid of people, as if Indigenous people never existed, such as Tom Thomson’s Northern River (1915) and portrayals of the progress of colonization such as Robert R. Whales’s View of Hamilton (1853), where evidence of the First Peoples are again absent. The largely chronological installation of the work continues to reinforce the western canon of art history, neglecting Indigenous teachings that tell us time is fluid and circular, and that objects like the Beaver Hill Petroglyph offer knowledge back and forth across time.
To counteract this linearity to some extent, examples of Indigenous art are interspersed in other rooms with both two- and three-dimensional works, creating a real dialogue between cultures and aesthetics and highlighting the crossovers that were taking place across Indigenous and Euro-Canadian cultures. Beautifully wrought handcrafted works like the Métis Octopus-style Pipe Bag, circa 1900, and a Beaded Tufted Bag are juxtaposed with Antoine Plamondon’s portrait of the Wendake artist Zacharie Vincent, The Last of the Hurons of Lorette (1838). The beaded footwear created by Indigenous artists Margaret Football (Dogrib), Joan Elise Tsetso (Fort Simpson Band), and Joyce Growing Thunder Fogarty (Assiniboine Sioux) are set in conversation with Emily Carr’s paintings of monumental carvings such as The Welcome Man (1913). Such instances also speak to the efforts the gallery has made to include a wider range of artists, notably women and Indigenous artists as well as Canadians of non-European descent.
One small note in regard to textile, beading and quillwork: I did wish that the curators could break their self-imposed cut-off year rule and include more work by contemporary bead and quill workers in the historical rooms, to show both continuity of the practice and the ways the art forms have changed and evolved over time. They have done this in some galleries; for example, in the room with the Emily Carr paintings, a contemporary Transformation Mask (n.d.) by Marvin Tallio (Nuxalk and Heiltsuk) overlooks beaded and quilled moccasins and mukluks.
Other combinations reflect further curatorial attempts to change the narrative. In the New France room an embroidered tabernacle cover borrowed from the Ursuline Museum in Quebec City is placed across from the abovementioned Plamondon portrait of Zacharie Vincent. I suggest this work was placed here as a reference to the artistic capabilities of Vincent as well as referencing the young Wendake women who contributed their knowledge of beading and textiles to the Ursulines. Despite the absence of any accompanying contextual material, the embroidery remains a valuable example of cross-cultural collaboration, as Aboriginal girls and women and the Ursuline nuns brought their collective knowledge and skills together in textile works such as this from the late seventeenth century onwards. Another example of altering the narratives comes with the placing of an early twentieth century Algonquin canoe with its decorated gunnel placed in the centre of a room, between Group of Seven landscapes and a salon-style wall of late nineteenth and early twentieth century paintings. Further on, Michael Belmore’s (Anishinaabe) The Lost Bridal Veil (2015), a draped and folded sculpture of copper and steel, expresses his commitment to listening to the land and water. His use of copper is important in that this material has a duality: it is reflective, but it is easily marked or marred and therefore, like the land, it needs to be cared for. The artist also addresses the Anishinaabe worldview of the universe being composed of layers that are in continuous motion, thereby acknowledging the power that exists in spaces, sites and states of being (Nahwegahbow, 2017). This work is situated in the Kroener Atrium with its glass-bottomed pool and skylight, and it is positioned across time and space to engage with a group of small-scale bronze sculptures of Aboriginal people: Alfred Laliberté’s Young Indian’s Hunting (1905), Louis-Philippe Hébert’s The Last Indian (1901), and the Suzor Cote’s Caughnawaga Women (1924).
There is no doubt the NGC has moved forward. I am thrilled to see not only more work by Indigenous artists, but more work by women, such as Frances Ann Hopkins’s Shooting the Rapids (1879), Charlotte Schreiber’s The Croppy Boy (The Confessions of an Irish Patriot) (1879), Ethel Seath’s The Gardener’s House (c.1930), Paraskeva Clarke’s well-known Petroushka (1937), and Rita Letendre’s (Abenaki) Tension on Black (1963). There is still much to be done. It was heartening to finally come upon the presence of a black figure in Henrietta Shore’s Negro Woman and Two Children (c.1916), but the title alone definitively constructs the woman and her children as other, and speaks to the need to tell a bigger, more diverse story of Canada. However, in these re-imagined galleries, both historical and contemporary, a new conversation has started.
Lori Beavis, PhD. is a curator, art educator and art historian based in Montreal. Identifying as being of Mississauga Anishinaabe & Irish-Welsh descent, she is a band member of Hiawatha First Nation at Rice Lake, Ontario.
Bibliography
Nahwegahbow, Alexandra Kahsenni:io (2017). mskwi•blood•sang Karsh-Masson Gallery, Ottawa (https://michaelbelmore.com/mskwi-blood-sang/ accessed August 27, 2018).
Phillips, Ruth (2011). Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums. Montreal: McGill-Queens Press.
Whitelaw, Anne (2006). Placing Aboriginal Art at the National Gallery of Canada. Canadian Journal of Communication. , vol 31. no1, p.197-213.