Last week, the Museum hosted an panel discussing Ahnisnabae Art and the search for a new critical context for First Nations Art History. We were thrilled at the wealth of expertise, experience and wisdom that came to the table that evening. Following opening remarks by the late Roy Thomas’s wife, Louise Thomas, the panelists were introduced. They were:

Ahmoo Angeconeb (artist)
Tom Hill (curator, writer, lecturer, art historian)
Elizabeth McLuhan (independent curator, art historian)
Ruth Phillips (art historian, Canada Research Chair in Modern Culture, Carleton University)

Fascinating presentations by each speaker were followed by lively discussion. Here are some photos from the event and a couple of quotes brought forward by Dr. Phillips that evening – food for thought and further discussion.

While studying art at school, I began to form a political and cultural awareness. I soon developed a desire to reflect these ideas in the artwork that I would create and began to search for a culturally relevant means of expression. A fellow student showed me a catalogue of Morrisseau’s work and I was deeply intrigued. They communicated knowledge and pride in an indigenous view of the world. The works appeared to come from an ancient place, but the brightly painted canvases also spoke the language of the modern world in ways that I thought challenged the work of the celebrated western artists that we studied at school.

– Greg Hill, “Preface” to Greg Hill ed., Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist, (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada)

Indigenization presumes an affinity of some sort between the cultural practices from elsewhere and those in the indigenizing location. Hostile soil does not allow transplantation to take hold. Conversely, the practices that take hold in their new location are changed in the process.

– From Susan Stanford Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies,”Modernism/Modernity 13 (3) (2006)