Canadian Native Art

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Canadian Native Art
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Native Art in Canada
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Canadian Native Peoples

• First off, Native peoples in Canada are often
  referred to as one group, but actually reflect
  many different cultures. Just like we understand
  that people from different European or Asian
  countries have different traditions, languages,
  histories and cuisines, the same is true for
  Native peoples. Canada is a huge country which is
  home to many different groups of Native peoples.
  This also means that there are many different
  types of Native art.

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Native Art in History

• Historically, to the native people, art was only
  one aspect of their lives. Art played a special
  role in their religious ceremonies. In some
  societies it was an important part of their
  political and social organization and it helped
  to make useful objects attractive.

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• Shamans Charm
• Shamans were expected to contact
• the spirit world by dancing and
• singing, so drums and rattles were
• important in their rituals. These items
• were often carved to represent their
• spirit helpers or painted with scenes
• of the shaman entering the land of the
• spirits.

• Wampum BeltWampum was used by the
  native people as currency and to record treaties
  and settle disputes

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Interactions with Europeans

• The greatest change brought by Europeans was in
  technology. Indians were particularly keen to
  trade furs for glass beads and metal tools. Beads
  were far simpler to use for embroidery than
  porcupine quills. Before long, Indian women were
  using beads in all shapes and colours and
  quillwork became a skill of the past. Woollen
  cloth, too, was easier to obtain than skins and
  hides. On the Northwest Coast, metal tools caused
  a flourishing of wood carving for some years
  during the 19th century.

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Beaded Clothing
Moccasins decorated with porcupine quills
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Native Artists Today

• Today, most native artists are painters,
  sculptors, and makers of prints and jewellery.
  Although they may use many of the traditional
  myths and styles in their art, they do it in new
  ways and with new materials.
• There are three main schools of contemporary
  native artists Inuit art, West Coast Native art
  and the Woodlands school of "Legend Painters."

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Inuit Art

• The first "school" to rise to prominence was
  contemporary Inuit art, with sculpture appearing
  in the late 1940s, and then Inuit printmaking in
  the late 1950s.
• Inuit sculpture and prints remained the most
  popular and most successful in the marketplace
  during the 1960s and into the 1970s, when
  original drawings by individual Inuit artists
  came to be more fully recognized and valued.
• Contemporary Inuit sculpture, prints, drawings,
  and textiles may often employ Western artistic
  techniques and cater to an outsider market. At
  the same time, contemporary Inuit art exhibits
  numerous points of continuity with traditional
  Inuit culture, values, and world view.

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Kenojuak Ashevak

• Kenojuak Ashevak, was born on October 3, 1927, at
  Ikerrasak, Baffin Island, N.W.T. Kenojuak is one
  of Canada's most popular printmakers. She grew up
  in a traditional Inuit family, living off the
  land and moving camp as the seasons changed. She
  had many children, several of whom died in
  infancy. In the late 1950s, James Houston
  encouraged her and her husband, Johnniebo, to
  make some drawings for the new printmaking shop
  at Cape Dorset. Since that time, about 200 prints
  have been based on her work. She is best known
  for her drawings of birds, which are colourful
  and composed with a strong sense of design. Her
  most famous print, The Enchanted Owl, was
  reproduced on a postage stamp in 1967. She also
  carves in soapstone, and she and Johnniebo (now
  deceased) have been honoured with many awards,
  including the Companion of Canada, a National
  Film Board film, and a book about her work, and
  major exhibitions in galleries across Canada. In
  2002 her work was featured in the exhibition
  Kenojuak Ashevak To Make Something Beautiful at
  the National Gallery of Canada. She was awarded a
  Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts
  in 2008.

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Festival Owl

• Wolves in Spring

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The World Around Me
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The Enchanted Owl
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West Coast

• In the late 1960s and early 1970s a "renaissance"
  of Northwest Coast art in British Columbia
  occurred, with the appearance in abundance of
  traditional forms of woodcarving, metalwork,
  painting, prints and textiles at first among the
  "northern" nations (Haida, Tsimshian, and
  Kwakiutl) and more recently among the "southerly"
  Nootka and coast Salish.
• Famous artists include Tony Hunt and Robert
  Davidson who are skilled carvers of totem poles
  and masks. William Reid is famous for his
  sculpture, jewellery, and prints as well.
• Contemporary art is produced on the coast today
  for use in Native villages, but more often such
  traditional items as masks, rattles, boxes,
  bowls, textiles and jewellery are adapted to
  EuroCanadian techniques, materials, and functions
  for sale in Native art shops.

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Characteristics

• Use of formlines and the use of shapes referred
  to as ovoids, U forms and S forms.
• Media were wood, stone, and copper since
  European contact, paper, canvas, glass, and
  precious metals have also been used.
• Common colours are red and black, but yellow is
  also often used, particularly among Kwakwaka'wakw
  artists.
• Patterns depicted include natural forms such as
  bears, ravens, eagles, and humans legendary
  creatures such as thunderbirds and sisiutls and
  abstract forms made up of the characteristic
  Northwest Coast shapes.

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Wooden Moon Mask
Soul Catcher
Totem Poles
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Bill Reid

• William Ronald Reid, was born on January 12,
  1920, at Victoria, B.C. He died there on March
  13, 1998. Bill Reid did more than anyone else to
  revive interest in Northwest Coast Native art and
  to create new art forms within the old
  traditions. He was the son of a Haida mother and
  a white father, but it was not until he was in
  his late teens that he learned anything about his
  native heritage. He worked as a broadcaster for
  16 years, and in 1948-49 he took courses in
  jewellery-making in Toronto. He also began to
  study Native art in museums and books, and made
  his first trip to the land of his ancestors, the
  Queen Charlotte Islands. Before long he was
  recognized as an authority on Haida art and
  culture.
• Reid carved totem poles which contained
  complicated clan and family histories, but he
  also created simple sculptures which could be
  easily understood by people from other cultures.
  His huge wooden sculpture, Raven and the First
  Humans, at the Museum of Anthropology in
  Vancouver, tells the old story of the trickster
  raven who discovered the first Haida men in a
  giant clamshell but Reid had given each a man a
  different expression as he peers out into the
  world or steals back into his shell.

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Bill Reid (Cont.)

• Bill Reid also worked in non-traditional
  materials. Outdoor sculptures, such as the Killer
  Whale, which rises from its own pool outside the
  Vancouver Aquarium, have been cast in bronze. He
  made exquisite jewellery and boxes in gold,
  silver, and argillite which were engraved with
  Haida designs. He was one of the first artists to
  use silkscreen prints to portray native art. And
  he wrote and illustrated many books about the
  culture and myths of his people. In 1986 Reid
  built a traditional dugout canoe for display at
  Expo 86 in Vancouver.

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Thunderbird
Nanasimget Bracelet
Thunderbird
Sockeye Salmon Pool
The Raven and the First Men
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Killer Whale
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Wolf Drum
Grizzly Bear Necklace
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Woodlands School The Legend Painters

• The Woodlands school has been influenced by
  Norval Morrisseau, a self-taught Ojibwa artist
  who was the first to paint the secret legends of
  his people. The Woodlands school gained
  recognition in the 1970s with Morrisseaus rise
  to fame. The majority of Woodlands artists
  working from the 1970s into the 1980s have been
  inspired and influenced by Morrisseau and as a
  group are also known as Legend Painters for their
  depiction of imagery taken from spiritual and
  mythological traditions.

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Thunderbird Dreams
Pride
Ducks
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Norval Morrisseau

• Norval Morrisseau was born on March 14, 1932, at
  Sand Point Reserve, near Beardmore, Ont. He died
  on December 4, 2007, at Toronto, Ont. Morrisseau,
  or Copper Thunderbird as his name means in
  Ojibwa, was a self-taught artist who recorded the
  beliefs and legends of his people. He had little
  formal education, but had a close relationship
  with his grandfather, who taught him Ojibwa
  traditions. He developed a style of painting
  known as "Woodland Indian art" which combines
  features from both Indian rock painting and
  European art. In the 1960s, he was the first
  artist to break the barrier between native and
  European art in Canada. Using simple bold lines
  and strong bright colours, his "x-ray paintings"
  show the outside of bears, thunderbirds, and
  people as he sees them and their insides as he
  imagines them to be.

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Morrisseau (Cont.)

• The paintings, like the legends they are based
  on, are full of symbols and opposites - good and
  evil, human and animal, night and day. By
  exhibiting these sacred images to non-Indians,
  Morrisseau broke a tradition of secrecy and at
  first met with strong opposition from Ojibwa
  elders. He is now accepted, and many other
  "legend painters" have followed his style of
  painting. Through his writings and his art,
  Morrisseau hoped "to reassemble the pieces of a
  once-proud culture ... to show how dignified and
  brave my people once were. We were once a great
  people."

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Mother and Child
Self Portrait of Artist Astral Projection
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Fish and Loons From Lake Nipigon
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This Is The Way It Is
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A Vision To Its Soul
Self Portrait
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Artistic Influence

• Native art influenced many non-native artists.
  Two famous artists influenced by native artwork
  and artistic styles are Emily Carr and Ted
  Harrison.

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Emily Carr

• Emily Carr was born on December 13, 1871, at
  Victoria, B.C., and she died there on March 2,
  1945. Carr, who lived and worked alone on
  Vancouver Island, is one of Canada's most famous
  artists. Although she decided to be an artist
  early in life, it was only when she was 57 years
  old that she began the paintings and writing for
  which she is remembered.
• She studied art in San Francisco, in England, and
  visited France in 1910-11.
• 1908 she recorded the culture of the Northwest
  Coast native people, to paint their totem poles
  and carved log houses.
• Carr returned seriously to painting in 1927 when
  her work was exhibited in a national show in
  Ottawa.
• On her trip to the east, she met members of the
  Group of Seven, and Lawren Harris in particular
  encouraged and inspired her. She continued to
  paint Indian themes, but turned increasingly to
  nature. Her skies and forests are alive with
  energy, movement, and shimmering light.

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Skidgate
Indian Raven
Indian Hut, Queen Charlotte Islands
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Raven
Indian Church
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Ted Harrison

• Edward Harrison was born on August 28, 1926,
  England.
• settled in the Yukon in 1968.
• He taught high school
• His paintings, many of life in the Yukon, have
  been shown in exhibitions across Canada.
• Harrison's first two children's books, Children
  of the Yukon (1977) and A Northern Alphabet
  (1982), use vivid colours to depict the rugged
  scenery and the variety of human activities in
  the North.
• The Blue Raven (1989) is the story of a heroic
  journey a Native boy makes to find help for his
  suffering people.
• Harrison has also illustrated Robert Service's
  The Cremation of Sam McGee (1986) and The
  Shooting of Dan McGrew (1988), two famous poems
  about the gold rush days of the 1890s.

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Ice
Library Day
The Boat
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Whale Frolic
Emilys Place