Buffy Sainte-Marie

Musical icon’s dazzling digital art continues its Canadian tour.

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Pathfinder, a touring art exhibition by singer and composer Buffy Sainte-Marie, has landed where it surely feels at home – the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.

The NAC, as it’s fondly known by locals, is a performance centre for the country’s best artists, the 81-year-old Indigenous icon amongst them. Her pioneering digital art is essentially an arm of the on-stage musical extravaganzas that have given voice for decades to issues facing Indigenous people, as well as reflecting her views on love, war and spirituality. Each piece of art is a digitized collage of original painting, found photography, scanned objects and computer wizardry.

Consider Hands: The Coming of the Digital Age, a self-portrait that sums up Sainte-Marie’s art career. Her hands cover her eyes as she, like all of us, faces the new virtual world, one as bright and intense as an exploding sun. 

While wandering the corridors outside Southam Hall, you can almost hear powwow drums thumping in the background and may feel like the singer is about to spring magically to life from one of her digital prints. It would be difficult to replicate these sensations in an art gallery.

Sainte-Marie’s singers, dancers, warriors, shamans and self-portraits are infused with Indigenous iconography, sly humour, historical references, psychedelic glitz and profound moments. Each work provokes an emotional response ranging from laughter to longing.

Sainte-Marie, born to Cree parents on the Piapot 75 reserve in Saskatchewan’s Fort Qu’Appelle Valley, is showing works that date as far back as 1984, long before the Internet blanketed the world. Those early works were created on Apple’s first Macintosh personal computer, a quaint antique included in the show. 

Sainte-Marie was ahead of her time. But her artwork falls into the category of “celebrity art” – an unkind term, although it’s unlikely it otherwise would have spent the past year touring Canada with stops at the Urban Shaman artist-run centre in Winnipeg, the National Music Centre in Calgary, and the Penticton Art Gallery in the B.C. Interior. But that does not mean Sainte-Marie’s art is undeserving of an audience. Her images are especially interesting for those eager to explore another aspect of a great musician’s creativity.  

High-profile celebrity art in Canada includes photographic portraits by rocker Bryan Adams, singer Joni Mitchell’s Van Gogh-inspired paintings, and astronaut Roberta Bondar’s landscape photographs. I’ve seen work by all three but have gasped in horror only once at celebrity art, in 2019, when former American president George W. Bush sent his amateurish paintings of war veterans to be exhibited at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. That was like a hostile invasion. 

Still, the work of celebrity artists is not welcome at many blue-chip galleries, which believe such art, regardless of its quality, does not belong alongside the Group of Seven or Rembrandt. But other venues, like the National Arts Centre, are willing to welcome a musical legend. 

This iteration of Pathfinder includes 16 digital prints, most the size of large posters, two sketches for album covers and various objects, including a sparkly beaded jacket, Indigenous rattles and a drum.

Among the digital prints, a personal favourite is Elder Brothers. This is Sainte-Marie’s homage to an 1881 portrait of two Indigenous men by American frontier photographer L.A. Hoffman. The men emerge from history in a psychedelic, pixelated haze. Sainte-Marie scanned eagle feathers to put in each man’s grasp. The image is like Cree artist Jane Ash Poitras on acid. It’s totally mesmerizing.

Another standout is Yaqui From the Wings, in which an Indigenous dancer performs on stage. To his left, members of his family peek from the wings. The dancer seems oblivious to his relatives and the audience. Instead, he meets the viewer’s gaze. This is Sainte-Marie connecting directly with us, the audience for both her musical and visual art.

A tribute to Sainte-Marie will be held Sept. 16 at the National Arts Centre with Indigenous singers performing everything from opera to electric powwow, with Sainte-Marie in attendance. Also in September, the Toronto International Film Festival debuts a documentary, Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On, by Winnipeg filmmaker Madison Thomas. Clearly, Sainte-Marie remains a vital part of Canadian cultural life. ■

Buffy Sainte-Marie: Pathfinder at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa from Aug. 27 to Sept. 18. It can be viewed daily free of charge from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

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National Arts Centre

1 Elgin Street, Ottawa, Ontario