Resilience Billboard Project
Over the next two months, billboards across Canada will feature art by Indigenous women. This vast linear gallery, with unprecedented visibility for women’s stories, is an act of cultural reconciliation.
Jaime Black, “Untitled,” 2016
archival inkjet print, 36” x 36”
From the recent Insurgence / Resurgence show at the Winnipeg Art Gallery to the Contemporary Native Art Biennale now underway in Montreal – it’s titled níchiwamiskwém | nimidet | ma soeur | my sister and is curated by Niki Little and Becca Taylor – the impact that the Indigenous female voice is having in the art world cannot be denied. Indigenous women have finally become a central voice in this community, weaving their visual stories into the tapestry of Canadian art.
With this in mind, Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art, a Winnipeg non-profit group that’s advocated for female artists for decades, proposed a billboard project and asked Mohawk curator and scholar Lee-Ann Martin to oversee it. Taking the calls to action put forth by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Martin suggested the idea of Resilience – a cross-country billboard project by Indigenous female artists.
Martin was quick to see the potential. “The curatorial premise would be mine to determine,” she says. “It didn’t take me very long to say yes to this amazing project and to propose that we feature the art of 50 Indigenous women artists, given that women have largely been excluded and under-represented in the canon of Canadian art, until recently.”
The Canada Council for the Arts saw the potential too, providing $345,000 in funding through its one-time New Chapter program, set up to help mark the 150th anniversary of Confederation. With that news, Martin began to organize the project in earnest last spring.
Resilience, which runs from June 1 to Aug. 1, includes more than 160 billboards, often on Indigenous territories. Some billboards are digital, which allows many more works to be featured sequentially. The project’s website has a helpful map.
But why billboards? “In inner cities and on highways, sites from which too many women have disappeared, the presence of Indigenous women is made highly visible, individualized (beyond statistics), celebrated,” Martin writes on the Resilience website. “This project is a physicalized reminder of buried histories and diverse contemporary perspectives. Indigenous women artists present their ideas, their visions, themselves.”
Shuvinai Ashoona, “Summer Sealift,” 2003
lithograph on paper, 22” x 30” (Collection of Indigenous and Northern Affairs, Canada)
Passersby are exposed to what’s essentially a massive exhibition suitable for any major gallery, which is exactly the point. Though some works may be familiar to Canadian art lovers, the billboards reach beyond the art world and into the visual culture of the larger public. They insert both individual and collective Indigenous visions into the everyday. This is where the project’s power rests.
The list of works is jaw dropping: One of Nadia Myre’s beaded blood works; Rosalie Favell’s 1999 ode to Métis pride, I awoke to find my spirit had returned; Annie Pootoogook’s drawing of grocery store in Cape Dorset; Caroline Monnet’s typographic investigation into hierarchies.
Meryl McMaster, “Dream Catcher,” 2015
archival pigment print on watercolour paper, 32” x 66”
One well-known piece is a 1982 photograph of Shelley Niro’s mother posed provocatively on the back of a car. Dana Claxton offers a photograph of two teenagers posed on red Mustang bikes, while Rebecca Belmore’s dramatic image, Fringe, shows a woman’s back draped with a beaded fringe of a scar. With images like these, the project effectively becomes a canon of contemporary art by Indigenous women.
But emerging artists like Jaime Black and Meryl McMaster are also included.
The works are often directly political. Mary Anne Barkhouse imposes a biblical quotation over a black-and-white photograph of a wolf in Dominion. Marianne Nicolson pointedly alters the British Columbia flag.
Mary Anne Barkhouse, “Dominion,” 2011
photograph, 36” x 48”
Winnipeg artist KC Adams says this is an important moment. “This is voices rising. This is sharing. This is the embodiment of Indigenous spirit. This is us being free to share our culture without repercussions.”
Context is critical when it comes to art, as Adams is well aware. Her series of photographs, Perception, challenged negative stereotypes about Indigenous people when it was shown in 2015 on Winnipeg bus shelters. A work from this series is part of Resilience.
“It is about us taking this medium and sharing our voice – be it anger, hope, whatever we are trying to say,” says Adams. “It’s about getting people to change their minds about Indigenous women.” She says the project is already prompting conversations. “With my Perception series, my mom was telling me that her bridge club at the beach were talking about it.”
Marianne Nicolson, “The Sun is Setting on the British Empire,” 2017
vinyl banner, 151” x 259”
How and where people see art impacts their response. Resilience is a brilliant demonstration of the power of contemporary art when shifted into everyday communal spaces. The project is already receiving critical acclaim, in the art world and beyond.
The women in the show are buoyed in the lead-up to the launch. “It’s been overwhelmingly enthusiastic as the artists understand the significance of this unique project,” says Martin. “Many have expressed the notion that this project will change the cultural, artistic and natural landscape of Canada this summer.”
1 of 5
Maria Hupfield, “Waaschign,” 2017
photograph, variable dimensions
2 of 5
Bev Koski, “Ottawa #1,” 2014, and “Berlin #1,” 2014
beads, thread and found object4” x 3” x 2”
3 of 5
Jeneen Frei Njootli, “White Swan,” 2013
photograph, 11” x 17” (Collection of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada)
4 of 5
Sherry Farrell Racette, “Ancestral Women Taking Back Their Dresses,” 1990
gouache and watercolour on paper, 20” x 24” (Collection of the Saskatchewan Arts Board, Regina)
5 of 5
Skawennati, “Jingle Dancers Assembled,” 2011
print, 36” x 62” (Collection of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada)
The complete list of artists:
KC Adams, Kenojuak Ashevak, Shuvinai Ashoona, Rebecca Gloria-Jean Baird, Mary Anne Barkhouse, Christi Belcourt, Rebecca Belmore, Jaime Black, Lori Blondeau, Heather Campbell, Joane Cardinal-Schubert, Lianne Marie Leda Charlie, Hannah Claus, Dana Claxton, Ruth Cuthand, Dayna Danger, Patricia Deadman, Bonnie Devine, Rosalie Favell, Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Lita Fontaine, Melissa General, Tanya Harnett, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Bev Koski, Nadya Kwandibens, Mary Longman, Amy Malbeuf, Teresa Marshall, Meryl McMaster, Caroline Monnet, Lisa Myers, Nadia Myre, Jade Nasogaluak Carpenter, Marianne Nicolson, Shelley Niro, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Nigit’stil Norbert, Daphne Odjig, Jane Ash Poitras, Annie Pootoogook, Sherry Farrell Racette, Sonia Robertson, Pitaloosie Saila, Jessie Short, Skawennati, Jackie Traverse, Jennie Williams and Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson ■
MAWA Mentoring Artists for Women's Art
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