Louis Riel Day

Yesterday was Louis Riel Day in the Province of Manitoba. Happy Louis Riel Day.
Riel was a controversial figure yet he was also a leader, an activist, a preacher, a visionary and a man. A man with hopes and dreams like everyone else. He continues to inspire a legacy of Metis across generations: artists, writers, composers; there's even an opera named after him.

What do you think of Louis Riel?  Leader? Visionary? Traitor? Madman? You can watch this heritage minutes clip of Louis Riel here, produced by heritage Canada.

NYC trip

I'm heading to NYC next week - hoping to see some great art and theatre. Maybe do some research.
Will post photos on my return.
Happy February everyone!

Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven Inches

video: courtesy of The Teddy Award,  Berlin Film Fest, http://news.teddyaward.tv/en/video/?a-z=1&select=G&id_film=129

Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven Inches: Kent Monkman’s use of humour to subvert the sacredness of McMichael Canadian Art Collection 

Artists have being using humour to subvert dominant institutions of learning, theology and art for many centuries. Kent Monkman, an artist of Cree and Irish descent, uses comedy to challenge the authority of painters such as the Group of Seven as well as undermine the agenda  of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, located in Kleinburg, Ontario, with his video Group of Seven Inches. Monkman’s work also seems to be informed by the Trickster, an Aboriginal spirit figure who is playful, yet serious, and full or irony. The McMichael has a powerful agenda of validating Canadian art and artists within the Western canon of art history, and can be seen to play an important role in the creation of Canadian citizenry. Proceeding through the grounds of the McMichael, and viewing the “masterpieces” by the Group of Seven, the viewer reenacts a ritual. As Carol Duncan notes, this ritual is part of the cult of museum-going. In this essay, I would like to explore the following questions: in what ways does Kent Monkman provide an alternative viewpoint to the viewer’s expectations of the McMichael as the “spiritual home of the Group of Seven?” How does he subvert the veneration that viewers feel for the McMichael?

McMichael as “spiritual home” 

For the McMichael visitor, ritual is evoked through its architecture, placement of objects and creation of a sense of reverence. Duncan describes the museum as a “ceremonial monument”, which is not unlike a cathedral, temple or other sacred space where the architecture evokes notions of grandeur, and a sense of awe.# The viewer may participate in the ritual aspect of the museum unknowingly when they walk along a corridor and gaze at objects with focused attention, not unlike the participants in a religious ceremony who are transfixed by the beauty and sanctity of an altarpiece. Through the lighting on the objects, and the ability of the viewer to hear their own echo and voice in the space, a sense of awe is created, as viewers are obliged to keep their voices low in order to commune with the works and not disturb other visitors. According to Duncan, in the process of viewing, the visitor may suspend their disbelief and have a liminal moment in which their consciousness opens onto new perspectives.#

The wilderness setting of the McMichael along with the architecture and placement of the artworks all contribute to the viewer’s experience of ritual in the space. The Michael is situated on 10 acres of tree-covered land, complete with walking trails and beautiful vistas. Once the visitor has parked, they walk on a path shaded with coniferous trees, which might evoke visions of the Group of Seven’s celebration of the Canadian wilderness. Once inside, in order to access the main collections, they can proceed up a ramp, and stop and admire the beautiful Canadian scenery. The view extends for miles into a valley that has both coniferous and deciduous trees. This ramp functions as a gateway, both in a practical and an intellectual sense as the viewer can contemplate the physical landscape outside and then see the art works inside by the Group of Seven painters.  

If one does not feel entirely spiritually renewed by the artworks of the Group of Seven, they can visit the graveyard on the premises, which is located outside the gallery in the woods, in which are interred six of the Group of Seven members. Through the sense of grandeur created by the panoramic vistas, the processional-like ramp that leads to the permanent collection and the reverence in the gallery, the institution seems to fulfill its mandate to be the “spiritual home” of the Group of Seven.#

Like the McMichael, many museums have a political agenda. Through the process of displaying objects, certain stories are told to the public while others are excluded. By claiming to be open to everyone, a museum or gallery can represent the nation’s aim for equal opportunity, education and spiritual growth of its citizens. As Duncan notes, “the political passivity of citizenship is idealized as active art participation and spiritual enrichment.”# Through conscious means of analyzing and appreciating artwork and the unconscious enactment of ritual in the museum space, the visitor reinforces their own citizenship and attachment to certain political ideals, thereby strengthening their tie to the nation. The symbols and objects that once conveyed the McMichael family’s wealth, good taste and morals become iconic of the “products of individual and national genius.”# Visitors to the collection can build their cultural capital by seeing these items and linking them to the nation’s greatness, and can be proud of being a citizen of that nation. Although the contemplation of works seems passive, the viewer reenacts their citizenship to Canada while legitimizing the Group of Seven’s work. 

The McMichael prides itself as having “100 percent Canadian content” and it also boasts to visitors that they can “experience Canada in a day.”# These claims represent the aims of the institution to be a firm symbol of Canadian identity and pride. Although the collection holds First Nations art, contemporary art and art exhibits from across Canada, the majority of the space is devoted to the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson. In the Tom Thomson room, there is a timeline of his life as well as artifacts including his paint palette and an axe that he used, as well as many of his paintings of Algonquin Park and other areas of northern Ontario. There is also a historical shack in which he used to paint, that is located at the entrance to the McMichael. The idea of Thomson as “artist/genius” is not only represented through the large room devoted to his works and artifacts of his life but also the fact that the permanent gallery tours focus on his life story and describe his mysterious death. The legend is that Thomson went fishing in his canoe, was caught in the fishing line and drowned, although there are several variations of the story told to visitors. People from all over Ontario and Canada have heard the story of Tom Thomson’s unexplained death and going to the McMichael becomes a defining experience, a sort of rite of passage. In its display of Tom Thomson and other Group of Seven members as “artist/genius”, the procession that the viewer must follow to reach the exhibitions and the wilderness setting, the McMichael becomes an “identity-defining machine”, which Canadians use to learn and then affirm their status as Canadian citizens.# This relationship is passive, one does not need to think about it to be enwrapped in the folds of the nation. However, what happens when this reverence is subverted or challenged as in Kent Monkman’s video?

Humour as a tool of subversion - The Trickster’s role 

While the viewer is encouraged to remain stoic, perhaps having a liminal moment at the McMichael, he/she is not encouraged to laugh aloud or poke fun at the works of the Group of Seven. This would be profane. However, Kent Monkman’s video, Group of Seven Inches, has this exact effect on this viewer. The expectations placed on the McMichael as a serene space and container of masterpieces by the Group of Seven is completely inverted by Monkman’s video. It could be suggested that Monkman invokes a “Trickster Shift.” As Dr. Allan Ryan points out, “the Trickster Shift is perhaps best understood as serious play, the ultimate goal of which is a radical shift in viewer perspective and even political positioning  by imagining alternative viewpoints.”# The film then expresses a resistance to the colonial narrative that is inherent in the collection and space of the “identity-defining machine”, the McMichael. 

In the video, Monkman, dressed as his alter person Miss Chief Share Eagle Testicle, seduces two European males, using the Tom Thomson Shack. The first scene shows Miss Chief, dressed in her feathered headdress and high heels, astride a horse, outside the McMichael Canadian Art Collection sign. Miss Chief then saunters down the driveway and is then seen by two European males who wear loincloths. The two males seem entranced by Miss Chief. The two men are led to the Tom Thomson shack and Miss Chief gives them alcohol, spanks them with the snowshoes that were in Thomson’s shack and then seduces them. At the same time, we also see Miss Chief’s petroglyph-like painting of them. She creates an art form, which Europeans deemed “primitive.” She paints the two European males and adds measurements, recalling the anthropological studies of Aboriginal communities in earlier centuries, while satirizing this system of classification. In particular, the words “seven inches” are on the painting, drawing attention to the male anatomy of these two European “specimens.” The eye of the camera pans between the picture of Tom Thomson on the wall, who seems to be like a spirit watching over his shack and the cajolery that Miss Chief performs on these European males. 

After they wake up from their seduction, they dress in historical European fashions and Miss Chief poses them inside a picture frame. This act deconstructs the capturing practice of European painters like Paul Kane, who wanted to paint the “dying Indian.” Many anthropologists, artists and scholars in the nineteenth century, believed that Aboriginal people were doomed to die out. In an effort to salvage the “dying Indian”, they recorded all aspects of indigenous life, romanticizing and dehumanizing their subjects.# Miss Chief captures the Europeans in the frame. The framing also brings attention to the active role of Miss Chief as the holder of the gaze and her control over the European males. 

Even if the viewer knows little about the McMichael, they would still be able to recognize the tensions of sexual domination and identify the stereotypical representations in the film. The McMichael sign at the beginning of the film alerts the viewer to the space. Although viewers who were familiar with the McMichael grounds would recognize the Tom Thomson shack, those who were not familiar would not necessarily recognize the shack, symbol of Thomson’s genius. However, the screen switch from the painting of Tom Thomson back to Miss Chief and the two “specimens”, alerts the viewer to the tensions inherent between Tom Thomson’s vision and the vision of Miss Chief. Tom Thomson created paintings that were devoid of any Native presence, in an effort to create visual art that represented the nation of Canada. Documenting the Canadian wilderness, the Group of Seven painters represented the physical landscapes as “empty space”, denying the presence of Aboriginals as well as suppressing the violence of colonial acts of land take over and assimilation.# Miss Chief, sexually dominates the two European males to reverse the sexual power inherent in colonization. Miss Chief also turns around the lens of power, so that she frames them, rather than the European framing the “dying Indian” as was previously conventional. 

The headdress of Miss Chief, and the loincloths that the two European males wear, are perhaps reminiscent of Wild West Shows in which Europeans dressed up in what they thought to be emblematic clothing of Aboriginal peoples. The use of these stereotyped costumes is funny and viewers can laugh at the absurdity, but the costumes also perhaps draws attention to people’s biases. People, who do not question stereotypes, think of ‘real’ Indians as existing in glass cases in museums, with full-feathered headdresses, rather than acknowledging the breathing presence of indigenous peoples today. 

Monkman with his performance as Miss Chief seducing the white men in the cabin, reclaims the space of the McMichael, poking fun at the sacred value which the Thomson shack holds for visitors. Tom Thomson used his shack as a space to paint his vision of Canada: images that depicted the rugged Canadian shield of Northern Ontario, completely devoid of any Native peoples. Today at the McMichael, many visitors stop outside the shack to peer into the place where Thomson spent many hours of his life, perhaps hoping to absorb some of his artistic genius and pay homage. The seduction of the white men in the shack, however, gives the space an entirely new meaning as a place of sexual desire and domination by an Aboriginal queer man, thereby subverting the “shrine” that visitors flock to on their way to or from the McMichael.

The sexual dominance of Miss Chief also recalls Monkman’s artistic agenda to highlight the fact that colonization played a large role in Aboriginal sexuality as well as representing a reversal of power. Miss Chief is dominant and the white males are in submission to her demands when she seduces them in the cabin. She gives them liquor, and rubs their bodies with it, pinching their nipples and arousing the two males who seem oblivious to her painting of them. Roland Maurice notes that Monkman did not want to convey the actual violence in his works between Aboriginals and Europeans but rather, “desired to recognize the reality of historical and actual acts of dominance and aggression by using the image of sexual relations between two men as a representation of political power and the colonization of Native sexualities.”# The sexual power of Miss Chief and her domination of the two Europeans can be understood by the viewer as an act of retelling history, and resistance to the colonial domination of Europeans, and specifically the European male. 

Monkman’s performance is not only a reversal of sexual power, but also can be seen as a challenge to the canon of Canadian art history, which validates the white European male and hesitates to consider other artists. The Group of Seven was exclusively male. David Liss explains Monkman as an artists who, “takes aim at the Group of Seven’s colonialist chauvinism and its by-now notorious exclusion of women from the tight-knit circle.”# Using a feminist interpretation, Monkman’s work seems to question the validity of the male artist-as-genius as well as the Western art historical canon, which places the European male at the very top, thereby “othering” women, and racialized groups. Miss Chief then could be seen as an alternative figure who brings a queer understanding of space, gender and art to the discourse of Western art history, thereby allowing more perspectives and stories to be told than only the European male’s. 

The identity of the two European males in the film seems straightforward, yet the identity of Miss Chief, the “Indian”, seems deliberately obscured to the immediate understanding of the viewer, embodying the Trickster spirit. Who exactly is Miss Chief? Miss Chief defies categories, she wears a Hollywood-type Indian costume with her headdress of feathers and long, braided hair. Yet we see his/her masculine bronzed body with high heels. She is in drag, yet she is also physically male. We see her muscled torso, and she exemplifies categories of male and female. Like the Trickster, Miss Chief is hard to pin down. Monkman explains, “Miss Chief is not really male, not really female, she’s kind of, in between, and sometimes she’s more female, sometimes she’s more male… S/he is a trickster, like the Cree Coyote spirit Wasagachuk, indefinable, fluid, charming, upsetting, silly, playful, revealing.”# In a sense, she is the anti-thesis of Tom Thomson, who is created by the McMichael as a male, artist genius, who paints the Canadian wilderness, exerting his colonial gaze over the land. Miss Chief plays a trick on the viewer’s expectations, subverting the serene landscape of the McMichael and the “holy” shack of Tom Thomson into a re-gendered space that promotes multiple voices, including Aboriginals, women and marginalized groups. 

Miss Chief subverts the viewer’s expectations using the Thomson shack as a place of seduction and the stereotypical costumes but also through the text presented throughout the film to convey “her” perspective. During the film, there is no spoken dialogue, only the written text of Miss Chief. At the beginning of the film when Miss Chief meets the two European males, she moves her lips as if to speak, but the Europeans do not, it as if they are mutes, or perhaps cannot understand her spoken language. The opening lines of text read, “I have for many years contemplated the race of the white man! But alas! They are changing through contact with the red man! They now favour our style of dress.” At this point, there is a close-up of the loincloths the two European males wear as they stand in the forest gazing out as Miss Chief. These first few lines parody travel writers and artists, like George Caitlin and Paul Kane, who came to North America and documented many First Nations. 

In the nineteenth and early twentieth-century, many anthropologists and others believed that Aboriginals were dying out and there was a great rush to document all aspects of Indian life. Miss Chief’s documentation of the white man then can be seen, as a humorous deconstruction of the paradigms of colonization and the “dying Indian.” As Miss Chief states, “It has become my life’s work to make a record of them before they are .. Obliterated… completely!” The irony in this statement is that Kent Monkman as an Aboriginal person was not obliterated, as many people thought would happen to Aboriginal peoples. Rather he reverses the lens of documentation, so that the Aboriginal view is a present active force, instead of being subjugated to the anthropological gaze. Miss Chief documents the two European males and subjects them to both a sexual and pictorial domination. 

Once Miss Chief has brought the two men inside the cabin, she continues to control them, on a sexual level, but also through pictorial means. She removes her feathered headdress and puts on a sequin cap, going along with her Cher persona. Lifting up their loincloths, Miss Chief inspects their anatomy, drawing attention to her sexual power as observer. After posing the two males with a paddle, she then has them face the camera, rear first. “I paint each sitter with profound feeling for his dignity and individuality,” the text explains. At this point, she hits them with snowshoes, a sexual act of dominance. This text is clearly meant to be funny and ironic, as Miss Chief seems to be very interested in their bodies as pleasure objects, rather than their dignity as persons. The two males then drink alcohol and pass out in the shack. When the two males awake, they are completely naked, suggesting the total sexual domination of their bodies by Miss Chief. They are surrounded by paintings by Kent Monkman, many of which are idyllic landscapes; yet do not exactly fit in the romantic landscape genre since they contain the figure of Miss Chief, having sexual liaisons with cowboys. 

After Miss Chief has used their bodies for sexual pleasure, she then subjugates them in another sense, with the frame, and the paintbrush. She dresses them up in European costumes. The text at this moment states, “The European male will live forever in my pictures… as living monuments of a noble race.” Miss Chief places wigs on the two males and directs one of them to play the piano and the other to gesture with his hands to the music. The piano player plays a classical piece, emblematic of European high culture. The viewer sees all the Europeans’ behaviours through a picture frame. They are “captured” by Monkman on screen. 

While the paintings by the Group of Seven are validated by the McMichael as “100% Canadian” and Tom Thomson’s paintings are viewed as authentic representations of Northern Ontario, what does one make of Monkman’s fantastical and deconstructive film Group of Seven Inches? His work is informed by his own experiences, and as such is an authentic performance. As David Liss explains, “As absurd and mocking as Monkman’s characterizations may be, he is Cree after all, and his interpretation of Native culture and behaviour is certainly as valid as any white man’s, if not more so.”# While the viewer can laugh at the hilarity present in Monkman’s video, one can also understand the video as a presentation of the power relations between Aboriginals and Europeans, and this aspect is a serious one to consider. The video can thus function on several levels it seems; viewers can interpret the sexual relations in the shack, and the costumes as part of a hilarious yet absurd play, or the viewer can see Monkman’s narrative as a reversal of the power relations inherent in the colonization and documentation by European artists of Aboriginal people. 

How was the video received by the McMichael? While the McMichael did show a series of watercolours by Kent Monkman which critique the Group of Seven’s landscapes, they have not exhibited the video Group of Seven Inches.# This is not surprising considering the video might offend those who like the paintings of the Group of Seven and do not want to consider the social and political agendas behind the artists and the institution that presents them to the visitor. Furthermore, the McMichael primarily displays paintings and drawings, objects that fit into the Western category of “high” art. Videos played are usually biographies of artists, or documentaries, which are often secluded off the main galleries for viewers to fully appreciate the paintings. Thus, the McMichael would have to make a radical shift in its mandate to include Kent Monkman’s video in an exhibition since it critiques the foundations that the McMichael prides itself in: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven’s paintings. 

With his performance of Miss Chief, Kent Monkman undermines the viewer’s relationship to the Tom Thomson shack as well as destabilizes the identity of the viewers themselves. His video could be understood as a critique of the detached yet worshipful reverence that the McMichael instructs its Canadian citizens to have for works of art by the Group of Seven. In his video, the shack is turned from a “shrine” that visitors gaze into as the place of Tom Thomson’s genius to a love shack, a place of sexual domination and revelry. Instead of a liminal moment, in serious contemplation of a Tom Thomson painting, the viewer can laugh aloud and ridicule both the Group of Seven and Miss Chief. The loincloths as well as the drag costume of Miss Chief embody the stereotypes that Europeans often appealed to in Wild West Shows. The many inversions that Monkman invokes could be understood as a Trickster Shift. Through the irony of text and narrative, Monkman draws attention to the old colonialist agenda of these artists who did not recognize Aboriginal peoples. 

Monkman’s Group of Seven Inches also subverts the viewer’s presumably sacred relationship to the paintings by the Group of Seven and therefore their ties to Canadian citizenship. While Carol Duncan’s critique of the museum as a producer of citizenry is valid, her analysis may benefit also from Judith Butler’s notion of identity as repetitive performance. As Roland Maurice notes, “If identity needs repetition to maintain its existence, as Butler suggests, then subversive influences can have the potential of altering that repetition. If this binary system is what we know as reality, camp, as a queer aesthetics with its inherent ironic incongruity between what is expected and what actually occurs, throws this reality into chaos.”# Monkman’s inversions throws the viewer’s relationship to the McMichael into question. His subversive video draws attention to the tensions between the colonial vision and Aboriginal peoples. The humorous video is an utterance, a voice that analyzes and challenges the McMichael as institution that creates citizens based on the notion of a Canada that represents the “triumphant” position of the Group of Seven. While the video may never be shown by the McMichael for obvious reasons, the dialogue created by this video hopefully will reveal the not-so-subtle position of the Group of Seven, the McMichael’s role in creating a passive citizenry and the mediating and/or remedial role that the Trickster has for Aboriginal artists. 

Many Aboriginal curators and artists have drawn on the Trickster to invert the status quo. Richard Hill, curator of the exhibition World Upside Down,  notes the importance of the Trickster, for understanding the inversions by many artists in his show. The Trickster embodies inversion but also balance and functions as a mediator between the spiritual world and the physical world. Hill writes of the importance that the Trickster plays for him, “If I’m in a situation that is formal and academic, I always feel like I want to kind of pull back and give them something that is coming from a different aspect of my own experience… its an evasion of colonial expectations.”# Hill’s self-reflexive stance parallels Kent Monkman’s desire to be simultaneously reflexive and critical of the Western art canon. Further, the use of ridicule in Cree communities functions as a way of keeping social relationships in harmony. The artists in Hill’s exhibition used inversion to comment on the dominant ideologies of society and like the Trickster provided an alternative way of viewing. Kent Monkman’s video Group of Seven Inches, continues in this tradition of subversion. 

Throughout the film, Kent Monkman challenges the authority of the McMichael as the producer of a national identity. He pokes holes in the canvases of colonization, or the Group of Seven’s agenda to depict a Canada that was devoid of Native people. The use of the shack as a place of sexual desire and domination, and the Wild West type costumes are hilarious, absurd and unsettling, all elements that recall the Trickster. The viewer’s expectations and perspective is turned upside down, as Kent Monkman provides a challenge to the colonial histories that are represented by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. Flying in the face of the McMichael, Monkman’s work criticizes the very “landscape” upon which the McMichael Collection is founded, works by heterosexual, European males and the sacred value of paintings by the male genius artist. The discourse created by this video could function as a remedial force to combat narratives that reinforce a nationalism that celebrates heterosexual males but largely excludes anyone else including Aboriginals and women. Although, this video could also just make someone laugh. 

Please do not reproduce this essay without contacting me first. Copywright GBell 2012. 

Notes

 #Carol Duncan, “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,” Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine, (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 90. 

# Duncan, 91. 

# McMichael Canadian Art Collection, “About Us - Who We Are,” http://www.mcmichael.com/about (accessed January 25, 2010). 

# Duncan, 94. 

# Duncan, 95. 

# McMichael Canadian Art Collection. 

# Duncan, 101. 

# Allan J. Ryan, The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art, (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999), 5. 

# Frances S. Connelly, The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725 - 1907, (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 2. 

# Jonathan Bordo, “Picture and Witness at the Site of Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry 26, no 2 (2000): 224. 

# Roland Maurice, “The Otherings of Miss Chief: Kent Monkman’s ‘Portrait of the Artist as Hunter”, (MA thesis, Carleton University, 2007), 31. 

# David Liss, “Kent Monkman Miss Chief’s Return: Subverting the Canon through Sublime Landscapes and Saucy Performances,” Canadian Art, (2005): 82. 

# Maurice, 57. 

# Liss, 82. 

# Ibid. 

# Maurice, 64. 

# Richard Hill, Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Joseph Nayhowtow, “You are Never Just One Thing in One Place: Tricksters and Contrary Spirits,” typescript of discussion, 2007, 6. 

Please do not reproduce this essay without contacting me first. Copywright GBell 2012. 

                                                                Bibliography

Bordo, Jonathan. “Picture and Witness at the Site of the Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2,      (2000): 224- 47. 

Connelly, Frances S. The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725- 1907. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. 

Duncan, Carol. “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship” in Exhibiting Cultures, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine. Washington and London: Smithsonian, 1991. 

Group of Seven Inches. DVD. Directed by Kent Monkman and Gisele Gordon. Toronto, Urban Nation, 2005. 

Hill, Richard. Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and Joseph Nahhowtow, “You are Never Just One Thing in One Place: Tricksters and Contrary Spirits,” typescript of discussion, 2007, 7 pp. 

Liss, David. “Kent Monkman Miss Chief’s Return: Subverting the Canon Through Sublime Landscapes and Saucy Performances” Canadian Art 22, (2005): 78 -82. 

Maurice, Roland. “The Otherings of Miss Chief: Kent Monkman’s ‘Portrait of the Artist as Hunter”, MA thesis, Carleton University, 2007. 

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” In The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, edited by Amelia Jones, 44-53. London: Routledge, 2003. 

Ryan, Allan J. The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art, Vancouver: University of British Colombia Press, 1999. 

Please do not reproduce this essay without contacting me first. Copywright GBell 2012. 

Grants for Aboriginal artists in Ontario

The deadline for the Ontario Arts Council Aboriginal arts grants is fast approaching!The deadline is February 15th.
If you have an interesting artistic (fine arts, dance, literary arts) project that you need monetary support for, then you should apply.
Here's the link.
Good luck to everyone!

Become an Artist in the Park on beautiful Georgian Bay

Apply to be an artist in the Georgian Bay Islands National Park of Canada for this summer. Application information is here. 

(Image courtesy of the Parks Canada website).