ART
Current
Issue
ART
Jane
Poitras: Media is the Message
Morrisseau
Exhibit at National Gallery
Reuse,
Recycle, Renew
BEE
IN THE BONNET
Honest
Injun
Sex'um Scandal
COMMUNITY
Natives
Compete for Métis Fire Fighter Position
CRIME
Highway
of Tears Symposium Sparked by Teen Murder
ENVIRONMENT
Ontario
Natives Recruit Environmental Lobbyists
MUSIC
Throat
Singer Mixes Punk, Folk and Poetry
MODERN TREATIES
BC
Metis Continue Push for Harvest Rights
NEWS
BRIEFS
Chief
outraged by near jailhouse birth
Residential school students' abuse lawsuit
given green light
Court
battles incur "tidal wave" of costs
Kenora area on priority list for safe drinking
water
Six Nations protestors remain after deadline
By Lloyd Dolha
He has been described as perhaps the greatest native artist who ever
lived - a primal visionary who gave form to the Ojibway legends and myths
told to him by his maternal grandfather Moses "Potaon" Nanakangos.
He is Norval Morrisseau, an Ansishnaabe artist of national and international
renown; the first aboriginal artist to receive a retrospective of his
life's work in the exhibit Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist, which runs
from February 3 to April 30, in the Great Hall of the National Gallery
of Canada.
The solo exhibition contains 59 works of Morrisseau covering the 1958
to 2002 period of his life. It is viewed by many as an end to the institutional
discrimination of First Nations artists by the country's foremost bastion
of Canadian art.
The exhibit features drawings, painted objects and paintings that document
Morrisseau's progression as an artist in a unique style that came to be
known as "Woodland" or "legend" painting, which the
artist is credited for founding as a school of form.
While the national gallery's reluctance to embrace Morrisseau's work is
unfortunate, even distasteful, it is perhaps understandable and even forgivable.
Morisseau's life as an artist was marked by alcoholism, drug use, forays
into homosexuality and a brief flirtation with organized crime in the
1970s.
He was often destitute and occasionally on the wrong side of the law.
It has been said that in Toronto he was often seen in the company of young
men and in Vancouver, he traded his art for bottles of booze.
In 1957, at the age of 26, Morrisseau contracted tuberculosis and was
sent to a sanitarium at Fort William, where he claims he had a number
of visions and dreams calling him to be a shaman/artist.
The astral plane or what Morrisseau calls the "House of Invention"
is the source of his luminous, totemic art.
In works that evoke ancient symbolic etchings on sacred birchbark and
pictographic renderings of spiritual creatures, Morrisseau reveals the
souls of humans and animals through his use of "ex-ray" style
of imaging skeletal and internal organs of the subjects he portrays.
The landmark exhibition is probably the last great tribute to a master
of his form and unique contribution to aboriginal art in Canada.
Morrisseau is now in his 70s and is ailing, confined to a nursing home
in Nanaimo, British Columbia.
His friend and longtime agent Jack Pollack, the art dealer who discovered
Morrisseau in 1962, described him in his memoirs.
"He's eccentric, mad, brilliant. He's an extraordinary human being."