Headlines, North America

/ARTS WEEKLY/CANADA: National Gallery Honours First Nations’ Art

Mark Bourrie

OTTAWA, Jul 1 2003 (IPS) - -Canada’s National Gallery has become the first major fine arts institution in North America to permanently incorporate Canadian aboriginal art into its displays.

The gallery has revamped its sprawling Canadian gallery to include 100 pieces of Native art and place them, and non-native art, in the same historical context.

Greg Hill, the National Gallery curator and artist who, because of his own Native heritage, negotiated loans with Canadian First Nations, said the display, titled ‘Art of this Land’, "really makes a strong point that there’s thousands of years of history in this land known as Canada."

Among the art on display is an 8,000-year-old Pacific Coast Salish petroglyph, ancient Dorset sculptures from the Arctic, a Plains Indian headdress, works in silver and gold, and weavings of dyed moose hair.

"Finally, Native art has broken through that big cultural barrier," said Olive Dickason, an award-winning historian who is credited with bringing Native history into mainstream academia in Canada.

Dickason, who worked at the National Gallery in the 1960s before returning to university to earn her doctorate, said she "never would believed that barrier would come down".

Hill, who is partly of Mohawk heritage, says he is particularly proud of arranging the loan of a wampum belt given to Mohawk leader John Brant when he was elected to the legislature of what is now Ontario in the 1830s. Brant was the first aboriginal to hold elective office in Canada.

Hill said the Mohawk leadership, for decades, has been reluctant to lend the belt, a metre-long strip of beadwork that symbolises friendship, and a healthy distance, between the leaders of the Mohawk and the colonial legislature and leadership.

While the display, and the policy of integrating aboriginal art into all parts of the Canadian sections of the National Gallery is permanent, the artworks will be changed periodically because so many of them are on loan from First nations and from museums in Canada, the United States and Europe.

Hill said the gallery is prepared for criticism that the gallery is being "politically correct, or that the aboriginal material is not fine art”.

"I firmly believe that the aboriginal art is of the same quality, or better, than the material it’s displayed with," he said. "The work fits into the gallery, into an expanded idea of what’s art. Sometimes there is a very limited notion of what is art at the National Gallery. The perception that it’s just oil paintings and sculpture. It’s opening up the idea of what art is and allowing more material in, showing the visual traditions of this land.

"Before we did the installations, we did evaluations and made a test display case of aboriginal work and asked ‘Do you believe this is art? Do you believe it belongs in the national gallery? Would you want to see this here?’ There was a lot of support from the public, and, in some ways, the public is ahead of curators,” explained Hill.

”Curators are so hung up on categorising things, while the public says, ‘this is beautiful, this is artistic, it’s about time this material was in the gallery and it’s great that it’s going to happen’,” he added. He said the display shows the difference between the Euro-Canadian and aboriginal art traditions, but the art styles compliment each other.

"Europeans have a different tradition of that, they represent it through the landscape painting, but it’s the landscape of Canada. (Canadian artists of the 20th century) tried to develop a new way of looking at the land, but there were already traditions in this country," he said.

He believes the gallery will draw more aboriginal students, who will see how their artistic heritage fits with the rest of Canadian artistic heritage.

"Now there’s an obvious symbol that the National Gallery is a place for aboriginals. Aboriginal artists will be treated in an equal way, and this is permanent, it’s not just a three-month show. It’s really opened up the doors and I hope to see more aboriginal people come through and that will be a focus of our educational activities, to do more outreach,” Hill added.

"We also found there was a great interest in aboriginal languages, and that was something we addressed through the audio guide, where you can hear some native speakers in different languages discussing the work in the language of the particular culture that the pieces of art came from,” he continued.

University of Ottawa religious studies professor Marie Francoise Guedon, who, while working as an anthropologist at Canada’s Museum of Civilisation, negotiated with British Columbia First Nations to acquire many of the artifacts and artworks in the museum’s dramatic Pacific Coast gallery, says she is pleased that the national art gallery has started the new programme.

"The art of the aboriginal peoples is among the most dramatic in the world. There is nothing else that looks like it, and, to those who are not familiar with it, it is incredibly exotic. Sometimes, I have felt that Europeans appreciate it more than non-aboriginal Canadians,” she explained.

"It has always been appreciated as ‘native’ art, but it’s now getting recognition as fine art. It’s about time," Guedon said. (END/IPS/NA/AE/PB/KS/03)