Gerald McMaster | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | March 9, 1953 |
| Nationality | Canadian, Siksika Nation |
| Occupation(s) | curator, artist |
Gerald Raymond McMaster CM (born 9 March 1953, in North Battleford) is a curator, artist, and author and a Plains Cree member of the Siksika Nation. [1] McMaster is a professor at OCAD University [2] and is the adjunct curator at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. [3]
Gerald McMaster was born in 1953 and grew up on the Red Pheasant First Nation reserve in Saskatchewan, Canada. His father is Blackfoot, while his mother is Plains Cree. He says he grew up listening to the Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy on the radio, while avidly reading western comic books – all of which would later influence his art. [1]
McMaster says, "I've been an urban Indian since the age of nine. I've attended art school in the United States, trained in the Western tradition; yet I am referred to as an 'Indian' artist. I have danced and sung in the traditional powwow style of Northern Plains, yet my musical tastes are global ..." [1]
McMaster studied art at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from 1973 to 1975. He earned his BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He earned his master's degree in Anthropology and Sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, [4] and continued his studies at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. [5]
McMaster draws and paints with humour and an ironic juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary pop culture elements. Identities, fluid and multiple, are central to his art practice. In his piece Eclectic Baseball, "traditional Plains Indian symbols of warfare and sacred ceremony were freely mixed with symbols and actual equipment of contemporary baseball". One of his best known series is The cowboy/Indian Show. [1] Hide painting, pictographs, and petroglyphs inspire his methods of representation. He works in oil and acrylic. [5]
In 1995, he ceased being a full-time artist in order to devote more time to curating, critical theory, and writing.
From 1977 to 1981, McMaster coordinated the Indian Art Program and was an instructor at the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. Beginning in 1981, he was curator of Contemporary Indian Art at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. [4]
McMaster has curated a number of thought-provoking contemporary Native art shows, including INDIGENA at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. [6] In 2011, he curated with Ingo Hessel Inuit Modern at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. [7] In 1995, McMaster curated Edward Poitras's exhibition at the Biennale di Venezia . In 2005, Poitras, of Gordon First Nation, was the first aboriginal artist to represent Canada in the Biennale di Venezia. [8]
He served as the director's special assistant and deputy assistant director for cultural resources at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City from 2000 to 2004. He worked with the permanent collections there, as well as curating the shows, First American Art in 2004 and New Tribe/New York in 2005. [9]
He was curator of Canadian art at the Art Gallery of Ontario until 2012, when he was succeeded by Andrew Hunter. [10] [9]
In 2020, McMaster published a Iljuwas Bill Reid: life & Work through the Art Canada Institute. The book is one of the first comprehensive documentations of the artist's storied career and affinity for his indigenous heritage.
William Ronald Reid Jr. was a Haida artist whose works include jewelry, sculpture, screen-printing, and paintings. Producing over one thousand original works during his fifty-year career, Reid is regarded as one of the most significant Northwest Coast artists of the late twentieth century.
The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art is an art museum in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. The Eiteljorg houses an extensive collection of visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas as well as Western American paintings and sculptures collected by businessman and philanthropist Harrison Eiteljorg (1903–1997). The museum houses one of the finest collections of Native contemporary art in the world.
Rebecca Belmore D.F.A. is an interdisciplinary Anishinaabekwe artist who is notable for politically conscious and socially aware performance and installation work. She is Ojibwe and a member of Obishikokaang. Belmore currently lives in Toronto, Ontario.
This is a chronological list of significant or pivotal moments in the development of Native American art or the visual arts of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Earlier dates, especially before the 18th century, are mostly approximate.
Bonnie Devine is a Serpent River Ojibwa installation artist, performance artist, sculptor, curator, and writer from Serpent River First Nation, who lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. She is currently an associate professor at OCAD University and the founding chair of its Indigenous Visual Cultural Program.
Alfred Young Man, Ph.D. or Kiyugimah is a Cree artist, writer, educator, and an enrolled member of the Chippewa-Cree tribe located on the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation, Montana, US. His Montana birth certificate lists him as being 13/16th Cree by blood-quantum, his full sister, Shirley, is listed as 16/16ths. He is a former Department Head (2007–2010) of Indian Fine Arts at the First Nations University of Canada in Regina, Saskatchewan and former Chair (1999–2007) of Native American Studies, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Lethbridge and University of Regina.
Ingo D. W. Hessel is a Canadian art historian and curator specializing in Inuit Art. The author of Inuit Art: An Introduction, Hessel has curated exhibitions for the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, the Museum of Inuit Art in Toronto, and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.
Jane Ash Poitras is a Cree painter and printmaker from Canada. Her work uses the idioms of mainstream art to express the experience of Aboriginal people in Canada.
Lori Blondeau is a Cree/Saulteaux/Métis artist working primarily in performance art, but also in installation and photography. Blondeau is a member of the Gordon First Nation, and is based in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Edward Poitras is a Métis artist based in Saskatchewan. His work, mixed-media sculptures and installations, explores the themes of history, treaties, colonialism, and life both in urban spaces and nature.
Sherry Farrell Racette is a Métis-Canadian feminist scholar, author, curator, and artist. She is best known for her contributions to Indigenous and Canadian art histories. She is currently an associate professor of Visual Arts at the University of Regina.
Ruth Cuthand D.F.A. is a Canadian artist of Plains Cree and Scots ancestry. She is considered an influential feminist artist of the Canadian prairies, and is lauded for her interpretation of racism and colonialism. Her work challenges mainstream perspectives on colonialism and the relationships between settlers and Indigenous people in a practice marked by political invective, humour, and a deliberate crudeness of style.
Michelle LaVallee is a Canadian curator, artist, and educator. She is Ojibway and a member of the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation in Cape Croker, Ontario. She has BFA (2000) and BEd (2004) degrees from York University in Toronto.
Jolene Rickard, born 1956, citizen of the Tuscarora Nation, Turtle clan, is an artist, curator and visual historian at Cornell University, specializing in indigenous peoples issues. Rickard co-curated two of the four permanent exhibitions for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.
Carmen L. Robertson is a writer and scholar of art history and indigenous peoples. She was born in Balcarres, Saskatchewan, of Lakota and Scottish ancestry. She is Canada Research Chair in North American Art and Material Culture in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton University. Before joining Carleton, Robertson was an associate professor in the Faculty of Media, Art & Performance at the University of Regina (2006-2012). She also served as the Indian Fine Arts department head at the First Nations University of Canada where she taught from 2000-2006. A number of Robertson's writings focus on the Aboriginal Canadian artist Norval Morrisseau. She is past president of the Native Heritage Foundation of Canada.
Morgan Wood is a curator and artist who is Stony Mountain Cree. Her family is from the Michel Callihou Band in Alberta and her great-grandmother was Victoria Callihou. Wood received a Bachelor of Indian Art from the First Nations University of Canada, at the University of Regina in Regina, Saskatchewan.
Barry Ace (artist) (born 1958) is an Anishinaabe (Odawa) photographic and multimedia artist and curator from Sudbury, Ontario. Ace's work includes mixed media paintings, and mixed media textile and sculptural work that combines traditional Anishinaabe textiles and beadwork with found electrical components. Ace has a strong interest in combining traditional and contemporary technologies, aesthetics, and techniques in his artwork.
Âhasiw Maskêgon-Iskwêw (1958–2006) was a Cree and French Métis theorist, curator and artist. Maskêgon-Iskwêw was a significant figure in the field of contemporary Indigenous arts, and a formative proponent of digital media within Indigenous communities. In their 2015 book dedication to him, Steven Loft and Kerry Swanson describe Maskêgon-Iskwêw as "one of the foremost thinkers and practitioners of Aboriginal new media art."
Edmund Montague Morris (1871-1913), was a Canadian painter and pastelist who recorded the First Nations in paint and photographs and collected their artifacts. He was the son of Alexander Morris, Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories. He both co-founded the Canadian Art Club and authored an early book on Canadian art, Art in Canada: the early painters (1911?).
Carol Podedworny is a museum director and curator who advocated for the inclusion of contemporary Indigenous art and for Indigenous voices in Canadian museums in a career spanning over 40 years. Besides post-contact First Nations art, she is interested in contemporary Canadian art, and a diverse range of art history and art, including its material practice. She is the author or co-author of many books, catalogues and essays which investigate these subjects as well as issues of medical inquiry.
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