Métis artist and educator, Diane Montreuil, with the support of invited guest curator, Metis multi-disciplinary artist and knowledge carrier Nathalie Bertin, and the Artists’ Network’s Leslie Grove Gallery, is hosting Wisdom of Kinship – Indigenous Art Exhibition.
Wisdom of Kinship features 28 artworks by 11 Indigenous artists from Ontario, Quebec and Massachusetts, USA. We are honoured to present works by
- Barb Nahwegahbow, Ojibway, jewelry designer
- D. Ahsén:nase Douglas, Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) painter
- Deb Malcolm, Métis, painter
- Destiny Rae Wheatley, Indigenous artist and muralist
- Dianne Brown-Green, Indigenous of Cree heritage, painter
- Donald Chrétien, Aboriginal artist
- Ella Nathanael Alkiewicz, Labrador Inuk, painter and writer
- Isaac Narcsio Weber, Anishinaabek, painter and muralist
- Lisa MacIntosh, Abenaki, photographer
- Pam Cailloux, Métis, Huron and Algonquin heritage, painter
- Wesley Havill, Batchewana First Nation from Sault Ste Marie, Eagle Clan, carver
Supporting Woodland Cultural Centre
Leslie Grove Galley will donate all proceeds from Wisdom of Kinship – Indigenous Art Exhibition to the Save the Evidence Campaign at the Woodland Cultural Centre, Brantford Ontario.
Virtual Opening
Thursday August 5, 2021 — 7 – 8:30pm
A special evening will open with the sharing of storytelling, song and drumming with Grandmother Kim, Anishinaabe (Ojibway/Pottawatomi) band member of Shawanaga First Nation. Artists of the Exhibition will chat with our hosts, Diane Montreuil and Nathalie Bertin, about their work as it reflects wisdom of kinship in their family and community. Guests will be free to ask questions of our hosts or artists, or comment on the evening.
Read CBC online
Indigenous Art Show Explores Role of Kinship in Culture while Works Convey Pain, Hope, Beauty
In Unmarked, a painting now showing at a Toronto art gallery, a young Indigenous girl holds a human skull in her hands and stares at the viewer, her eyes full of sadness.
Ahsén:nase Douglas, a Kanien’kehá:ka painter with roots in Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory, created the artwork in January 2020, more than a year before the discovery of unmarked graves of children at Indian residential schools in Canada.
For Douglas, who considers himself a figurative painter, Unmarked depicts the loss of culture, language and children that occurred because of the Canadian residential school system. He said residential schools took away and “destroyed” the next generation of Indigenous people.
The painting is especially relevant now, he added.
“Most of my relatives have gone to residential school. I carry a lot of their stories, especially my auntie. It’s part of what I know as an Indigenous person,” Douglas said.
“I wanted to express essentially a feeling of loss, but also a feeling of sadness that I felt for the loss of the children as well as our culture and our language,” he added.