Joane Cardinal-Schubert's Poignant Lesson
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Joane Cardinal-Schubert, “The Lesson,” 1989
chairs, books, apples, rope, mirror, whistles and chalk, dimensions variable, installation view (photo by Dave Brown, LCR Photo Services, University of Calgary)
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Joane Cardinal-Schubert, “The Lesson,” 1989
chairs, books, apples, rope, mirror, whistles and chalk, detail of installation view at Nickle Galleries, Calgary (photo by Dave Brown, LCR Photo Services, University of Calgary)
Joane Cardinal-Schubert – artist, activist and curator – addressed the conditions and events of her time, drawing from a well of personal experience, family history and her own Kainai/Blackfoot and Métis ancestry.
Her generation includes singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, Halfbreed author Maria Campbell, and the late actor Russell Means, a spokesperson for the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. Cardinal-Schubert’s installation, The Lesson, a poignant indictment of the residential school experience and its tragic legacy, ranks with their achievements.
Shown more than a dozen times in Canada and the United States since 1989, it’s now part of The Writing on the Wall, a retrospective on view at the Nickle Galleries in Calgary until Dec.16 that honours Cardinal-Schubert’s contributions.
The Lesson is set in a schoolroom with two chalkboard walls. The writing on one is an oppressive liturgy. On the other, heartbreaking stories pepper a memory wall. Visitors are invited to add more. Each detail adds to the wretchedness: The chairs are lined up, tethered, painted black. A dunce’s cap occupies a stool at the back. Yet there’s also childish spunk. A textbook covers reads: “We Discover Columbus.” The spine adds: “Lost at Sea.” And there’s provocation, too, in the red apple skewered to each seat. Over time, they turn brown.
When The Lesson was included in Made in Calgary at the Glenbow Museum in 2014, curator Nancy Tousley wrote: “Its relevance and the voice that Cardinal-Schubert gives to a long-hidden history and its continuing effects are undiminished by time.”
Cardinal-Schubert wrote on a blackboard again after the Oka crisis, creating a powerful, three-part wallpiece, Where the Truth Is Written – Usually. On the left, a painted American flag is replete with imagery representing First Nations sovereignty and Canadian identity. In the centre, a diary-like entry by someone at the 1990 standoff is transcribed in chalk. And, on the right, framing a crucifix of paperwork, are the repeated, cleverly altered lyrics: “Don’t make your brown eyes blue.”
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Joane Cardinal-Schubert, “Where the Truth is Written – Usually,” 1991
installation view (estate of Joane Cardinal-Schubert, photo by Dave Brown, LCR Photo Services, University of Calgary)
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Joane Cardinal-Schubert, Detail of “Where the Truth is Written – Usually,” 1991
oil on canvas flag with lodgepole pine flagpole (estate of Joane Cardinal-Schubert, photo by Dave Brown, LCR Photo Services, University of Calgary)
Cardinal-Schubert took her role as an artist seriously, wielding a potent and personal visual language that embraced narrative. “Storytelling was introduced to me as a parallel example of problem solving,” she once said. “Stories were not directives but provided a space for personal resolve. This is similar to what an art work achieves.” She has spoken too of the circularity of her practice, which often revisited ideas and themes, allowing her to work out connections and concerns. “My ‘stories’ are circular, the end and the beginning linked, referenced ... and I can cross over the circle and spin off into little circles rediscovering aspects I have missed or that remained undeveloped in previous works.”
Curator Lindsey Sharman has taken an astute approach, arranging some 60 works from 1973 to 2007 to reflect relationships rather than chronologies, reinforcing the artist’s circular and cyclical process. The University of Calgary Press also deserves praise for the richly illustrated book that accompanies the exhibition. Seven writers add valuable perspectives, along with Cardinal-Schubert’s own poetry and writings.
The show allows Cardinal-Schubert’s ways of knowing to come to the fore. The trace of her hand is evident and materials are tactile. Red dominates and recurring motifs – horses, buffalo, stars, human handprints, quilt checkerboards and sweat lodges – radiate throughout. She takes aim at museum practices that lock Aboriginal culture into the past in her series, The Preservation of a Species. She breathes life into the pictographs and petroglyphs of her beloved Writing-On-Stone, a historic site southeast of Lethbridge. She mourns that Mother Nature is given a hysterectomy. She claims the right to create her own warshirts and dream beds as markers of her life. Remembering My Dreambed, a 1985 painting, expresses her angst-ridden recollection of invasive surgical treatment for breast cancer. Many years later, cancer recurred, causing her death in 2009.
Joane Cardinal-Schubert, “Remembering My Dreambed,” 1985
acrylic on canvas, 59" x 45" (from the estate of Joane Cardinal-Schubert, photo courtesy of Nickle Galleries, Calgary)
Cardinal-Schubert was born in Red Deer, Alta., in 1942, into a family of eight children. Her father worked as a game warden and her mother as a nurse. Her eldest brother, Douglas, would become renowned as the architect of the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que. The family lived on an acreage, where her father had a mink farm. Cardinal-Schubert talked of “a lake with water lilies, the animal life, and my dad’s trap lines around the lake,” in a 1997 interview with curator Gerald McMaster that highlights the importance of her childhood logic. Even then, she loved making things with her hands, and would try out new materials and methods.
In 1962, she enrolled at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary, taking courses in painting, printmaking and multimedia. She returned with more purpose in 1967, the year she married her high school sweetheart, Eckehart (Mike) Schubert. They raised two sons, Christopher and Justin. She took up studies again in 1973 at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, but transferred to the University of Calgary, where she received a BFA in 1977.
It was the heyday for printmaking in Calgary, and Cardinal-Schubert soaked up the experimental atmosphere and honed her graphic sensibility. She echoed the boldness o of stencils and block printing in paintings, collages and drawings, creating silhouettes, solid shapes and repeated figures. She claimed materials from popular culture with gusto; Ancestors (Keepers) includes a torn bit of newspaper, faded German currency and a throwaway bingo card. Her work shows an appreciation for worn and rubbed surfaces. Many pieces have an intimate quality and, like a diary, were her place to come to terms with personal experience.
Joane Cardinal-Schubert, “The Writing on the Wall,” 2017
installation view at Nickle Galleries, Calgary (photo by Dave Brown, LCR Photo Services, University of Calgary)
In 1978, when Cardinal-Schubert had her first solo exhibition, Canadian Heroes, at the University of Calgary Art Gallery and the Red Deer and District Museum, she wrote: “It has become a habit of Canadians, whether unconscious or deliberate, to adopt heroes of other countries. I would, therefore, like to present to you, the viewer, a few of your own heroes.” Throughout her career, Cardinal-Schubert would continue to honour trailblazers who contended with injustice, sexism and racism. It’s fitting then that the Calgary Board of Education recently recognized her as a hero, announcing plans for a new high school to bear her name.
After graduation, Cardinal-Schubert began work as a curatorial assistant at the University of Calgary Art Gallery, and then continued as assistant curator in the new campus facility, the Nickle Arts Museum, until 1985. That experience stood her in good stead when she started to volunteer with the Calgary Aboriginal Arts Society in 1988 and helped create the F’N (First Nations) Gallery in 2001. She took a leadership role in founding the Aboriginal program at the Banff Centre. Her final curatorial project was to build an Indigenous collection for the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.
Cardinal-Schubert received numerous honours and awards in her lifetime. She was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, which she thereafter proudly included in her signature. The University of Calgary presented her with an honorary doctorate in 2003. Her works have been collected widely, and thanks to the Alberta government, two of North America’s most prestigious institutions have examples of her work. Song of My Dream Bed Dance was given to the National Gallery of Canada in 2005 to mark Alberta’s centennial. The following year, the province gave Medicine Wheel Nebula (Dream) – Glass Bottom Boat to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
That latter work’s sister painting, Medicine Wheel (No Hercules), now in the collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, is on display at the Nickle, located in a spot that could be the end, or perhaps the beginning, of the show. Two lodgepole pines hold up a loose canvas stained with the dark blue of a night sky. It’s punctuated with constellations of Cardinal-Schubert’s own making: a medicine wheel and pictographs. Remembering that for her a story is a place for resolve, and recognizing her skill with layered symbols, consider this: Could she be visualizing an ultrasound of healthy breast tissue and twinning it with a medicine wheel, expressing the childlike spirit of wishing on a star? Underlying Cardinal-Schubert's response to the pleasures and struggles of life – whether humour, joy, anguish or rage – is her belief in the power of beauty and hope.
Joane Cardinal-Schubert, “The Writing on the Wall,” 2017
installation view showing "Medicine Wheel (There Is No Hercules)” in foreground, 1985, acrylic on canvas and lodgepole pine, 92" x 68" x 44" (Collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, photo by Dave Brown, LCR Photo Services, University of Calgary)
Nickle Galleries
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