Lita Fontaine | Winyan

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Lita Fontaine, “Purple Sweetgrass,” 2023

mixed media on wood panel (courtesy of the Gallery)

Winyan [wee-yahn] (the Dakota word for “woman”) is a solo survey exhibition of Dakota/Anishinaabe/Metis artist Lita Fontaine. Bringing together both seminal and recent work, this exhibition honours the career of a beloved Treaty 1 artist. Fontaine’s work centers and celebrates the beauty of Indigenous femininities as a resistance to heteropatriarchal and colonial practices that often relegate them to the periphery and render them vulnerable to violence.

Adopting a critical Indigenous feminist lens, Fontaine’s work incorporates symbols of assimilation and gender-discriminatory policies while mobilizing her love for her sisters, matriarchs and Dakota culture to create collage, drawing, dresses, and large medallion-shaped paintings embellished with berry and floral motifs, the Morning Star, and allusions to Sky Woman.