Endurance…..Patience

Four powerhouse Indigenous artists make pointed political statements one bead at a time.

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Beadwork was part of the visual culture when I was growing up in Manitoba. While the Métis side of my family did not practice the craft, I’ve always associated it with my culture and female labours of love. 

Beading as a political statement is not a new concept in art making. The four Indigenous artists in Endurance…..Patience, on view at Winnipeg’s Urban Shaman until March 21, are a testament to this. Each artist in the show, organized in conjunction with the national Beading Symposium – Ziigimine-shin, which took place Feb. 6 to Feb. 9 in Winnipeg, uses beading as a political tool. 

The result is a powerhouse quartet – Carrie Allison, Catherine Blackburn, Ruth Cuthand and Nadia Myre – with some of the most important contemporary work made in Canada in recent decades. 

The Red and Assiniboine rivers are topographical icons that represent Manitoba and the Prairies. Allison’s Red River Beading (sipiy), a sprawling stream of amber beads, meanders more than 30 feet across one of the gallery’s main walls. 

Allison, whose work responds to her maternal Nêhiýaw/Cree and Métis ancestry, creates the land’s veins, where water flows and life has grown. She honours this sacred and crucial pathway with a material that asks us to slow down and focus – as she must do when making such work. The piece complements her slow and sweet video animation, To Honour, which documents the beading process as a meditative reflection.

Myre’s Indian Act was one of the first works I saw as an emerging arts writer some 20 years ago. I had never seen Indigenous rights represented and reflected this way. It stopped me in my tracks and still makes me gasp. 

The act of beading over the government document that stripped Indigenous people of their rights is a clear and critical act of reclamation, one that holds new and urgent meaning within the current Wet'suwet'en crisis. What’s more, this work is a collaborative piece – over 230 friends and family members helped the Montreal artist create the work. 

Cuthand, a symposium speaker and this year’s recipient of a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, is represented with Boil Water Advisory, an installation that’s part of a larger work, Don’t Breathe, Don’t Drink. 

Crystal-clear drinking vessels – from goblets to baby bottles – are filled with what appears to be clean water. But Cuthand, of Plains Cree and Scottish ancestry, infects the water with intricately beaded bacteria and parasites that have been found in the water of Indigenous communities on boil-water advisories. The work is breathtaking in both its aesthetics and politics. 

Blackburn, of Dene and European ancestry, makes work strongly connected to material metaphor. Her beaded tea bags, filled with traditional medicines, sit atop fur thrones. Another work, Our Mother(s) Tongue, graphically stitches beaded Cree syllabics onto black pillows printed with images of human tongues, referencing and reclaiming Indigenous languages stolen in residential schools.

How do we rewrite material histories to make meaning of the past, present and future? These four artists use beading as an act of protest, an assertion of voice and a way to recontextualize understandings. Each artist brings elegance and precision to material history with urgent critical messages that encourage viewers to reflect on difficult pasts and imagine a more hopeful future. ■

Endurance…..Patience is on view at the Urban Shaman Gallery in Winnipeg from Feb. 7 to March 21, 2020.

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Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art

203 - 290 McDermot Ave, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 0T2

204-942-2674

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