A Digital Journey into the Life of the Iconic Indigenous Artist
By Ally Lemieux-Fanset
In 1983, Carmen Robertson walked into a Calgary exhibition and encountered an artist who would inspire decades of her research – Norval Morrisseau.
“I’d heard his name, but I didn’t know his work. I was just blown away by that colour and energy,” she says.
Morrisseau was one of the first Indigenous artists to show in mainstream Canadian galleries in the 1960s and founded the Woodlands style.
He opened so many doors for artists not long after that, Robertson explains. Many people call him the mishoomis — the grandfather — of contemporary Indigenous art.
Dr. Carmen Robertson
Now a Canada Research Chair at Carleton, Robertson leads the Morrisseau Project: 1955-1985. After twenty years spent researching his legacy, she’s launching Norval Morrisseau: Storylines.
The website, presented by the MacKenzie Art Gallery and funded by Heritage Canada, launched on May 15. It’s the first detailed account of Morrisseau’s legacy, bringing his work to new audiences with contributions from experts and Indigenous knowledge keepers.
Through interactive features, users can discover how one of the most prolific Indigenous painters created a unique language to articulate his connection to the world around him.
Nothing like this really exists anywhere for an artist in Canada, Robertson says. It’s really important to make sure his legacy resonates not just in Canada, but worldwide. Because his art and his creation of a visual language is so important, but it’s been misunderstood.
Dr. Carmen Robertson
Divided into six modules, Storylines connects the stories behind Morrisseau’s life through innovative web design, allowing users to see the links between his body of work. According to the Digital designer and Carleton student Emily Vilé, breaking the flow of a traditional website was critical to making Morrisseau’s stories accessible to all audiences.
“Anishinaabe and Indigenous methods of curation are not necessarily focused on telling linear stories. There would be a lot more connections and be more free-flowing,” she says.
“I don’t think everyone knows about his life, his paintings, and how and what influenced him to produce these major artworks that are hanging in the National Gallery. And the progress that he made to get there is often overlooked.”
Bringing Language to Life
The website integrates Morrisseau’s visual language alongside the written and spoken. But Art Designer Jay Odjick from Kitigan Zibi, says it was important to bring the artist’s spirit of ingenuity into the website.
He created an interactive birch-bark map of Turtle Island that tracks important locations for Morrisseau across the continent. Odjick imagined how Indigenous peoples would draw the landmass pre-contact, picking out materials and looking at the continent from a different perspective.
That really speaks to Morrisseau as an artist. It just gives this thing a different feel from anything we’ve seen before, which I think was what Morrisseau did. Give things a different feel, he says.
Jay Odjick
Odjick is an Algonquin Anishinaabe writer, comic artist and television artist. He produced one of the first Algonquin superhero comic series, Kagagi, and adapted it for television.
“Initially, I felt like maybe this wasn’t something I was well suited for, coming not from a fine arts background, but from a guy who draws comic books,” he says.
After speaking with Robertson, Odjick explains he felt an organic connection with the artist’s story.
“Before he was a painter, he used to work in mines and down into mines, a lot of the time they had nothing to do,” Odjick says. “So, these guys would bring comic books and kind of trade and read them. And that influenced his art style.”
“Is it not the most amazing thing ever, that the most prolific Indigenous painter of all time pulled some of his influence from American comic books? That’s such a brave ideology to say, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna take this stuff because I love it,” he says.
Storylines looks beyond Morrisseau’s visual language and explores his role in language revitalization as a fluent Anishinaabemowin speaker.
The artist was a traditional storyteller, explains York University professor Alan Corbiere, who recorded a conversation with Morrisseau in his hometown of M’Chigeeng First Nation in the 1990s. Corbiere says he wanted to understand how artists fluent in Ojibwe talked about their work and “expand the realm where language is spoken.”
“I was reading one of these art curatorial essays and there were a lot of words like ‘postmodern’, and ‘curvilinear,’” he says. “We’re bypassing this whole art discourse in Ojibwe for a whole art discourse in English.
At the time of the interview, Morrisseau was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Corbiere remembers how the artist’s hand shook as they spoke, until he picked up his brush and began to paint. That tape was lost over the years, but Corbiere recorded a new talk about Morrisseau’s work all in Anishinaabemowin with Saul Williams, an artist who was inspired to create in his teens following a fateful workshop with Morrisseau. That recording is featured on Storylines, translated and transcribed in syllabics.
“If we get a number of these down, transcribe them and translate them, then we will be able to start to do discourse analysis. And second language learners like myself could then use those to talk about that subject area.”
Bringing His Work to New Audiences
One section, Love (Medicine), highlights pieces often described as “erotic.” Michelle McGeough, a Cree Métis professor at Concordia, developed the section included in Storylines.
For nearly twenty-five years, she’s studied Morrisseau’s pieces that probe into gender and sexuality. The artist rejected most labels, she explains, but is often identified as queer or two-spirit.
It’s important for younger people trying to find examples of individuals who identified like they do, to see themselves in these works, she says. It’s important for us as Indigenous people to reclaim our worldviews. Sexuality and the expression of our sexual being is only one aspect, but it is an important aspect.
Dr. Michelle McGeough
Yet, McGeough says art institutions often “don’t show the work.”
“If they do have these types of work in their collection, these are usually the first works that they will try to deaccession and so they go into private collections,” she says. “Once they enter into private collections the public never has access to that. Only the collector does.”
The MacKenzie Art Gallery, located in Regina, SK, is the presenting institution, building on their recent exhibition of Morrisseau’s work and long history promoting Indigenous-focused programming and exploring innovative models for digital art presentation. Many Carleton University faculty members and students also supported Robertson’s initiative with their contributions.
The Morrisseau Estate provided critical input for Storylines, according to Robertson. The project’s modules are voiced by Morrisseau’s son Eugene Morrisseau and great-grandson Logan Fiddler. Robertson says it was important to ensure Morrisseau’s voice was present throughout the website, which features over 150 of his works.
Often people see his work as narrowly defined. And that’s not Morrisseau at all. But it’s been very hard to access the range of his art, she says. So this is the first time that people have an opportunity to really see that online in ways they haven’t had access to before.
Dr. Carmen Robertson
