Bonnie Devine, curator
Bonnie Devine – Transcript
The Drawings and Paintings of
Daphne Odjig: A Retrospective
This is my first major curatorial project. I have done a little bit of curatorial work. I’m mainly an artist though. I was drawn to curate a major retrospective of Odjig’s work because I felt that she had not received the attention that she deserved nationally or even regionally. I was very aware of her work when I went through art school. I’m a native person myself. I’m Ojibwa from Ontario. So her imagery was part of my formative education as a First Nations artist but even that imagery that we were shown did not properly assess or even explain the many facets of her project. The styles that she explored, the themes that she explored and the intellectual acuity with which she approached all of the things that she was interested in… And I felt that a curriculum of Canadian art history as it stands right now was incomplete without an examination at least of this major Canadian artist. I had worked on the sets and costumes of a play that was put together by Native Earth Theatre company of Toronto. A play written by another Anishnabe playwright ‐ named Alanis King ‐ and they asked me to do the sets. And my conception for the sets was to use details from her paintings in large format as canvasses and to use those as the set changes. And so, I found myself in a large studio working on these replicas of the paintings. And I did that for about three months and what happened while I was in that studio doing these paintings is that I came to understand the complexity that sometimes is hidden in the seeming simplicity of her lines. And when I came out to Pentiction to talk to her, just before the play opened and I saw her in her sister’s house and in her own apartment surrounded by the works that she hasn’t sold, that she’s kept for herself I realized that this artist needed to be seen. And not only here where she’s spent most of her life but nationally. And I applied for a grant and received the grant. I took it to the Art Gallery of Sudbury. The Art Gallery of Sudbury is quite close to where Odjig was born. It’s the closest regional gallery to her home on Manitoulin Island. And I said to the curator, “I’d like to do a retrospective of Daphne Odjig’s drawings and paintings.” The last retrospective that Odjig had was in 1985 and it traveled to just three 2
galleries in Ontario. It didn’t leave that region and that was at that time twenty years ago. That was in 2004. And Celeste Scopelites at the Art Gallery of Sudbury very courageously said absolutely let’s do it. And that was the beginning of our partnership. We worked for two years. I chose works, traveled several times, met with collectors, met with collectors in Montreal and in Ontario and in Alberta. The work has been drawn from public and private collections across the country and in the United States. And to our amazement, to our delight most of the collectors that we spoke to agreed completely that it was past due, that there needed to be a reassessment of her work. We needed to haul some of the paintings that had been bought by major institutions and were sitting in storage in basements that had never been shown. We needed to haul those out of the basements and bring them up and show the world what we have here in Canada. So that’s how it began. These are instructive pieces, not only for native people but for all Canadians. This is our patrimony and we want these pieces shown. They belong to us as Canadians. I want to see all these pictures together so that I can learn, that’s what art should be and that’s what the gallery experience should be I think. It’s an opportunity for us to talk to the artist and to learn from the artist and to take away something that will allow us to create in our own lives. It was important ‐ if it’s a retrospective ‐ to show the various directions that the artist has gone in. I tried to avoid what I would consider to be her really saccharine imagery and I tried to focus on those works that perhaps aren’t as commercially acceptable, if that’s okay to talk about that and to talk about the things that have more critical interest and more discursive interest in a contemporary art world. But I felt that it was really important also too that you know how sentimental a person she is and an artist she is. One of the stories that she was told was that her people, Potawatomi people, were not always from Manatoulin Island. She asked Aunt Grace where do we come from, who are we really? She had been told she was Ojibwa, she had been told she was Odawa. Aunt Grace told her: “You’re Potawatomi.” The Potawatomi came from Illinois and Indiana and traveled north to Canada as refugees after the war of 1812 and her great, great, great grandfather was a chief in Dearborn, Michigan … wherein her 3
people were driven out of this state and traveled by foot to Canada, to refuge. And the Canadian government offered them land on Manatoulin Island ‐ an uninhabited island I might say ‐and there they settled with Odawa and Ojibwa people and made a community such as it was. It came to Odjig in the 1960’s and early 1970’s that our history had not been told. And that her role as an artist was also to teach. She embarked on an investigation of her own origins, the story of her own people and, as she learned that story, she painted it. And so I felt that it was important to start the exploration because I feel that it underlies everything that is most important I would say about Daphne’s work is…I’m speaking as an aboriginal person …is her investigation into our history. She began painting as a young woman. She was born in 1919. She raised two kids. She had hardship. It took her a long time to develop the skill. She did not have the benefit of a formal education in art. It took her a long time to develop the confidence but if you consider where she was coming from, to be painting at this level with no support, she did not have a gallery behind her… You know the major regional galleries were not collecting aboriginal art at that time. Odjig is Anishnabe word and it means “fisher.” A little animal that lives by the river. And when she moved to Toronto ‐ Parry Sound and then Toronto ‐ she began using “Fisher” as her last name because if she told them her name was Odjig they wouldn’t hire her. And if you go to Manotoulin Island now you’ll still see lots of people who call themselves “Fisher.” In fact there’s a whole branch of Daphne’s family that still go by the name Fisher but it was in these years in 1968 that she began to sign her work Odjig. She moved to Toronto in ’39 or ’40. It was wartime, she worked at Planters Peanuts and in a munitions plant: so she would have been early twenties. So a very young woman leaves the reserve, comes to Toronto. She was holding down three jobs and teaching herself to paint at night. And, so this sense of losing her roots and ‐ at the same time ‐ this was when she met her husband to be and he brought her to B.C. She came to British Columbia in 1946…1945 right after the war, so still in her twenties. And really, aside from eight or nine years when she lived in Manitoba, she has been a B.C. resident for all of that time. When she moved to B.C. she lived in several different places. But the place I guess that was the most enduring and 4
where most of her work was created was on the Shuswap at Englemont and while she was there of course she began to see the destruction of the forests and the clear cutting operations that were going on at the time right around her. And her work veered at that time into a land based or a environmentalist subject matter and we begin to see a celebration of the earth, a celebration of the spirituality and the beauty of the trees. She was influenced very much by Picasso. She was influenced by the surrealists. Some of those she found resonances because her imagination was so fertile and because she could see the colours so clearly. She saw resonances with other European artists: the cubists. Of course she is never shy to say, that she studied the work of Picasso, she copied from books and from works that she saw in museums. She would get the stool and draw those. She studied the colours, the form, the way of composing. She didn’t have an education in composition or design. She had to learn how to do that and she learned from the masters and became a master herself. Part of the critical assessment that I wanted to make was to show that notions of abstraction have a very strong North American origin, you know. And when I say abstraction I’m not necessarily speaking only about colour field paintings or works that don’t seem to have any kind of objective form. I’m talking about paintings about abstract concepts and this is North American. But when the Europeans came here and looked at the things that they saw ‐ you know scratched on the rocks or painted ‐ they could not read it because they did not have a concept of trying to paint abstract notions. It took them many years, probably forty or fifty years from the time that they first began studying those pictographs and petroglyphs to understand what was going on and it had an amazing impact on North American abstract painting and on European abstract painting. The cross pollination has not been adequately assessed and as we see scholars and artists of First Nations backgrounds coming forward and writing this history, we will hopefully be able to balance that account because the account is not balanced at the moment. We’re in big deficit, eh? Yeah, but we’re getting there. In 1961 she was invited to come to Wikwemikong to see the powwow. She’d never been to a powwow in her life. She was I guess forty‐five years old at that time. She had spent most of her adult life 5
trying not to be a native person because of the discrimination that she had faced and because of the hardships and so on and she came to the powwow and they were all dressed up in Indian clothes. And actually it’s quite funny, I’ve seen some of the old photographs and they are obviously made out of polyester with fringes, you know and big feather at the back like…almost like a cartoon because they were searching and a lot of that was make believe because they could hardly believe it themselves and they didn’t know, you know. So Odjig goes and they asked her to help them to hang a show of native art that the community had put together because Prime Minister Pearson was going to be coming to this second powwow and in fact he arrived when Daphne got there by helicopter. It was his riding and so she helped to hang this show and then she went out to the Powwow And the Drum…it must have been amazing. The drum was ringing eh? And people were dancing and her sister‐
in‐law said “Daphne, come and dance.” And Daphne said: “I’m not going to dance.” Very reluctantly she went out into the circle and that drum and she began to dance and what she said is: “I became an Indian, that moment I realized this is who I am, this is my place. I can do this and still breathe, in fact you know I’m whole.” And it was during that experience and in the years intervening that she began to paint her real subject matter which of course is “us.” And that’s the stylistic break that made her from a very good technical painter, very good, competent oil painter into the artist that she is now. It was a matter of identity and it was a matter of claiming that identity fearlessly and announcing it to everyone. Daphne traveled to Wikwemikong in 1962 to see what was going on. And while she was there her sister‐in‐law asked her to travel around to the neighbourhood women and hear the stories because she said “Daphne you can draw. We would love it if you would make pictures of those legends and we will make a book and we’ll start teaching that to the kids.” And so Daphne made a series of drawings. Those books became the Nanabush tales. There were ten of them. There’re small primary readers. They are still in use on Wikwemikong in a Pontiac school. They are beautiful but this is the beginning of that Woodland style and we see it in Morriseau and we see it still being practiced by many of the Algonkian painters, eh? 6
The Tales from the Smokehouse, were painted in response to a request that Daphne got from a German scholar who was living up in Tuktuyuktuk and who had seen Daphne’s work in a magazine in Montreal. He was working on a collection of First Nation stories, traditional stories. Not a native person but very interested and very well educated and so he wrote to Daphne from Tuktuyuktuk and said: “Would you consider illustrating these pictures …or these stories for me?” He said: “they are a little bit racy” and she said: “well I don’t really paint that way but…you know, okay.” What Daphne said is she likes a challenge and she certainly does, she’s never said no to anything and so she agreed to paint the The Tales from the Smokehouse. And he would send her the manuscript, the pertinent part in the story that he wanted illustrated and she would do a drawing and they corresponded through Canada Post. And what Daphne says is she would send him a picture and he would say well it’s good but could you make the genitals a little bit bigger please so she’d paint it again and send it up. He’d say the same thing, it’s okay but I need them bigger and it went back and forth that way until he was satisfied and she has this body of work that, you know we had to put in a back room! But it was important again to show that she was fearless in that regard as well. She was prepared to collaborate with everyone. She never discriminated about, you know European people who came and were asking to learn. Very open about that, very generous in so many ways and the exploration of these Tales gave her an opportunity to learn also. She’s a lifelong learner and so she talks about some of the stories that are illustrated there with great glee. The book is still available, it’s not in print anymore but it’s still available online. If anyone’s interested…Tales from the Smokehouse…it’s a very funny read and the pictures are beautiful.