Native Art Department International, Aanzinaago (Caught in a Transformation) 01, 2024
Last year at Art Toronto we acquired Aanzinaago (Caught in a Transformation) 01, 2024, by Native Art Department International (NADI), for the collection at the McMichael. NADI is a collaborative long-term project created and administered by the Ojibwe Anishinaabe performance artist, sculptor, and mixed-media artist Maria Hupfield (b. 1975) and the Chiricahua Apache and Mexican multimedia artist Jason Lujan (b. 1971). NADI began in Brooklyn in 2016 and is now based in Toronto.
Aanzinaago (Caught in a Transformation) 01 is a large-scale painting that recalls classic works of the Woodland School such as Norval Morrisseauโs Shaman and Disciples, 1979, with the use of bright colours, bold graphic shapes, and thick black outlines. Here, however, the forms are not immediately recognizable as human figures or animals as they are in the work of Morrisseau but instead appear distorted and warped into abstraction. The title, Aanzinaago, is the Ojibwe word for “transformation,” suggesting that this composition presents a figure caught in the midst of transition to an altered state.
See this work and works by Norval Morrisseau in the exhibition Early Days: Indigenous Art at the McMichael.
Early Days: Indigenous Art at the McMichael
On view through MAR 29, 2026
Discover more than one hundred works that tell the story of Indigenous art in Canada
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