Early Days: Indigenous Art
at the McMichael

From its beginnings, the McMichael has had a long and proud history of collecting Indigenous art, now with more than 1,500 works ranging from eighteenth-century ceremonial regalia, through to items made for trade with settlers, to works by the vanguard of artists coming of age in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s — among them Robert Houle, Carl Beam, Norval Morrisseau, Alex Janvier, Greg Staats, Faye HeavyShield and Shelly Niro — and onward to leading contemporary artists like Kent Monkman, Meryl McMaster and Rebecca Belmore. The McMichael also holds the West Baffin Eskimo Co-op’s landmark collection of original drawings from Cape Dorset (Kinngait) dating back to the 1950s, to be displayed alongside our deep holdings in Inuit drawings, prints, textiles, and sculpture. Early Days: Indigenous Art at the McMichael will gather the remarkable artworks together, and the stories that go with them, in an six-month celebration of these powerful legacies. The show will also include recent acquisitions reflecting the diversity and vitality of Indigenous art in Canada today.