Native Art at the AGO

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Piece by art piece, the works of Native artists have slowly been receiving recognition from the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). But last month, the AGO seemingly went into fast forward mode, by adding a substantial number of Native works to its permanent collection.

A porcupine quill medicine bag, pipe bowls and a gunstock club crafted by nations living around the Great Lakes during the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries are among the pieces now displayed in the gallery's Canadian wing.

The new exhibit is entitled "Meeting Ground," in light of the fact that the art from this period was forged shortly after first contact between Native peoples and Europeans.

Before this new addition, Native art at the gallery consisted of an exhibit of Haida totem poles and a reinstallation of work by Canadian painter Edmund Morris (1871-1913) called No Escapin' This: Confronting Images of Aboriginal Leadership, developed in collaboration with Onondaga curator/photographer Jeff Thomas.

Recognizing that the historical works of art from the new exhibit also have a sacred spiritual connection for Aboriginal people, all the objects were purified before being shown to the public, and anyone who visits the exhibit can make an offering of tobacco.

Richard Hill, curatorial assistant of Canadian art at the AGO and of Cree/mixed ancestry, said that seeing the purification ceremony made him fully realize the "rich life" and "living connection" of the objects, which he helped select and acquire for the gallery.

Ironically, it was this rich life of the objects that has kept them from being featured prominently in the gallery's halls. Because each object had been used for a specific function, none was recognized as art by the mainstream arts community for most of the past century.

"Historically, the idea was non-western cultures were ethnographically interesting, but not for art," said Hill. "Westerns tend to think that it can't be art if it's functional, which is really a silly idea -it's a separation of art and life."

"These are objects where art is integrated into people's lives. It's a much more interesting model than the dysfunctional model [of art] in the western world."

Hill added that a big organization like the AGO is slow to change, and this also prevented the presence of Aboriginal art at the gallery.

Every effort was made to learn the history of the centuries-old pieces on display.

Unfortunately, for many of the objects, their known history begins and ends with their European collectors.

"With a lot of these objects, unfortunately, the collectors weren't interested in the history of them, they were just picking up souvenirs," said Hill. "So you have a lot of objects floating around where the specific history is lost."

In the event that someone steps forward to lay claim to an object, the gallery has created a comprehensive set of guidelines concerning cultural property rights and repatriation of objects to their rightful owners.

According to Hill, the exhibit is "a first step," and "a lab for proceeding with how we're going to change the Canadian wing."