Mi’kmaq Art

Alan Syliboy’s The Journey So Far

Mi’kmaw artist Alan Syliboy’s retrospective The Journey So Far, curated by Pamela Edmonds at the Dalhousie Art Gallery (May 9 to August 11, 2024), spanned more than fifty years of work. The exhibition included paintings, collage, photography, music, print, mixed media, video, drums, and guitars and even a commissioned wall mural featuring a great horned...

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Alex Antle’s Njikam (My Younger Brother)

Embedded within a matrix of dark stone on the second-floor landing gallery at The Rooms is the vivid and materially diverse exhibition Njikam (My Younger Brother) by emerging L’nu artist Alex Antle. Originally from Qapskuk (Grand Falls-Windsor), Antle is currently based in Elmastukwek (Bay of Islands) where her maternal Mi’kmaw ancestors are from, and where...

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Sisterhood Bound by Quills

My first time seeing porcupine quillwork was watching my Aunt Connie create pieces at her kitchen table when I was 16 years old. It was mesmerizing to watch her take tiny quills and insert each one meticulously into place. I still remember the rhythm she created. When I began my own exploration into Indigenous Arts...

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Reaching Backward, Projecting Us Forward: My Cousin’s Cousin

Reflections of neon Beothuk pendants, electric colours, and textures coalesce into the dark, marbled concrete floor of Eastern Edge Gallery. The energy of the artwork in My Cousin’s Cousin cannot be contained to just the walls of the gallery—it activates all surfaces. This exhibition highlighting the interrelatedness between all beings was created as part of...

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MEMORY OF ROADSIDE FLOWERS

Care and Kinship in the Work of Emily Critch

Emily Critch is a visual artist, curator, and writer of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry from Elmastukwek, Ktaqamkuk (Bay of Island, Newfoundland). Critch’s work was recently featured in Future Possible (2019) at The Rooms and her upcoming curatorial project mitsujuk | kussikuashu | kpitni’sewet | they sew will be exhibiting in Corner Brook in 2020. Critch...

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All These In-betweens

Logan MacDonald on how to reclaim what has been lost

MacDonald tells me that “this work is sad. It is about contemporary mourning and historical mourning, but it is also a call to action and to empathy.” In these betweens there is also a generative tension that illuminates hope and possibility.

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Ketu’elmita’jik / They want to go home

Jordan Bennett

When you first walk into the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia’s exhibition space holding Ketu’elmita’jik, created by Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland) artist Jordan Bennett, the colours and designs flood your senses. They enter you like some otherworldly creation that has seeped into your brain and started playing music you can’t quite hear. This site-specific work fills the...

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Michelle Sylliboy Book Launch & Reading

Visual Arts News magazine presents Michelle Sylliboy's Halifax launch of her new book of photography and Mi'kmaq (L'nuk) hieroglyphic poetry: Kiskajeyi - I Am Ready, in partnership with the Halifax Central Library and Rebel Mountain Press.

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Re-discovering Indigenous Identities

The impact of the Identify Festival

To “identify” is to name something and render it visible, even if it may have been present all along. Organized by Eastern Edge Gallery, the Identify festival facilitates the gathering and sharing of traditional and contemporary artistic and cultural practices of Indigenous peoples in Newfoundland and Labrador including Mi’kmaq, Inuit, Innu, Southern Inuit of Nunatukavut...

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Black Light, White Night

Nocturne 2018

This year was Nocturne’s tenth edition. A milestone for the organization, marked by a partnership with the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, who helped select Raven Davis as Nocturne’s first Indigenous Curator. Davis, in turn, selected this Nocturne’s theme: Nomadic Reciprocity, a multilayered reflection on what is given and what is taken as we move through space, and as we move here in Halifax over unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaq territory.

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Art Talks Gallery Tour

A free bus tour of K'jipuktuk/Halifax galleries featuring talks with indigenous artists and curators: Carrie Allison, Aiden Gillis, Tarah Hogue, Maria Hupfeld & Wanda Nanibush. Followed by the launch of the Fall issue of Visual Arts News: UNKOWN LANDS.

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Resource Extraction: Meagan Musseau

Exploring memory, language and our relationships to the landscape

“My response to the landscape is emotional,” says Meagan Musseau. “I observe and engage with the land and the social environment in which I live.”

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