New Aboriginal curator in Thunder Bay

An artist’s spotlight on Arthur Shilling is one of the first projects planned by the Thunder Bay Art Gallery’s newly appointed Aboriginal curator in residence.
“His work was quite different than someone out of the Indian Group of Seven, who were practicing at the same time as him,” said Suzanne Morrissette, a Metis curator, artist and writer. “He often gets called an expressionist painter and I’m really trying to flesh that out and see what that means.”
The Arthur Shilling spotlight will be exhibited Sept. 6 to Nov. 27 on the Thunder Bay Art Gallery’s front foyer wall.
Morrissette plans to research the way Shilling’s art has been exhibited in the past and different ways of talking about his work now and in the future.
Born in 1941 in Rama, Ont., Shilling developed a distinctive expressionist style using bold strokes of colour to set off the quiet questioning or proud defiance in the faces of his subjects.
Shilling held his first solo exhibition in 1967 in Ottawa and his work is now in the permanent collections of the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, McMichael Canadian Collection, National Museum of Civilization, Royal Ontario Museum and Canadian Embassy Collection in Washington, D.C.
He was also the subject of the National Film Board’s prize-winning documentary, The Beauty of My People: The Life, Work and Times of Arthur Shilling.
Morrissette will also be presenting a paper on the Thunder Bay Art Gallery’s mandate study from 1994 at an upcoming Aboriginal Curatorial Collective meeting in Toronto.
“That was at a time when a lot of galleries were re-evaluating the way Aboriginal artwork is collected and displayed,” Morrissette said. “So I’m looking back to see what the mandate study had accomplished, what has been done since and how that affects my position here at the gallery.”
Morrissette grew up in Winnipeg; her grandparents are Cree from the Interlake and Metis from the Red River Valley.
She studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design University in Vancouver, B.C. and recently completed her Master in Fine Art at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, Ont.
Morrisette previously was an intern at both the Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art Gallery and aceartinc., an artist run centre in Winnipeg, Man.
She is also working on an exhibition of drawings, including Norval Morrisseau pieces, for Sept. 1 to Nov. 27 at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery.
“We have some very large drawings and some smaller drawings of his as well,” Morrissette said. “They’re quite reduced by comparison (with his paintings) so it’s a really interesting comparison to make, so I’m going to see what kind of narrative we can pull through with that.”