Indigenous art in spotlight downtown

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This article was published 18/05/2016 (3454 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For Kevin Anderson, one of the aboriginal artists whose work will be on display in downtown Winnipeg this summer, wherever he happened to be that day was home.

He lived on the streets for 10 years, carrying his art supplies in a backpack: producing art, and losing it, and producing it again.

Art brought his life into focus, as it does for other artists, he explained in a quiet voice barely audible over the downtown traffic noises.

The Indigenous Artwalk, unveiled Tuesday by the Winnipeg Downtown BIZ, opens the world of aboriginal artists such as Anderson to the rest of Manitobans. Twelve storefronts, either on or just off Portage Avenue between Vaughan and Fort streets, are displaying works by aboriginal artists.

The project was initiated by the BIZ’s aboriginal peoples’ advisory council.

“Art is a way of telling our stories… and expressing who we are as a people,” said Sharon Redsky, an aboriginal advisory council member and one of the artists of the Shoal Lake No. 40 art display in the window of the Women’s Health Clinic on Graham Avenue.

The Shoal Lake band has provided water for the City of Winnipeg for a century but has not had its own drinking water for 19 years, Redsky said. Her art display includes a traditional jingle dress, beadwork and photographs.

Anderson’s art is different. It melds traditional aboriginal art and modern art with fantasy. His ink drawings are half-colourized, and half-ink sketch, like an unfinished page in a colouring book.

The colourized part he wants you to see first; the non-colourized should come afterward and sink in more slowly. His drawing, in the window of Book Fair on Portage Avenue, is called Bittersweet, and shows a tale of elders in colour in the foreground and alcohol abuse to the side in black and white. They are surrounded by toadstools like in a fairy tale. The addict in black and white will not go to the elders for help, Anderson explained. That’s a mistake, he said.

Anderson’s life has been anything but a fairy tale. Quiet, but not necessarily shy, he described an abusive childhood, 10 years of homelessness and a battle with cancer, and he’s only 41 years old.

“I learned how to survive,” he said, crossing Portage Avenue during a media tour of some of the storefront art.

He still carries his art supplies in his backpack but now with prints of his artwork he sells for about $20 each wherever he is, places such as Tim Hortons, Portage Place and The Forks.

“As long as I’ve got a pencil and paper with me, I’m OK,” he said. An Ojibwa originally from Sioux Lookout in northwestern Ontario, Anderson has been off the streets in Winnipeg the past three years. He said his art is also on display in Neechi Niche (part of Neechi Commons), the Edge Gallery, Cree-Ations, and the Canadian Plains Gallery.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca