Can anyone own a style?
Another, more detailed account of Amanda PL’s exhibit and the objections to it.
An art gallery in Leslieville has cancelled an upcoming exhibit after receiving complaints that works by a Toronto artist are offensive to Indigenous people.
The artist, who goes by the name of Amanda PL, in an April 26 email interview with The Beach Mirror, said her work is influenced by the Woodland style, an art form practiced by Aboriginal artist Norval Morrisseau. She recently rented Visions Gallery at 1114 Queen St E. for a guest-artist exhibit: The show titled Nature’s Landscape was set to run from Wednesday, May 10 to Sunday, May 14.
She rented the gallery; that’s an important detail that wasn’t in the other story.
“Within less than a day we started getting responses. We hadn’t anticipated any issues when we agreed to exhibit the work,” said the new gallery’s co-owner Tony Magee, who said they’ve received “several” emails and phone calls from people concerned about the upcoming exhibition.
Magee, who also lives in the neighbourhood, said they “took the matter very seriously” and have individually responded to every email and phone call.
“We respect the experience, culture and perspective of Indigenous people,” he told The Beach Mirror.
But does any of that add up to a veto on other people’s art works? Even if the works are derivative?
Amanda PL said she’s been “flooded with harassment’s (sic) and emails from the Aboriginal community in the last few days to protest against my art work, closing down the opening of my first solo art exhibition scheduled for May 12.”
“Although influenced (by Morrisseau), my art is original and the intention of the style was to express Canada’s true roots, and capture its naturally beautiful landscapes.”
I wonder if there could have been a solution short of closing down her exhibit. I wonder if for instance a prominently placed tribute to Morisseau with (duly permitted) images of his work and gratitude for his inspiration would have been acceptable.
I don’t think cultures should be sealed off. Of course there’s a huge power imbalance between indigenous and non-indigenous people in Canada and elsewhere, but I don’t think forbidding non-indigenous people to draw inspiration from indigenous art is a great fix for that.
Upper Beach resident Nancy King, an Anishinaabe artist who is also known by her spirit name Chief Lady Bird, was one of the people who spoke out against the exhibit.
King, who grew up in Rama First Nation, first learned about Amanda PL a couple of months ago from posts on Instagram. She also said she watched a YouTube video with the artist explaining her work.
“It was a kind of infuriating interview,” said King, who right away noticed that the artist didn’t list her Nation on her work, which she said is a common practice for Indigenous artists.
King also alleges Amanda PL’s pieces “looked suspiciously” like Morrisseau’s work.
Initially, she didn’t approach the artist with her concerns until fellow artist Chippewar informed her that Amanda PL was going to be exhibiting her pieces in Leslieville.
“When I saw that, I thought, ‘I don’t think so.’ I lost it. I felt compelled to speak out. I have a following of people who can stop this,” said King, who also shared her thoughts on social media.
“The response was amazing. People started calling the gallery.”
Hmm, yeah, amazing, but maybe not in a good way.
King said she would still like to speak with the artist face to face and help her better understand why culturally appropriating Indigenous art is wrong and hurtful.
“It trivializes our art, our experience, and our culture,” she said, pointing to Canadian art collector and collector Robert McMichael who said Morrisseau painted Anishinaabe stories that were passed down to him from elders around Lake Superior.
Maybe…or maybe it alerts people to its existence? Or maybe there’s some of both?
Offensive to SOME indigenous people. SOME. Otherwise, we must assume all indigenous people think in lock step on this issue, which strikes me as pretty insulting.
“King said she would still like to speak with the artist face to face and help her better understand why culturally appropriating Indigenous art is wrong and hurtful.”
You know what is also “wrong and hurtful?” Purposefully attempting to destroy an artist’s career. Artists don’t usually have many options to make money. They might need that money to buy things. Like food and rent.
If I wanted to paint gumtrees like Albert Namatjira did, that wouldn’t be appropriation. But if I painted using Arrernte symbols, that would be.
When an Indigenous Australian makes a piece of art, the symbols and imagery are drawn from the stories and images from their people’s history. A dot painting with trees and waterholes and a lizard symbol shows where they are from, what country and people they belong to. It’s important to the individual and their community. There are stories and images that are supposed to be kept secret. Indigenous people who paint in modern styles, not using traditional images, are still very much identified by their country and people.
So when a non-indigenous person comes along and thinks wow, I’m going to paint in that style; they’re making a Google translation of a private conversation they’ve overheard. It’s seriously wrong.
I have been able to find this out by reading, watching TV and talking to people who’ve talked to people. Amanda PL does not need to have the artist explain to her. She’s engaged in intellectual property theft, at the very least.
I struggle with the idea of cultural appropriation. On the one hand – like Ophelia – I can’t see that sealing each culture in it’s own little box is remotely helpful. Art needs cross fertilisation to remain fresh and relevant. However, I have to acknowledge there’s a problem when (usually white) artists make money using techniques, imagery and styles that are part of another culture whose own artists often can’t make the same money because they aren’t able to do things like hire galleries, or are passed over by the gatekeepers of “high culture”.
It’s a similar thing in literature. White writers are starting to use more diverse characters but that has led to a preponderence of white folk talking about black experiences while black writers can’t get published meaning the voices of experience – and thus true diversity – isn’t achieved.
It mostly works to the benefit of white culture and to the detriment of POC cultures – I’m allowing for some positive effect due to raising awareness of that culture and its traditions, but is that raising of awareness significant if it still merely allows white artists to make a living off different cultures while the actual members of that culture receive no material benefit? What do we do about it? I don’t know. But I do understand members of POC cultures calling out white artists who are selling work that they can’t because of cultural privilege.
learie, I’m not sure that I agree that the situation is anything like that clear cut. This has been, and still is, an issue of great debate in NZ where we have a vibrant Maori culture with rich artistic traditions covering carving, weaving, painting, tattooing (Ta Moko) and oral/musical/dance traditions. There is great tribal variation in all of these forms and some attract much greater scrutiny than others.
I have seen Maori artists criticised for using contemporary influences, both as having abandoned the spiritual nature of traditional forms and being captive to colonial forms. Non Maori artists have been criticised for incorporating Maori elements into their work (Makaro by Gordon Walters being just one such example https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/makaro-gordon-walters).
There is certainly a space within which a non-Maori artist should tread very gently. Certain forms and designs are considered taboo and their use is culturally restricted. Similarly Ta Moko, especially in traditional forms carry specific meanings and should only be created by a person versed in the particular tribal form who can determine if the wearer should have that design.
On the other hand there has been a realisation that a culture that shuts itself off from outside influence (which works both as the giver and receiver) is a static culture that will die, if nothing else from eventual irrelevance. This is an ongoing debate with fluid boundaries.
Can’t Amanda PL just BUY an online ‘First Nations’ certificate, like Ward Churchill?
She may well be unoriginal, churning knock-offs of an older artist’s work. She may well be doing the bogus, New Age, ‘Native Spirituality’ racket. But still, this pursuit of racial authenticity is cultural genocide. Is an artist supposed to post a DNA printout next to their work so that it may be judged on THAT basis?
We’ve had several scandals where works that were completely acceptable so long as their creators hid behind a false identity, suddenly being discovered as ‘wrong.’ Helen Demidenko’s gushing Ukrainian-ness (including casual anti-Semitism) was just swell, until it turned out she was a fictional character herself. ‘The Education of Little Tree’ was stock Native American lit for school kids, until the author was revealed as a Far Right White racist.
Of course, there is another side to that coin, too. White women writers are being demanded to include maximum diversity in their plays (I can only speak for plays; that is what I write) otherwise we are unacceptable. If we include diversity in our plays, we are called awful names and accused of cultural appropriation. I have not seen a similar thing occurring to male playwrights, though it might be happening, because obviously I am not omniscient.
The effect is that white women are the most underrepresented group in theatre, and we are being expected to apologize for our privilege of being the dominant group (we are not – white males certainly are, but people of color are actually represented in numbers that are surprisingly close to their actual percentage in the population). I will admit that a great deal of representation in theatre by people of color is in theatres devoted specifically to that demographic, but the women’s theatres have basically failed for the most part. There are still contests devoted predominantly to plays about women, but plays about women of color will get the most notice, because we still operate under the assumption that privilege operates in the exact same way in every single place and every single situation, and that means that white women have all the privilege. It’s a really weird world right now.
No arguments here.
I have seen similar (though fewer) accusations levelled at male writers (I know more about books than plays though) but they seem to be recipients of a far greater degree of societal support. As usual, women are perceived as easier targets. Society is also far happier about attempting to control women’s (of all colours) self-expression than men’s.
Women’s (of all colors) self-expression is often less comfortable than men’s. We often challenge the status quo, and suggest that this may not be the best of all worlds. And we often write women who do something other than think about men, take care of men, and raise men’s children. We are more likely to show women having a mind and an interesting, rich, full life.
I haven’t seen that much criticism of plays by white men (yet). In fact, in one group where I was being roundly harangued for not including enough diversity in my play, the male in the group who had written a play that got all its humor from objectivizing women was passed over without a comment on that, and received an award. The worst of it is, the person demanding purity in my play while ignoring the actual real sexism in the other play was a woman (and I know she could recognize sexism – she questioned the roles of my female characters as though all females have to fit into a high business/professional model for a play to be acceptable).
I would say I’m really sick of being a woman, but then someone would jump in and demand I consider changing my gender (though maybe not on this site; Ophelia does a good job of keeping order here)
Thinking on this more, I think the landscape in the UK may well be different anyway – we have far fewer of the dedicated-demographic theatres/cinemas – and when we do see that kind of thing it tends to be on the order of a large multiplex dedicating one screen to showing all Bollywood movies to service our significant Asian population. Our theatre is still very much white, and largely male.
When it comes to books POC still find it very hard to get published in the mainstream. Which leads to the situation where the majority of POC characters are written by white people. And that leads to the exact question: how do we help the situation? If we, as white writers, avoid POC characters we contribute to the dearth of representation of POC in literature, if we write about POC we risk being accused of making money off POC experiences while POC writers can’t get a chance to tell their own stories. And I do think that is a legitimate complaint/problem – I just don’t know what the answer is.