Legacy Article - Joane Cardinal-Schubert

Legacy Article "The Journey of Joane Cardinal-Schubert"
Winter 2003
by Sandra Vida

Her journey as an artist parallels in some ways the broader social movements of Aboriginal peoples within Canadian society in the past few decades—an increasing profile, a Vie growing activism, a desire to organize and to be heard, a need to redress old and new wrongs. But Joane Cardinal-Schubert is also unique, an original—with her own particular style, her sometimes controversial opinions, and her self-defined path. She is a product of her times who also adamantly shapes her own destiny. Now at the height of her career in painting, printmaking, and installation art, as well as writing, curating, and teaching, Cardinal-Schubert has achieved recognition as one of Canada's most renowned Aboriginal artists. But she is not content to rest on her laurels. She never stops exploring, always engaging with new ideas and projects with youthful enthusiasm.

Her early years were happy ones, and her parents and siblings encouraged her creative energy. The oldest girl in a large family including her brother, prominent architect Douglas Cardinal, she says that a lot was expected of each family member. Her parents encouraged her to take on responsibility, and to honour who she was, especially her Kainai (Blackfoot) heritage. "My family came from a long line of leaders on both sides. We were taught that there would always be opposition, but not to let others discourage us," she says.

During her childhood she learned to balance her active family life with times of quiet introspection, an impulse retained in her solo work in the studio. "I roamed around on our land and by the lake, testing my strength, learning my place, looking and seeing." In those years, her artistic bent was expressed in everything from making patterns in the snow to writing poetry, taking dance lessons, competing in figure and speed skating, acting in school plays, and singing in a choir. "I remember being feverishly engaged in a journey of discovery," she says.

As a result, a strong sense of identity imbues Cardinal-Schubert's art and life: "One's identity is the most important thing that one can have," she asserts. "There is nothing more powerful than to know who you are, where you come from." Following this principle throughout her career, she has remained true to her values, representing Indigenous experience and history, and exposing prejudice and oppression.

Her sense of self was sometimes challenged in her school years and in encounters with the mainstream art world, but these obstacles appear to have further strengthened her personal resolve. "Growing up in a small town with very few Native people, I heard the disparaging comments," she admits, "but that never affected my hopes and my dreams. I had no reason not to be proud of my family." She talks about the difficulty in getting her art degree, when a certain Chair of Fine Arts in Edmonton refused her application to university. She kept painting, while building a home life with her husband Mike and two children, and when that chair retired, she reapplied and was accepted. Her recent award of an honorary degree from the University of Calgary is therefore both a significant honour and a vindication of her determination.

Her invitation to join the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts in 1986 also came about as a result of the artist's initiative. That year, disenchanted with current curatorial practices and exhibition opportunities, she accepted an invitation to show her work in the unconventional venue of the Delta Bow Valley Hotel in Calgary. The resulting exhibition, Something New, looked wonderful in the pink room it graced and drew the attention of president Alison Hymas of the Toronto chapter of the RCA, who nominated her for membership. Her resounding acceptance by all provincial chapters is celebrated in Cardinal-Schubert's proud addition of the letters RCA after her name in her signed works.

In her prints, drawings, and paintings, Cardinal-Schubert has developed a personal vocabulary of images, including stylized horses, bears, buffalo, and human shapes, some reminiscent of Aboriginal pictographs. Using a rich palette of earthy red, yellow, and brown, with highlights of white and deep twilight blue, she arranges her symbolic objects within compositions that often break free from the usual strata of landscape. Her circles, arches, amphoras, and tipi shapes float within the unlimited space associated with dreams. "I constantly attack the two-dimensional surface in an attempt to make it larger, with a deeper perspective created by colour, communication, and understanding," she says. "In my view, there is no division between mind, body, and spirit"

Recent retrospective exhibitions, such as Two Decades, first exhibited at the Muttart Gallery in Calgary in 1999 followed by a national three-year tour, have offered artist and public a chance to look back on the trajectory of a prolific career. Beginning with works from 1969 and including works produced through the next 26 years, the show demonstrated the connectivity of the artist's concepts, the emergence of recurring themes and important series works, and the seminal importance of family and history.

"My work springs from personal experience," she says, "but is related to a larger cultural ethic." This approach is inherent in the creation of the "warshirt" series, powerful works in paint and collage. Preservation of the Species is a notable example; in each of four panels, alluding to the spirits of the four directions, centrally positioned Plains-style shirts are featured prominently, while other overlapping images are woven horizontally through these basic structures.

"It was a piece of my grandmother's crochet work that was the impetus for the warshirt series," she explains. She realized at the time, in what she calls a "frozen moment" of perception, how important such objects are as fragments of personal symbolism. The piece of crochet sat on her workbench, while its image haunted her, for over a decade until the idea interacted with other such moments, resulting in an ongoing series of art works.

"I had known for years that there were things in museums that belonged to my family," she recalls. But it was not until she was featured in an art exposition in Sweden in 1981 that she came upon a book called Aboriginal Artifacts in Museums and Collections and was driven to seek out Kainai clothing in the collection of Canada's Museum of Civilization. Her anger at these personal belongings being removed from their cultural context and taken so far away from their owners, not simply across Canada but around the world, was a strong inspiration. "It still took me about three or four years to conceptualize how I was going to turn my cultural and personal angst into a universal statement that all people could understand," Cardinal-Schubert reveals.

"In a world of smoke and mirrors, as an artist it is my responsibility to share a world view, developed from years of looking and seeing."

In her installation works, Cardinal-Schubert feels that she can have a more intimate relationship with the viewer. "I am concerned with the space and how it makes people feel, as well as the choice and placement of found or created objects," says the artist. The Lesson, first created in 1989 in Montreal and re-created in 20 other venues in North America and Europe, replicated the claustrophobic structure of a residential school classroom, with indicators like flooring, a blackboard, and chairs and the seemingly humorous addition of a red apple inserted with a screw hook on each chair. The piece conjured up a range of associations with these sites of emotion and memory, subtly conveying the artist's personal critique of this repressive system.

One of her best-known works, Preservation of the Species: DECONSTRUCTIVISTS—This is the house that Joe built, toured internationally in the exhibition Indigena (1992) circulated by the Canadian Museum of Civilization. The piece was a direct reference to her father, Joseph, and his strength and belief that had "constructed" his family. It metaphorically represented a construction site enclosure, in which a black picket fence enclosed five lodgepole pine figures clothed in newspaper headlines, their mouths open in silent screams. Five identical "Watcher" figures stood outside the fence. Chalk on blackboard and painted panels formed the back wall, while the floor was scattered with debris including bottles, syringes, Bibles, and oil-covered birds. To view and read the work, the viewer had to peep through a series of holes in a collage-covered wall.

While Cardinal-Schubert's art works resonate clearly enough, she has also been active as a speaker and writer, where she has been at the forefront of debates regarding Native rights and land claims. Native education and healing, the ethics of museum policies, and the appropriation of Native imagery. She helped articulate the significant distinction between being categorized as a Native artist by others, as opposed to affirming that identity within organizations and projects that are Aboriginal-driven and self-defined. "When my work started to gain some momentum," she recalls, "there was a backlash—all of a sudden people said they didn't know I was Aboriginal or Native. It took me a while to realize I didn't fit their stereotypical view of what a Native person was." As one of a growing number of Aboriginal movers and changers, Cardinal-Schubert has helped to shift the parameters within which Aboriginal art is presented and received.

Cardinal-Schubert believes that being an artist is a "pursuit without boundaries." In addition to her visual art and writing, her creative energy has been expressed through theatre, film, and video, as well as in community initiatives. She has been an avid member of the Alberta Society of Artists, the Triangle Gallery Board of Directors, and served on the Arts and Culture Committee of CAAAS (Calgary Aboriginal Arts Awareness Society) before becoming their president in 2000. She was a provincial councilor of the Aboriginal Film and Video and Arts initiative, which formed the Aboriginal Arts Program at the

Banff Centre, and an active advocate for Native artists through SCANA (Society for Canadian Artists of Native Ancestry) and later through the Canada Council's Aboriginal Secretariat (2000-2003).

Her most recent projects include the F'N Gallery, one of only five First Nations galleries in Canada, and the F'N Haute Cafe which hosts events, readings, and other productions. She is a member of Original Diva Productions, an independent group of women who organize the yearly after-awards party following the national Aboriginal Achievement Awards. "I have to create strategies and challenge myself constantly," she laughs "otherwise I would get very bored!"

In recent years, Cardinal-Schubert has been recognized by critics (such as Nancy Tousley, Robert Enright, David Garneau, and Lucy Lippard) and has been honoured with many awards (such as the Commemorative Medal of Canada in 1993, the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002, and an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Calgary in June, 2003). Cardinal-Schubert is represented by several Canadian commercial galleries and is included in international exhibitions and residencies. But her strongest motivator remains her own resolution and vision.

"In a world of smoke and mirrors," she says, "as an artist it is my responsibility to share a world view, developed from years of looking and seeing." While never consciously seeking out the position, she has become a role model for younger Aboriginal artists, encouraging and enabling their careers through her presence and example as much as through her curating and presentation of their work. By bringing her unique Aboriginal perspective into the public arena, she has challenged systemic perceptions and contributed to the rich cultural matrix of Alberta. She is living proof that one individual can make a difference. "By understanding the past and experiencing the present," she says, "we will all have a part in determining what the future will be."