8:30 – 9:00 Registration

9:00 – 9:15 Welcome from Marc Mayer of the National Gallery of Canada

9:15 – 9:45 Symposium introduction by Ruth Phillips and Elizabeth Harney

9:45 – 10:45 PANEL 1: MAPPING MOVEMENTS (Moderated by Ruth Phillips) 1) W. Jackson Rushing III – “George Morrison’s Surrealist Journey: Expatriation and Return of the Native Son”

2) Elizabeth Harney – “Challenging the Cartography of the Modern with the Coordinates of Pan-Africanism”

10:45- 11:00 COFFEE BREAK

11:00 – noon PANEL 1, continued

3) Peter Brunt – “Falling into the World: The Art World of Aloi Pilioko and Nicolai Michoutouchkine”

4) Norman Vorano – “Our (Foot)prints are Everywhere: Pootoogook, Houston, Hiratsuka and the Politics of Mobility in Early Inuit Printmaking”

noon – 1:30 LUNCH (On your own. Café located through the gallery – free gallery passes available at registration.)

1:30 – 3:00 PANEL 2: MAPPING IDENTITIES (Moderated by Elizabeth Harney) 5) Karen Duffek – “An Intersection: Bill Reid, Henry Speck, and Mapping a Modern Northwest Coast Art”

6) Anitra Nettleton – “Conditions of Engagement: Modernism and Modernity in the Art of Two Black Twentieth-Century South African Artists”

7) Nicholas Thomas – “Artist of PNG”: Mathias Kauage and his Contemporaries”

3:00 – 3:30 COFFEE BREAK

3:30 – 5:00 PANEL 3: MAPPING CONCEPTS (Moderated by Nicholas Thomas) 8) Sandra Klopper – “Tivenyanga Qwabe and the (Re) invention of Zulu Tradition”

9) Bill Anthes – “Indian Painting in an Expanded Field: Mapping Modernism in Native North America”

10) Ian McLean – “Across Cultures: Indigenous Modernisms in Central Australia”

5:00 – 5:30 Wrap-up discussion (Moderated by Susan Vogel)ening Reception – hosted by the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Pre-registration required

BILL ANTHES (PITZER COLLEGE)

“Indian Painting in an Expanded Field: Mapping Modernism in Native North America”

A primary focus of histories of modernism in Native North America has been easel painting, a novel art form introduced in Native communities during the last years of the 19th century. Shaped in large part by the unequal relationship between artists and their white patrons, by the 1920s and 1930s what was termed “traditional Indian painting” was characterized by stylized and sentimental depictions of the past, with little attention to the modern experiences of Native people. One narrative of Native Modernism has highlighted the break with this style and its institutional supports. Yanktonai Dakota painter Oscar Howe’s famous 1959 letter to the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma figures as a key statement by an ascendant critical Native voice: “There is much more to Indian art,” Howe wrote, “than pretty, stylized pictures.” A focus on painting highlights an art easily recognized as “modernist,” but also reinscribes a notion of the individual creator – usually male – and the innovative, paradigm-shifting breakthrough. As such, singular attention to painting might be seen to reproduce the shortcomings of modernist art history that a focus on Native cultural production might otherwise hope to critique. Another narrative might consider painting as just one aesthetic practice in a field including the “traditional” artists and institutions against which Howe railed, as well as craft and souvenir production in ceramics and textiles, most often produced by women, and which tend to fall beyond the pale of histories of modernism. Considering painting in such an expanded field might allow for a more nuanced understanding of twentieth century Native North American art as an intercultural aesthetic commodity within the broader context of societal modernization.

PETER BRUNT (VICTORIA UNIVERSITY, NEW ZEALAND) “Falling into the World: The Art World of Aloï Pilioko and Nicolaï Michoutouchkine” With the globalization of the contemporary art world, new attention is now being paid to the global dispersal of modernism in the twentieth century, and particularly in the decades following World War Two. In this paper, I want to examine the artistic partnership of Wallis Islander Aloï Pilioko (1935-) and his ‘mentor’, the French-Russian émigré Nicolaï Michoutouchkine (1929-2010). Most modernisms in the Pacific – Māori modernism, the Aboriginal acrylic painting movement, the Hale Hauā III collective in Hawai‘i, Papua New Guinean modernism and settler modernisms in New Zealand and Australia – have focused on the contested site of nationhood or indigenizing identity. The artistic project of Pilioko and Michoutouchkine 2stands apart from the latter in that their project was profoundly regional and global, stretching across the Pacific islands from New Caledonia to the Marquesas, and across the world from the Pacific to France, Switzerland, Russia, Japan and elsewhere. The continual travelling and exhibiting of their extraordinary careers span the transitions of decolonization at the same time as it prefigures the globalization of the contemporary art world. Yet it also gives rise to personal reconciliations between the modernist romance of permanently leaving ancestral homes and the new home both artists create in postcolonial Vanuatu.

KAREN DUFFEK (UBC MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY)

“An Intersection: Bill Reid, Henry Speck, and Mapping a Modern Northwest Coast Art”

Bill Reid (1920 – 1998), widely recognized as the first modern master of Haida art, often articulated the contradictions he felt about his dual position as a maker of Haida art and “a product of urban 20th-century North American culture.” He not only confounded the beliefs of others, both Native and non-Native, about what Haida culture and Haida art had been and were becoming, but simultaneously and strategically drew on and resisted the values of modern Western art. Henry Speck (1908 – 1971), whose life followed a trajectory distinct from Reid’s in its strong rootedness in Kwakwaka’wakw ancestral territory, was a respected hereditary chief, dance-screen painter, and song leader. Prompted and promoted by a Hungarian art dealer, Speck exhibited 40 of his watercolours at Vancouver’s downtown New Design Gallery in 1964, receiving significant media attention—including a CBC-radio critique by Reid—for his modern re-contextualizations of Native painting. This paper maps the two artists’ divergent and intersecting paths in the period pre-dating Northwest Coast art’s formalist “revival,” as each struggled not only to be modern, but to be recognized as such.

KAREN DUFFEK is the Curator of Contemporary Visual Arts and Pacific Northwest at the UBC Museum of Anthropology (MOA). Her research focus lies both in the history of MOA’s Northwest Coast Aboriginal collections—including connecting and documenting historical objects, particularly those made and used during the period of potlatch prohibition, with descendants and originating community members—and in the relationship of 20th-century and contemporary art to cultural practice. Among her many exhibitions are a recent collaboration with Peter Morin in Peter Morin’s Museum (2011), Border Zones: New Art across Cultures (2010), Robert Davidson: The Abstract Edge (2004 – 2007), and with Tom Hill, the now- historical Beyond History (Vancouver Art Gallery, 1989). Her publications include the webzine borderzones.ca (2010), and the books Bill Reid and Beyond: Expanding on Modern Native Art (co-edited with Charlotte Townsend-Gault, 2004), Robert Davidson: The Abstract Edge (2004), and The Transforming Image: Painted Arts of Northwest Coast First Nations (co-authored with Bill McLennan, 2000). Karen’s current project is an exhibition co-curated with Marcia Crosby, Projections: The Painted Art of Henry Speck, Udzi’stalis, opening at MOA’s Satellite Gallery this summer (July 13 to September 15). ELIZABETH HARNEY (UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO) “Challenging the Cartography of the Modern with the Coordinates of Pan-Africanism” Framings of African modernist histories tend to situate artistic practices either in nationalist terms or in relation to European colonial axes of education and patronage. This paper will take a closer look at the cosmopolitan ideas and experiences informing the artistic practices of Senegalese painter Mor Faye and famed Ethiopian artist Skunder Boghossian. In formal and conceptual terms, both produced works that complicated these limited readings. Mor Faye was an accomplished, art- school trained painter and collagist, a product and beneficiary of Leopold Senghor’s Negritude-inspired nationalist system of patronage in 1960s Senegal. He never travelled beyond his nation’s borders. And yet it was his status as a renegade—in the last, tormented years of his life—that brought his work brief international acclaim. In a posthumous exhibition, an American critic labelled Faye “a poor black Picasso,” a “medicine man,” even an “African saint.” Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian is the best-known of Ethiopian modernists, whose large corpus of paintings is matched only by the breadth of his peripatetic career, moving between Addis Ababa, London, Paris, Atlanta and Washington. In Paris of the late 1950s and 60s he worked with surrealists André Breton, Aimé Césaire, and Wifredo Lam. Western critics and Africanists alike have situated his work accordingly, as “mythic”, “visionary” “filled with “a purity of intention.” This paper considers the art and histories of two very different African painters, whose practices nonetheless similarly contributed to and were marked by inter-continental, pan-Africanist theories of identity, transnational networks of patronage, and localized narratives of “belonging to the modern.” Despite being active in some of the most vibrant scenes of modernist art practice in mid-century, neither has escaped the often debilitating migratory discourse of European modernism which fixes their work as belated footnotes to the time-space of the artistic circles in which they operated.

SANDRA KLOPPER (UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA)

“Tivenyanga Qwabe and the (Re)invention of Zulu Tradition”

This project traces the intersecting histories of Rebecca Reyher, an American suffragist who visited South Africa repeatedly in the course of the 1920s and 1930s, and the early 20th century Zulu-speaking carver, Tivenyanga Qwabe, who was born in rural Nongoma, but who as a young man sought employment intermittently in Durban as a migrant labourer. It explores the far-reaching implications for Qwabe’s subsequent artistic career of Reyher’s interest in the figurative relief carvings he began to produce while working as a rickshaw puller for the then burgeoning tourist industry in colonial Natal. But it also considers why Reyher’s encounters, not only with Qwabe and his circle, but also with the Cape Town-based Expressionist artist, Irma

Stern, and with local colonial architectural and furniture styles, suggest that she repeatedly refused to honour some of the widely-accepted artistic hierarchies of her day. Journeying – both literally and figuratively – through unfamiliar landscapes, Reyher described South Africa on her second journey to the country in 1925, in somewhat exotic terms, as “breathlessly beautiful, maddening, and intoxicating.” But, as her moving biography of Christina, the first wife Zulu king Solomon attests, her efforts to make sense of the lives and experiences of the people she encountered were shaped by her early interest in challenging gender stereotypes and other clichés. Reyher’s 1937 article titled, “Natives who are artists in woodcarving: The work of the Qwabe brothers”, is the sole source of information on the early production of Qwabe and his circle, whom she met initially in 1927 and whose work she deemed “both interesting and good.” Responding to Reyher’s affirmation, Qwabe himself appears to have extended his market considerably, but his encounter with her also had far-reaching consequences for his career, encouraging him to make aesthetic and other choices that were at once liberating and limiting.

ANITRA NETTLETON (UNIVERSITY OF WITWATERSRAND, SOUTH AFRICA) “Conditions of Engagement: Modernism and modernity in the art of two black Twentieth Century South African Artists” In this paper I compare two South African artists, Kumalo and Hlungwane, both black, both descendants of rural dwellers, who engaged in very different ways with the contemporary art world of South Africa, whose lives were coeval, but whose artistic careers barely overlapped. In exploring the careers and work of these two artists, I peel back some of the assumptions made about modernity and modernisms in relation to the urban and rural as they are mapped on a global terrain. I explore Modernity as a phenomenon or a condition of production of art, as distinct from, the historical ‘moment’ of a singular European Modernism. Williams’s (1989) question “When was Modernism” offers a way of challenging the idea that Modernism is, in global terms, a temporal category, through an understanding of modernity as an ahistorical condition, or one that is not periodisable. I have taken Kumalo and Hlungwane as case studies because, while they were contemporaries, they engaged with modernism and modernity at different times. I argue that the conditions of their engagement are crucial to a wider understanding of multiple modernities, to an un-seating of singular modernity and its corollary modernism as an exclusively Western phenomenon. I examine the ways the discourse of the “authentic” / “African” is differently inflected for urban and rural artists, separating them from mainstream modernists.

RUTH PHILLIPS (CARLETON UNIVERSITY)

Symposium Introduction

RUTH B. PHILLIPS holds a Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Art and Culture and is Professor of Art History at Carleton University; she served from 1997-2002 as Director of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. She has researched and published on African art and on Native North American arts with a focus on the Great Lakes region. She is the author of Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900; Native North American Art for the Oxford History of Art (with Janet Catherine Berlo), and most recently, Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums. Her longstanding interest in the work of Norval Morrisseau has led to her initiation of the current Multiple Modernisms project. W. JACKSON RUSHING III (UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA) “George Morrison’s Surrealist Journey: Expatriation and Return of the Native Son” The Ojibway modernist painter and sculptor George Morrison (1919-2000) was born and raised near the Grand Portage Reservation in Chippewa City, a now-vanished Indian fishing village on the north shore of Lake Superior. While studying at the Minnesota School of Art in the late 1930s, he dreamed of a bohemian life in New York City, which he ultimately lived, and with gusto. Studying in Manhattan at the Art Students League (1943-46), his conversion to a modernism that synthesized Cubism, Expressionism, and Surrealism was swift and complete. Already well versed in the visual paradigms of the international avant-garde, Morrison’s awareness of European modernism deepened when a Fulbright Fellowship in 1952-53 enabled him to study, work, and exhibit in Paris and in the south of France, where he made numerous small works on paper that started with automatic drawing. From 1943 to 1963 he led an itinerant life, mostly based in New York, but punctuated with fellowships and visiting teaching appointments in France, Minnesota, and elsewhere in the Midwest and on the east coast. He was simultaneously a willful expatriate, whose work was keenly responsive to place, and an estranged “Indian,” longing (in his words) to be in his own country, near his people. Indeed, his oil painting, Ex-Patriot (1964), is surely a complicated visualization of expatriation and the desire to go home. When Morrison returned to Minnesota permanently in 1970, Chippewa City was gone and he was re-regionalized, celebrated not so much as an international artist, who had exhibited in both Paris and Tokyo, but as a Native son. NICHOLAS THOMAS (UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE)

“ ‘Artist of PNG’: Mathias Kauage and his contemporaries”

Mathias Kauage (c1944-2003) was a founding figure of modern art in the Pacific, and is still the most widely celebrated Papua New Guinean artist to have worked in modern media. He is particularly salient to the Mapping Modernisms project because he was not only a modern artist – one of the many who adopted modern media and pictorial conventions, the upshot of engagement with an expatriate mentor – but an artist of modernity. Unlike his important immediate precursor, Akis, he made urban life, new subjectivities, political events and the independent nation his subject matter. He came to sign his works, ‘Kauage – Artist of PNG’.

Kauage’s engagement with modernity was paradoxical. He embraced the status of ‘artist of PNG’, was proud to represent his nation and delighted to meet the Queen. He became a painter of manifold aspects of Melanesian and

7international modernity, and of the colonial history that connected both. Yet he represented modern events and modern life via a Chimbu aesthetic. In one sense, Kauage’s practice, and the New Guinean printmaking movement of the 1970s, are closely comparable to, and closely associated with, the practices of local and native artists in various other parts of the world. Yet it is striking that Kauage’s work is unlike almost anything else – it is even unlike the work of other PNG artists – in the particular manner in which an ancestral aesthetic mediates the representation of diverse, modern subjects. He invites comparison, perhaps, with other artists in decolonising nations who made the nation and its history their subject matter – Cheri Samba and Tshibumba are distinguished examples. But the apparent affinity underscores the near-incommensurability of Kauage’s project. The success of his work is attributable in part to its engaging, accessible, qualities; but this accessibility is in some respects deceptive: the interplay between the Highlands aesthetic and a modern practice is at once obvious and almost indefinable. The multiplicity of modernity and modernisms is not the proliferation of expressions of the same dynamic. It is the engendering of cultural expressions, many empowered by nonmodern ways of seeing, that remain genuinely diverse and surprising.

SUSAN VOGEL (INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR) Wrap-up discussion SUSAN VOGEL lives in New York, grew up in Beirut, and has lived for long periods in a village in Ivory Coast, and a medieval city in Mali. She has published many books, and written a few, founded an art museum in New York – that survived her departure – and directed two museums; she then successfully completed two years as MFA student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and became a successful filmmaker and producer. Vogel has a PhD in African art history and has held the positions of curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Founding Director of the Museum for African Art, Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, and Professor of Art History at Columbia. Her last book, BAULE: African Art/Western Eyes, received the African Studies Association’s highest honor for original research on Africa, the Herskovits Prize. Her body of work was recently recognized with the prestigious Leadership Award of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association. She is currently finishing a book titled El Anatsui: Art and Life for publication September 2012, and curating an exhibition of tents from the Sahara and Arabian deserts designed by Zaha Hadid that will open at I.M. Pei’s beautiful Museum of Islamic Arts in Doha in 2014.

NORMAN VORANO (CANADIAN MUSEUM OF CIVILIZATION)

“Our (foot)prints are Everywhere: Pootoogook, Houston, Hiratsuka and the politics of mobility in early Inuit printmaking”

This presentation examines the disjunctures between the practices and rhetorics of travel and mobility in the early years of Inuit printmaking from Cape Dorset, arguing that within the context of colonial North America, the regulation of mobility must be seen as part of the global framework to understand and contextualize the flow of modernism’s global flâneurs— be they artists, middlemen or promoters. The presentation contrasts the experiences of travel, real or imagined, by 3 interrelated agents who are entangled in the early history of the Cape Dorset print studio: James Houston, Un’ichi Hiratsuka, and Joseph Pootoogook. Seeing a Time magazine article on modern Japanese printmaking, the Canadian artist and cultural intermediary, James Houston, traveled to Japan in 1958 to learn printmaking with Un’ichi Hiratsuka, proponent of Japan’s cosmopolitan sōsaku hanga (“creative print”) movement. After three months of study, Houston returned to the Canadian Arctic with Japanese prints and knowledge of Japanese hand printing techniques, and helped facilitate the production of prints with Inuit graphic artists in Cape Dorset, such as Joseph Pootoogook. More than a simple teacher, Houston also wrote many of they key promotional texts about Inuit printmaking that would be used in the south for marketing.His travels through Japan and the Arctic fed into his own promotional strategy in his writing and media interviews about Inuit printmaking, and throw into relief the politics of mobility as exemplified in the life of Inuit artists like Pootoogook.