Dr. Carmen Robertson
Canada Research Chair in North American Indigenous Visual and Material Culture
Carmen Robertson is a Professor jointly appointed between the School for Studies in Art and Culture, the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture.
Robertson is a Scots-Lakota art historian whose research centres around contemporary
Indigenous arts and constructions of Indigeneity in popular culture.
She is a renowned scholar of Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau, publishing widely
on the painter’s life and work, including two books — Mythologizing Norval Morrisseau:
Art and the Colonial Narrative in the Canadian Media and Norval Morrisseau: Life and Art.
In 2018, Robertson was awarded a substantial grant from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council to lead a team of 14 researchers from across Canada in
an investigation of all aspects of Morrisseau’s life and work from 1955 to 1985 — the
first study of its kind of a contemporary Indigenous artist in Canada.
In her role as a Canada Research Chair, Robertson also conducts research around
Indigenous art theory and contemporary Prairie beadworkers — such as Ruth
Cuthand, a Cree-Scots artist who beads the spread of pathogens through colonialism
as a form of commentary, and Métis artist Katherine Boyer, who uses beadwork to
revitalize stories and knowledges around trapping and living on the land.
Robertson is also an independent curator. In the Fall of 2023, Robertson worked
with co-curator Danielle Printup to launch Norval Morrisseau: Medicine Currents at
the Carleton University Art Gallery. This exhibition spotlighted the iconic Norval
Morrisseau, a self-taught Anishinaabe artist best known for innovating the Woodland
School style in contemporary Indigenous art. The co-curators highlighted Morrisseau’s
use of divided circles that displayed a vision of balance, good and evil, day and night,
and heaven and earth. A photo of Robertson and Printup is featured on the cover
of this Research Review.
She also has an upcoming co-edited collection titled Bead Talk: Indigenous
Knowledge and Aesthetics from the Flatlands that debuted in Spring 2024
with the University of Manitoba Press.