Please join us for a vernissage on Monday, 22 April 2024, 1:00pm for opening remarks and light refreshments in MacOdrum Library, Room 252 to celebrate the opening of Weaving Together: The Art of Shirley Bear curated by the 2024 cohort of the Curatorial Studies 5002 seminar.
Weaving Together: The Art of Shirley Bear
Curatorial Studies seminar students invite all to visit the exhibition, Weaving Together: The Art of Shirley Bear, presented on the main floor of MacOdrum Library (the large wall nearest the big windows, to the left of the main doors) from April 22 to May 30, 2024.
This exhibition features a selection of works by Shirley Bear (1936-2022), Wolastoqiyik artist, poet, curator, herbalist, and respected Elder from Neqotkuk (Tobique First Nation) in Wabanaki territory, also known as New Brunswick. Through nine of Bear’s works and two pieces of her poetry, Weaving Together considers basketry as a metaphor for relationality. Just as splints of ash are woven together to form a basket, Bear reveals Wabanaki life as a constellation of entwined relationships between people, community, and land across generations. In this way, her work encourages a different — and more malleable — understanding of time. The works are selected from the Carleton University Art Gallery collection and are being exhibited for the first time since their donation to the gallery in 1995.
Weaving Together: The Art of Shirley Bear is curated by Victoria Hawco, Hanako Hubbard-Radulovich, Maya Maayergi, Dana Martin-Wylie, Melanie Nunez, Sevane Paroyan and Peter Salmon, graduate students enrolled in a winter 2024 Curatorial Studies seminar taught by Alexandra Kahsenni:io Nahwegahbow, in partnership with Carleton University Art Gallery.
The curators respectfully acknowledge our location on the traditional, unceded territories of the Algonquin Nation, and wish to thank the staff at Carleton University Art Gallery and the Indigenous Art Centre (Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada), and Emma Hassencahl-Perley for their help, support and sound advice in the development of this exhibition.
Image:
Shirley Bear (1936-2022)
Wolastoqiyik, Neqotkuk (Tobique First Nation)
Basket Weaver (1988)
Woodcut on paper, edition 5/7
Collection of Carleton University Art Gallery: Gift of Lesley Sinclair, 1995
Photo by Patrick Lacasse