Allan J. Ryan
Biography
A long time ago, in my final year at the Ontario College of Art (now the Ontario College of Art and Design University), I wrote and performed political satire on CTV’s public affairs show W5. Not long after, I cut PM Pierre, a catchy little ragtime number about Canada’s newly elected Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, for Capitol Records, which won a big silver trophy, with an equally big name: the Lloyd E. Moffat Memorial Award for Best Creativity and Originality in Canadian Recording for 1968. Not long after that, I recorded an equally catchy tune — to my mind at least — about leaving my body to medical research when I die, on an album recorded in New York for CBS Records. In hindsight, it is not surprising that I later developed a close affinity for the Native American Trickster as both muse and subject/object of research when I embarked on doctoral studies in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, exploring the role of humour and irony in contemporary Native art.
When the research was completed, UBC Press and the University of Washington Press published it as an elegant book in 1999. The favourable reception to The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art, and the many friendships and insights I developed while conducting the research for the book, eventually led to my position as New Sun Chair in Aboriginal Art and Culture at Carleton University, which I held from 2001 until my retirement in 2021. During this time, with a joint appointment in the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies and the Department of Art History, I got to introduce students to concepts of Indigenous pedagogy in courses on Aboriginal issues, cinema and the visual arts; host the annual, and immensely popular, New Sun Conference on Aboriginal Arts for sixteen years (2002-2017); and share Indigenous artworks and films by Canadian Indigenous filmmakers in several countries, including China and Brazil. It has been a remarkable journey for a kid from art college with a guitar taking a break from the music business.
And now…a more formal biography, drawing on some of the same experiences
In 2001, I was appointed New Sun Chair in Aboriginal Art and Culture at Carleton University, the first position of its kind in Canada. Here, I held a joint appointment as Associate Professor in the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies and the Department of Art History in the School for Studies in Art and Culture, where I taught both undergraduate and graduate courses on Indigenous topics, with a special interest in contemporary Indigenous issues and identities and their aesthetic manifestation in literature, film, music and the visual arts. Frequently, members of the local Indigenous community contributed to student learning in these courses. Beginning in 2002, and continuing for the following fifteen years, I organized and hosted the Annual New Sun Conference on Aboriginal Arts.
My academic interests include postcolonial theory, comparative Indigenous minorities, cultural representation in museums, and the field of humour studies. Many of these interests were brought together in my book, The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art (UBC Press/U Washington Press), which won an American Book Award for its contribution to multicultural literature in 2000. This led to post-doctoral research on Native American cartoonists at Simon Fraser University. In 2005, I co-curated, with my University of California colleague, Zena Pearlstone, the exhibition, About Face: Self-Portraits by Native American, First Nations and Inuit Artists, at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For several years afterwards, I used the full-colour catalogue to this exhibition as a text for an interactive course on Indigenous self-portraiture in which students got to create their own self-portraits in dialogue with those in the exhibition, and present them to each other.
I have also lectured on Canadian Indigenous art and cinema in several countries, including the United States, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, China (three times) and Brazil.
In former lives I have worked as a graphic designer, television satirist, singer-songwriter, and recording artist. In academia, such an eclectic mix is called “interdisciplinarity.”
In recent years I have been privileged to receive the inaugural Alumni of Influence Award for Distinguished Educator from the Ontario College of Art and Design University (2015); the Distinguished Alumni Award for Career Achievement from Brandon University (2016); and the Alumni Association Award for Professional Achievement from the University of Arizona (2017). In 2016, I was also inducted into the Ancaster High School Hall of Distinction. (Very cool!)