George Littlechild: Red Horse/Red Indian

Patricia Vervoort is an assistant professor of art history at Lakehead
University.

This catalogue of a solo exhibition of Alberta artist George Littlechild
(b. 1958) at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery in the summer of 1990 features
seven color reproductions of the 23 works included in the show.
Littlechild’s mixed-media works, produced between 1986 and 1989, are
vibrant in color and varied in texture. With thickly applied acrylic
paints and collaged elements (beads, buttons, foil, archival
photographs, etc.) the works explore the artist’s Plains Cree
ancestry. Images of horses and human figures predominate. Though the
style on first glance appears naive, the compositional complexities
reveal otherwise. While strongly influenced by the traditional
pictographic method of recording flat ideographic images,
Littlechild’s sophistication reveals affinities with contemporary art
in general. Indeed, he has a B.F.A. from the Nova Scotia College of Art
and Design. As this well-designed little catalogue demonstrates by the
art works and the essay by curator Janet Clark, Littlechild straddles
traditional boundaries and is an emerging artist to be noticed.