Odjig: The Art of Daphne Odjig, 1960-2000

Patricia Whitney, former coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program at
the University of Prince Edward Island, is the Bank of Montreal Visiting
Scholar in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa.

Most of this handsome book is given over to plates of Daphne Odjig’s
paintings, chiefly acrylic on canvas; each color illustration is placed
opposite some economical and wise words of the artist herself. This
arrangement results in a book that’s both beautiful and worthy of
Odjig’s wonderfully original artmaking. The power and loveliness of
Odjig’s line is a constant throughout.

For the most part an autodidact, less by choice than by circumstance,
Odjig has nonetheless claimed her place as an elder of Aboriginal art,
of women’s art practice, and of Canadian painting in general. While
refusing to be categorized, the artist remains particularly conscious of
her First Nations heritage, while always in touch with the similarities
of all human existence, such as when she writes that, for all of us,
“life is made up of one miracle upon another.”

Carol Podedworny’s essay, “Daphne Odjig: Making History,”
illuminates the artist’s participation in the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s
groundbreaking 1972 show, Treaty Numbers 23, 287, 1171, which
foregrounded questions of cultural diversity, multiplicity of gaze, and
history as social construct, and did so within the walls and cultural
authority of a major gallery. Now commonplace, these issues were then
revolutionary in their application to Aboriginal artmakers. Podedworny
argues that the Winnipeg show was crucial not only to Odjig’s artistic
development but also to her ongoing political action in such initiatives
as the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc.

Bob Boyer, himself an important Native Canadian artist and academic,
contributes an essay in which he places Odjig within her heritage as a
woman of the Anishinabe of Manitoulin Island. Boyer sees in her work the
sacred spiritual values of the Midewiwin belief system. Resisting the
dominant Eurocentric Canadian culture, yet incorporating certain cubist
values in her painting, Boyer positions Odjig as a part of the Woodland
School, treading her own path grounded in her womanhood and claiming
“the sovereignty of her own image.”