Cultural Alberta

Hello, I'm Frits Ponikuk. Welcome to Episode 5 of Alberta's Past: A New Lens. In earlier episodes, we looked at Indigenous innovation and Alberta's experiments in politics and institutions. By this point in the series, you've already met the four guests who will be joining me again in this program. Historian and writer Max Foran returns to extend his ideas of the new on new into Alberta's visual arts. Métis scholar and historian Heather Devine brings her work on Métis history and cultural expression to questions of art and representation. Culture and art historian Troy Patnotte is right at home helping us think across both Indigenous and non-Indigenous art. And Fred Bradley, whom we first saw through the political lens as a former MLA, joins us as a lifelong advocate for the preservation of history and culture with a particular depth of knowledge about arts and the heritage in the Crow's Nest Pass. Throughout the episode, we will look at visual artists who tried to paint Alberta as they saw it. "The National Anthem" "The National Anthem" "The National Anthem" "The National Anthem" "Until recently, there was relatively little scholarship on Alberta's culture compared to its politics and resource industries. One early exception was folklore, especially in areas with strong Ukrainian settlement. Much of that work stressed continuity with old-world practice. But the objects themselves show change: new colours, new motifs, and hybrid designs that only appeared in Alberta. To begin to see these patterns more clearly, we were able to see these patterns in Alberta. To begin to see these patterns more clearly, we start with the visual arts and explore some of the names that come to mind when we think about innovative artists in this province. In my

Mind, I've got Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. And Marion Nicoll comes to mind. Luke Lindoe comes to mind. Stanford Parrott comes to mind. And, you know, with Indigenous artists, Gerald Tailfeathers comes to mind. Alex Jonvir comes to mind. Douglas Cardinal. I'd add Adrian Stimson to that list even, too. These

Innovative Albertan artists sit within the long history of art in the province. Art historian Nancy Townsend, in A History of Art in Alberta, shows that early professional painters here worked under conditions very different from those in Toronto or Montreal. David Bates and William Leroy Stevenson pursued expressionist ways of painting that offered their own interpretations of Alberta and its people rather than conventional scenic views. We turn to historian Max Foran, who looks at the artists he believes best represent his ideas of Alberta as a place where new people confront new environments, including in the art schools. Stan

Perrott, born in Stavely, young, small, quiet guy. And he always liked art and went to the Alberta College of Art. And his teacher was a prominent British painter called H.G. Glide. And Glide asked the class to design a Christmas card. And Glide wanted, he didn't say anything, but a Christmas card to Glide. Cottage. Evergreen. Snow. British landscape. Good old England. And Stan said, I walked home from school every day. And in the blizzards, I followed the telegraph poles and the drooping wires. And when I got home, it was a kind of self-relief to get home. And I was happy. And Christmas to me was a happy season. And my Christmas card was the wires and poles reaching towards my house. Glide looked at it, ripped it up, said, do it again. He had no idea what he was dealing with. He had no idea. And he's a quiet guy. And he pulled before the Indianworth Coors. Coors was a giant. And so was A.C. Leighton. And so were these modern artists. Even Roland Gissing. Nancy Townsend didn't give him a mention in a book on painting. Why? Because he wasn't a trained painter. They called him more an illustrator. Well, no, no, no, no. Anyone who can capture colour and space like he did, I mean, he was more than that. His diary told me, "I will show the world the work of the real Roland Gissing." And a fire took them all out of the ghost. And that's when he became the popular Artist. Who knows what Gissing would have been

Like. From 1929 onward, Alberta's arts education was formalized under the conservative leadership of the British artist A.C. Leighton at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art. He provided discipline and institutional stability, but was suspicious of modernism. And his leadership reflected a conservative, male-dominant art establishment in which women struggled to be recognized as professional artists. Only later, when people like Marion Nicol began to teach at that institution, did the college open up to a more experimental and innovative approach grounded in local experience.

When I think of A.C. Leighton, I think of absolutely very British tradition, an imported one that is more about imposing an idea and a way of working onto this place. His way and his traditions that he learned from were the best way in some way. So therefore, they should be here. And it feels to me a little bit imposed, forced and perhaps closed minded. And you could absolutely point to some situations and some things that he did which were influential. But to me, I would say he couldn't quite get, you know, put his finger on the real depth of what the real potential and the real kind of possible aliveness that a real relationship to this place could bring forth and blossom. For Max

Foran, painters such as Stanford Perrott and Roland Gissing are the artists who most clearly captured Alberta's winters, space and light on a canvas more authentically. Gissing

And Parrott, both of them. They're in my living room now. They're the best. No one could paint poplars like Stan. No one. Both he and Eliworth Kerr went to the States to study the impressionist painters and they came back and did impressionism a while then they went back to their realism. But Stan always told me that impressionism made him looser and better and it attracted himself in his classroom. He said that painting was all about design and by design he meant the design in your own head, the design on the painting, the design on everything. He said I walked by a kid's painting and I'd say now that part's working. Never That part's not working. Yeah Stan Perrott as far as an artist goes is everything. And Gissing said in an interview, they asked him what he's going to do in later periods of his life. He said I am going to work on space. I don't think there's any Alberta yet that has captured space. I don't think there's any other way to do it. That was Gissing. And pair it with his Christmas tree. And the fact that Stan's teacher couldn't see

It. The first two that came to my mind real quick, Marion Nicoll and Luke Lindoe. For me, they were artists that for the first time just really seemed to want to like learn about this place, the land and get right into a relationship with this place in a little bit of a deeper way that wasn't wasn't necessarily about just sort of looking at these gorgeous landscapes in an external kind of a way. It seems to me that they just saw this deep, integral relationship between how they lived here and this place. And on one level, they understood that perhaps they didn't necessarily have a real deep relationship to this place. And so therefore they wanted to like find out more about it and really kind of went there with with their work, whether it was getting hands dirty in the clay here and not from just anywhere in the world or other parts of Canada, but that it actually meant something that it was that was from here, getting your hands dirty that way or starting to think about your relationship. How is I'm thinking of Marion Nicoll here now, how in some way, what we do and how we live our lives as humans, whether we're artists or working in any other area of life, how in some way, the relationship to where you are and how you belong to a place actually really mattered in shaping who you were in your everyday life as well, too. I mean, I see I see Marion Nicoll really kind of grappling with those those types of questions. A parallel

Story runs through the work of indigenous artists in Alberta. Contributors such as Gerald Tailfeathers, Jane Ash Poitras, Joan Cardinal Schubert and Alex Janvier have each developed distinct approaches, but all work from deep indigenous intellectual and aesthetic traditions. In practice, there are many different ways this can look. One comes from Métis painter Christy Belcour. Belcour uses a pointless technique familiar from French painting, but her motifs, spacing and color choices come from Métis beadwork. She's an example of indigenous artists using European media to extend rather than dilute their own visual traditions and even change how Divine decided to present her own work. When I finished

The book, when it was in the publication Process, we had to pick a cover piece of art. And I wanted something that said Métis immediately. I went to a conference in Saskatoon and Christy Belcour was there and her paintings had an exhibition of some of her paintings. And immediately I saw it. I thought, "Now that's Métis." And I asked her if she would allow me to choose one of her paintings. And she said, "Sure." This is how the original painting looks. It's called "Infinity." And if you look closely, you will see that there is a Métis infinity sign... Wrapped up in the picture. And I just thought that was great. And it was beautiful. And obviously when you're developing a book, you have to make it attractive. Well, I don't think anything could beat this.

This cover art shows how Métis beadwork designs can move from clothing and bags onto canvas, and then into an academic setting. One way Indigenous and Métis artists have shifted the boundary of being crafted in art is by bringing those familiar patterns into new media and institutions. Another has been to move across many different media and insist that Indigenous art belongs in every one of them. This is what Joan Cardinal Schubert's career illustrates. When she left this

World and passed into spirit, you know, the big project that she was working on, her projects were very much connected to galleries and the exhibition of Indigenous artists. That was always a big part of her life. And one of the great innovations with Joan Cardinal Schubert, I find, is she really, as an Indigenous artist, just unapologetically worked in a whole variety of mediums and just would bounce back and forth in amazing ways from performance art to installations to painting to, you know, and just and really kind of did it all. And there were other Indigenous artists that were around at the same time as her, you know, Carl Beam comes to mind and people like that, that were also doing similar sorts of things. But Joan was really at the forefront of that. And I'd actually say Adrian Stimson is an example of that now. You just never really know what Adrian Stimson is going to do next in a way. Is it going to be a performance? Is it going to be a painting? Is it going to be a sculpture? And so I feel Joan was a really important innovator for artists in Alberta, Indigenous or non, but certainly for Indigenous artists. To just so freely and unapologetically move through all these different types of visual art practices and mediums. If an artist

Can treat performance, painting and installation as part of the same practice, it becomes harder to keep beadwork, clothing and small bags in a separate category of craft. Well, I think when you

Take an object, like a beautiful basket, let's say, and you put it in a display case and you identify its date and what it's made of, that's fairly limited in terms of interpretation. You would probably be better off having also a picture of a Native woman doing the craft. When you're a mobile population, you're not carrying a lot of stuff around. So, what happens is that you incorporate beauty into the few items you have. For Métis people, a lot of that was their clothing, their moccasins, their jackets. That's what they would use and their wives would use that as the canvas for expressing themselves artistically. Not that they were thinking, but they wanted their husband to look good. And Sherry Fowler-Rissette writes about this quite a bit. The idea that you wanted your husband to look good. And so you see people with beautiful beadwork jackets and gloves and things. And it's like, he's married to a good woman, you know? It's also a way of connecting with your family.

I feel the women's art associations, even if perhaps not in the mainstream, but when people would go to these women's art association exhibitions and see Indigenous and non-Indigenous works and what we might call craft and hire all side by side in the same room, that's an important step in the way Albertans and Canadians could engage and see art. Perhaps unknowingly, perhaps not played a really integral role as well in being able to foster Indigenous artists at a time where they were locked out of the mainstream academy exhibitions and couldn't exhibit anywhere else. I feel like the women artists bring the Indigenous women artists into their exhibitions with them and exhibit right alongside them. It's like a crucial innovation. Over

Time, some of that work left exhibition halls and moved into private homes. One of

The interesting things I think about is lots of non-Indigenous buyers, people, collectors, buying and collecting Indigenous art. You know, what are the reasons behind that? And we can think about things like tourism and collecting kitschy little totem poles made in China and a souvenir shop in Banff. And, oh, it just kind of is neat to kind of collect these things. There's that kind of collecting. But then there's also kind of a collecting where, in some way, this is like speaking to my soul in a deep way that I can't explain. And I have to have this artwork. And we're surrounding ourselves in these rooms because, in some way, this is reflecting back to me something about myself. And it could be something about myself that I don't necessarily like, that I need to keep reminding myself, "Oh, this is something I need to learn in my life. And this is inviting me into this conversation." And it presents a new way of thinking. And then there's these works that kind of confirm or affirm things that we maybe already knew about ourselves or about our relationship with the world, relationship with our society. And so these types of collectors, I'm very interested in how their everyday lives are changed or in the process of transformation, because they have these artworks and they're surrounded by them in the room and presumably think and talk about them a lot. These art

Collectors live with pieces that are tied to older practices of story, song, dance and ceremony. Within an

Indigenous worldview, story itself kind of comes from a different place that I feel like is perhaps taken more seriously. It's able to do a different kind of thing within society and the everyday lives of people who read it or look at it, you know, look at these narratives today than if you are not someone from that worldview. And so it's just really recognizing how story exists within an indigenous worldview in a different way. There's like an authenticity to it. There's elements of imagination and elements of reality and all these different kind of layers all pulled in together. But it's all pulled together, not just because of mentally trying to think of some really cool, innovative way of doing it, like the craft of writing itself. But it's pulled together out of an authenticity that is your lived authenticity of not just you yourself, but also your people and your ancestors. And they're all in there with you. And it's pulled in, you know, by this authenticity that is way beyond just like the craft of writing in an intellectual kind of a way. The same

Is true of music and dance. We often forget that a lot of families on the prairies, there were no movie theaters or any of That stuff. And what they did have were dances. And Métis people have always made music. Even on the plains, they would lay out boards to dance on because they liked doing that. And if you see some of the old Pemina Métis pictures, the ones that were drawn for the Harper's Magazine in the 1860s, you'll see a group dancing and you'll see all the women who are breastfeeding babies along the side and then people dancing. And, you know, it was an integrated part of life. You don't leave the kids at home. Everybody's

There. Musicians blended tunes from different sources. Dancers adapted steps to new rhythms. Families modified instruments and playing styles to suit local acoustics and available space. Written work from someone like Maria Campbell does not replace those musical gatherings. It draws energy and material from them and puts them into a form that can travel through classrooms and libraries as well as kitchens and halls. It's Indigenous

Artists that are showing us actually there's fuller understandings of a relationship to this place. And with Maria Campbell, that's absolutely what's going on, right? Her life, her upbringing, how Indigenous worldviews have mixed with the reality of growing up in a settler colonial country. It makes what is possible for Indigenous artists very unique because no other Canadian can express it that way. Maria

Campbell's Halfbreed and the works of other Indigenous writers from Alberta take experiences shared through oral storytelling and move them into books and classrooms. But the flow also runs the other way. When universities host events like the University of Calgary's Convocation Pow Wow, they bring ceremony, song and regalia into spaces that were once instruments of cultural suppression. The Pow

Wow here is the best. The grad Pow Wow here is the top as far as I'm concerned. I remember hauling a couple of my Métis students who were graduating and jigging with them. You know, I had students that knew they were Métis but didn't know anything about it. And then they were going to see their grannies for the first time to talk about those things. If you are descended, I want you to engage with it. I want you to engage with your ancestors. I'm a big believer in ancestor worship, you know, on principle because we are the product of all our ancestors.

In that sense, the university becomes a cultural institution not just because it offers degrees, but because it hosts and supports cultural practices. This sets the stage for looking at some of the other institutions, foundations, libraries and schools that have shaped Alberta's arts landscape. The Banff

Centre for Arts and Creativity was established in 1933. Donald Cameron was very involved in that, became a Canadian senator, Senator Cameron. Yeah, that was very innovative in terms of an approach to the arts. Many

Of Alberta's cultural developments were supported by institutions that did not think of themselves first as arts organizations. One example is the Carnegie Corporation of New York. During the Depression, Carnegie funding to the University of Alberta and its Extension department underwrote drama, radio plays, music and other arts activities at a time when provincial finances were weak. Projects that led to the publication such as the Alberta Folklore Quarterly drew on grants from American foundations, including Rockefeller and Carnegie, to record stories, songs and place-based histories that might otherwise have been lost. Carnegie's influence is more widely remembered through its public libraries. Calgary accepted funds and conditions to build what became the Memorial Park Library, the first Carnegie Library in Alberta. Organizations like the Alberta University of the Arts also had a powerful impact in fostering innovation within Alberta artists.

Alberta University of the Arts, formerly going by the Alberta College of Art and Design and its earlier iterations, had such a crucial influence impact on arts and innovation in the early 20th century. And I wish that history was more out there in the mainstream. I wish more people knew about it. Their role in the arts and culture sectors of Alberta, for sure, is I actually think perhaps it's understated. And even if it's recognized on one level, I still think that's understated. I think it's that big and that important. People who were a part of the work of the Alberta College of Art and Design and AU Arts over the years, hugely influential parts of it and a part of it doing its work within Alberta. Graduates and people who taught here, both: Stanford Parrott, Katie Owey, Alex John Deere, Adrian Stimson, Joni Mitchell.

Throughout this period, Alberta also supported a surprising number of symphony orchestras. One of the most intriguing examples lies in the Krosnest Pass, where the local symphony is the oldest continuously performing orchestra in Alberta.

There were so many people from different ethnic backgrounds, and one of the oldest amateur symphony orchestras came from that rich background of different ethnic people settling there. So the Krosnest Symphony Orchestra is celebrating its 100th anniversary next year. It's the longest continuing performing amateur orchestra in Canada, and we had a rich history of music festivals. The Krosnest Pass music festival brought people from southern eastern BC, Medicine Hat from Cranbrook, into the Krosnest Pass to adjudicate the musical talent that was in the communities. That cultural tradition remains in the community with artists and musicians of very high caliber, and a lot of the people who came through that have gone on to have careers outside of the Krosnest Pass and contributed to cultural and musical achievements in the United States and other parts of Canada.

Historians Don Wetherell and Irene Kmet argue that activities like music, sport, amateur theatre and film going were central to how Alberta's built community and coped with work, climate and economic swings. When we think of Alberta art, stained glass and car racing do not immediately come to mind, but both show how cultural innovation can appear in unexpected settings. In the 1960s, Calgary was one of three centres in North America for a movement in stained glass. A very different spectacle unfolded on a half-mile track in Edmonton. Model T Ford racing relied on stripped down, inexpensive cars that many people could afford to build and drive. This means that innovation is not only a matter of new styles in painting or major literary works. Perhaps nothing represents the power of the arts better than this quote from Louis Riel. My people will sleep

For 100 years, but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back. Artists

Have helped people in Alberta recover histories, languages, and forms of pride that political and economic structures often pushed aside. In the later 20th century, music has been one of the most visible places where that has happened. Alberta has produced country, folk, rock, and pop musicians whose careers carried Alberta stories and sounds far beyond the province. Inside that wider field, Tommy Banks stands out. As a pianist, arranger, band leader, and broadcaster, he was central to developing a jazz scene in Alberta and to presenting that music on radio and television. Banks also worked on the structural side of culture. He was instrumental in establishing the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, which has provided grants to artists and organizations across disciplines. In that role, he helped create a funding system that allowed others to experiment. In this episode, we have seen that Alberta's cultural innovation appears in many places. In expressionist painting and in beadwork. In university powwows and Carnegie-funded folklore projects. In stained glass studios, community orchestras, and television jazz shows. These stories echo themes from earlier episodes. Albertans have repeatedly taken forms that arrived from somewhere else. British art, French pointillism, North American radio, and used them in ways that fit local realities. At the same time, Indigenous artisan communities have drawn on much older traditions to create work that challenges the institutions around them, and other different ways of understanding. In our next episode, we turn to innovation in resource development, mining, agriculture, and oil and gas. We will look at how experiments in these sectors reshaped Alberta's landscapes and institutions. But before we leave arts and culture, I want to end with a piece of music from Cody Hutchinson, an Alberta musician, composer, producer, and jazz host at CKUA, and a good friend of Tommy Banks. With pianist Chris Andrews, he leads the Hutchinson-Andrew trio. Here is their piece, Prairie Wind.