Talking Back to the West: Contemporary First Nations Artists and Strategies of Counter-appropriation

• Main Author: Froschauer, Christina
• Format: Thesis
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: Houle; First Nations
• Online Access: http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/35902/1/Froschauer_MA_F2011.pdf

Over a twenty-year period, renowned artists such as Edward Poitras, Robert Houle, Jim Logan, Kent Monkman, among others, appropriate renowned colonial landscape paintings and art historical canonical works, and then alter them to include First Nations narratives, as methods of critiquing the exclusionary nature of grand colonial narratives and their associated historical, art historical and, by extension, anthropological discourses. Using counter-appropriation as an artistic strategy, they critique: the West’s disregard for First Nations histories in North America; Art History’s past failures to classify their art objects as Fine Art; and contemporary cultural constructions of “Indianness” originating from colonial history and ideologies about the “Vanishing Race.” With their works, the artists offer their viewers insight into First Nations histories and stories, thereby enriching the multiple narratives and pluralist discourses existent in North America.