Daphne Odjig
Founder of the Indian Group of Seven
Daphne Odjig started painting seriusly after moving to British Colombia with her husband. She left her reserve on Manitoulin Island because of ratial discrimination at 18 years old.
Her paintings were associated with the Woodlands style, an art based on First Nation's cultures, but she considered her art as a reflection of woomanhood and family.
Manitoulin Island is in the province of Ontaria, Canada in the Lake Huron. The reserve she was born and raised in is called the Wikwemikong reserve. This is an unceeded reserve.
She participated in the exhibition Treaty Numbers 23, 287 and 1171 in Winniped with other artists. This exhibition was presenting their art as pieces of art rather than crafts. Following this exhibition, she founded the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc. This group of mainly Canadian artists was nicknamed Indian Group of Seven as a reference to the Group of Seven, landscapes Canadian painters from the 1920s. This original Group of Seven had a big impact on Canadian art because they were the first to paint landscapes this way. Before, landscapes were not considered worthy of behing painted and the Group of Seden wanted to change that exacly. They wanted to showcase the beauty of Canada. This reference would mean that the PNIAI has had the same kind of effect on the subject of their painting.
Daphne also painted scenes from Manitoulin mythologie including children's books about Nanabush, a trickster spirit illustrated as a rabbit called Michabou.
The First Nations artist and curator Robert Houle has described it as a depiction of Ms. Odjig's "personal struggle as an artist, as a woman and as an Indian in modern Canada … a monumental canvas fired with the same passion of social and political justice as Pablo Picasso's famous Guernica."
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/art-and-architecture/aboriginal-modernist-painter-daphne-odjig-led-indian-group-of-seven/article32483636/
