The paintings by Indigenous artists Allen Sapp (Cree) and Jim Logan (Cree/Sioux-Métis) offer contrasts and parallels on representations of Indigenous life in Western Canada. While both artists are guided by a folk art practice, they also speak to the context of their lived, personal histories as well. As the late Mohawk scholar Deborah Doxtator pointed out, the idea “that the past is distinct, differentiated, and, thus separate from the present has worked to create a mental gulf between the past and the present within contemporary mainstream North American societies.”[1] This disconnect with mainstream society has detrimentally informed the perceptions of Indigenous peoples in the Prairies.

For Logan, his vivid paintings is his “way of communicating in a polite and respectful way the realities of poverty, of living within a hegemonic society and reconciling what ‘reconciliation’ is or if one can really every achieve such.”[2] Though painting decades before, Sapp’s Getting Water for the Wash (1978) similarly presents a snapshot of everyday life, but with a sensitivity that is “a vivid event returned to, and relived by Allen, opening to the viewer something much greater than a single image of the past.”[3] As an art historian, I am interested in how Sapp and Logan communicate the subtleties of daily life and counter narratives of a separated or distant Indigenous past. When viewed side-by-side, these paintings act as contemporary visual documents and remind the viewer that Indigenous people have always been here.

These two works also represent the University of Alberta Museum Art Collection’s renewed acquisition strategy to research and collect the work of contemporary Indigenous artists from the Prairies.