Norval Morriseau/Copper Thunderbird: Draw and Tell: Lines of Transformation

Co-curated by The Drawing Center's director Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster (Plains Cree and curator, Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC), this exhibition showed over fifty drawings by the First Nations artist Norval Morrisseau (1932–2007). The presentation featured a series that the artist created in 1972–73 while in prison. Morrisseau gave the works to Robert Fox, a social worker he developed a friendship with during his incarceration. In turn, the series was donated to the Canadian Museum of Civilization in 1992, the sole lender to the exhibition. All of the drawings were made on paper towels, an everyday item easily available to the artist, which he ingeniously transformed into the support for visionary works in graphite depicting highly charged images based on a personal transformation of pictographic traditions.

Morrisseau was born in Canada in 1932 on the Sand Point Reserve in northwestern Ontario. He was primarily raised by his maternal grandparents, particularly his grandfather, a shaman who encouraged him to transmit Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) values and beliefs through art. By 1958, he was most frequently using birch bark as a painting support but also experimenting with a diverse range of other materials, including plywood, animal hides, and craft paper. In 1959, he began to sign with the Indian name his grandfather gave him—Copper Thunderbird—in his own language in syllabics, the first Indian artist to do so outside of a sacred context. Around this time, while working in the gold mines in Red Lake, Morrisseau met Dr. Henry Weinstein, who provided him with art materials and access to his art history library. Morrisseau's first exhibition of paintings, at the Pollock Gallery, Toronto, in 1962, was a huge success and came to be considered a turning point in the acknowledgement of Canada's native artists. Aggressively modern, his works also clearly asserted native roots and brought about a radical synthesis of Anishinaabe content and contemporary art.

For Morrisseau, the Anishinaabe oral tradition as well as its mnemonic pictography (or memory aids) and its decorative arts provided rich sources of forms and imagery. Yet through his creative process Morrisseau secularized visual forms previously employed solely for spiritual purposes. Drawn out of a revised pictographic tradition, the connecting lines in Morrisseau's works were described as "determinatives." They emanated so as to define or determine a cosmological status by expressing internal spiritual power and interrelationships.