CRCNA Helps Sponsor Art Show
The Indian Metis Christian Fellowship of the Christian Reformed Church of North America has joined with an art gallery in the Saskatchewan Legislative Building to sponsor a showing of art work by Ovide Bighetty.
The two shows at the gallery are Steps Along the Red Road Following Christ the Creator and The Creator's Gift.
Bighetty is a self-taught artist originally from the Pukatawagan First Nations in northern Manitoba. He paints in the Woodland-Cree style. His paintings are based on spirituality, stories, symbolism and legends passed down by elders. He's well known throughout the Canadian and Europe.
In 2006, Bighetty was commissioned by Burt Adema, director of the Indian Metis Christian Fellowship, to create twelve pieces illustrating the teachings known as Steps Along the Red Road Following Christ the Creator. For each image, says Adema, “Ovide selected an eagle feather to emphasize the sacred aboriginal spirituality of the teachings. The images, the feathers, and the teachings are integrated in shadow boxes constructed of birch, Plexiglas, and Baltic birch plywood.”
The other exhibit is called “Kisê-manitow Omiyikowiswin” or “The Creator’s Gift.” It is a series of depicting the Christmas story. “All of these paintings were taken from the Christmas story of when Jesus was born,” said Bighetty in a phone interview. Each painting comes from a particular passage of Scripture. “The first one shows when the angel visits Mary, telling her she’ll conceive. Each painting tells a different part of the story from the Luke and Matthew texts,” says the artist.
Although his work distinctly follows the biblical stories of the Savior’s birth, says Bighetty, each painting also uses a range of native symbols, from figures of people and animals to scenes of the outdoors, that are painted in a particular style. It is a style he learned by studying the work of Norval Morrisseau, an Ojibwe artist and founder of the Woodland school, also known as Legend or Medicine painting.
Some of the images in the paintings in the new series come from native lore while others he imagined himself as he contemplated the verses in the Bible. “I hope the story comes across in a certain visual way,” he said.
A traditional teaching amongst the First Nations of Turtle Island, says Burt Adema, is that before Europeans crossed the ocean, native elders had visions of people coming from the east with messages from the Creator.
“This ancient tradition resonates with the mandate of Indian Metis Christian Fellowship to encourage aboriginal people to claim, develop, use, and celebrate the individual and cultural gifts they have received from the Creator,” says Adema. “The tradition and the mandate provided the inspiration for IMCF’s commissioning of Ovide Bighetty to create (the) paintings.”
His work will be on display through February 16 at the Cumberland Gallery in the Legislative Building. A reception for the artist takes place Thursday at the gallery from 5-7:30 p.m. For more information, call 306-359-1096 or e-mail: [email protected].
