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Wutanminu – Our Community
1 March – 30 November, 2024
Opening: 21 March, 5-7 pm | Fogo Island Gallery 

Fogo Island Arts is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition, Wutanminu – Our Community, featuring a new series of paintings by acclaimed Mi’kmaq artist Nelson White. The exhibition, set to run from March 1 to November 30, 2024, will open with a reception on March 21 from 5-7 pm at the Fogo Island Gallery, located within Fogo Island Inn.

Wutanminu – Our Community is a tribute to the strong networks of familial and relational ties within Indigenous communities. Nelson White’s vibrant portraits capture the profound significance of these community relationships and their essential role in fostering a sense of dignity and belonging. The exhibition celebrates storytelling through detailed studies of doctors, lawyers, musicians, and community leaders, all bound by the connective threads of Indigenous kinship.

Representation is paramount to White’s works. With each colourful canvas, he considers the complexity of representing someone both as they see themselves and how they are seen. The new collection serves as a poignant insertion of Indigenous histories into the historically Western art form of portrait painting, where Indigenous subjects have been marginalized, misrepresented, or entirely absent. White’s practice is situated within a broader movement of contemporary artists who are working with figuration to redefine traditional portraiture today.

Wutanminu – Our Community draws inspiration from White’s family legacy of advocating for Indigenous rights in Newfoundland and Labrador. In 1949, during the province’s union with Canada, Indigenous peoples were not legally recognized in the area, excluding Indigenous communities from recognition and rights under the new provincial and federal governments. Since the 1970s, White’s father, Elder Calvin White, has been at the forefront of ensuring rights and recognition for the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq.

Seventy-five years since Indigenous peoples were ‘pencilled out’ of the Terms of Union, Nelson White’s exhibition serves as a vibrant documentation of the resilience and vitality of the Indigenous community in Newfoundland today. White sees his role as an artist as essential in connecting communities to ancient tribal values, culture and wisdom, and in building bridges between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.

Nelson White is a St. John’s-based Mi’kmaq painter who is a member of the Flat Bay First Nation Band (No’kmaq Village) in Flat Bay, Newfoundland (Ktaqmkuk). His work documents the changing cultural conditions of his community through contemporary portraiture, critically reframing Indigenous representation. He attended the Visual Arts program at the former Bay St. George Community College before graduating from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. His paintings are in public and private collections across North America, including The Rooms Collection, NL, and the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.