Art indicating the endurance and struggles of Aboriginal women is now showing on a roadside billboard in downtown Red Deer.
Motorists heading south on 51st Avenue can look on the east side of the road just before passing Superstore (at about 52nd Street). The eagle-eyed will spot a billboard partially obscured by branches and showing a striking image from the Resilience Project.
The enlarged pictograph of buffalo, forest and sky is from an acrylic painting by late Red Deer artist Joane Cardinal-Schubert. Her 1988 work is called Moonlight Sonata.
It’s one of 167 billboards seen from “coast-to-coast-to-coast” in Canada, featuring the artworks of 50 Indigenous women artists.
The idea behind the Resilience Project is to take art out of galleries and to show it instead beside highways and in cities where hundreds of Aboriginal women and girls have gone missing, said the project’s curator Lee-Ann Martin, of Winnipeg on the www.resilienceproject.ca website.
While some of these billboards stand along B.C.’s Highway of Tears and other places where Indigenous women were victimized, the imagery they display suggests strength and adaptability. Martin added the art portrays the continuance of customary practises by Aboriginal women, even as they are establishing contemporary identities in a changing world.
“Oh, I’m sure Joane would have loved this,” said Lorna Johnston, executive-director of the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery, who is not part of the Resilience Project, but knew Cardinal-Schubert while both were art students at the University of Calgary.
“She was such an advocate for Aboriginal women artists.”
Cardinal-Schubert, who died of cancer in 2009, was a trail-blazer in the 1980s, said Johnston, who believes she paved the way for many younger Indigenous artists. “She would be very proud”of being part of such a project, she added.
Anyone interested in seeing more of Cardinal-Schubert’s works is in luck — a retrospective of original paintings by the artist (and sister of renowned Canadian architect Douglas Cardinal) happens to be running at the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery until Aug. 12.
Those wanting to visit Calgary and Edmonton to see more Resilience Project billboards, before the project wraps up Aug. 1, can find their locations (as well as the names and images of the other participating Aboriginal women artists) on the project’s website.
lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com
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