“Art gave him a voice, and he always used it to speak on behalf of his people and community”
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Northern Alberta lost an international master painter when Alex Janvier died peacefully in Cold Lake at 89 last Wednesday — though his boldest visions remain with us in magnificent public art and galleries across the nation.
He leaves behind his wife of 56 years, Jacqueline and children Dean, Tricia, Duane, Kyle, Jill and Brett.
Janvier’s funeral took place Wednesday in Cold Lake.
The Residential School survivor is one of the great success stories of turning unfathomable horror into a beacon of inspiration, including his namesake gallery designed by Blackfoot architect Douglas Cardinal up in Cold Lake First Nations and a dynamic style mixing traditional Indigenous and modern impressionism he developed into a singular visual language.
“I think Alex recognized that he had been given an opportunity to be an artist,” said Art Galley of Alberta’s executive director Catherine Crowston, “and he saw this as both an opportunity and a responsibility.
“Art gave him a voice, and he always used it to speak on behalf of his people and community.”
Among his accomplishments, Janvier painted a mural in the Indian Pavillion at Expo ’67 and designed the 1998 White Buffalo $200 coin.
For a time, he signed his paintings with his treaty number 287 in protest of the way the Department of Indian Affairs treated him and his art.
He would go on to win the National Aboriginal Lifetime Achievement Award, the Order of Canada, the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and the Alberta Order of Excellence — with exhibitions in Paris, New York, Sweden, London and L.A., as well as across Canada through a long career.
Janvier’s works are featured in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Royal Alberta Museum and the Glenbow Museum in Calgary.
He was also been in numerous AGA shows, most notably major career retrospective ALEX JANVIER in 2012 and 7: Professional Native Indian Artists Inc. in 2016.
Three of Janvier’s works are up at AGA right now, part of the AGA100 celebrations.
Born Feb. 28, 1935, this son of Cold Lake’s last hereditary chief and one of 10 children was taken in a cattle truck against his will to Blue Quills Indian Residential School near St. Paul when he was eight, physically abused and forbidden to leave the reservation without government permission.
“They told us we were savages and taught us to hate our grandparents,” Janvier told me in 2012. “They took everything from us and told us it was evil.”
A year later, eyes sparkling in his sunlit gallery under a trademark Stetson, he noted, “I feel privileged to be able to do something in this world. It’s really right from an earth level.
“People, when they come here, they’re shocked — in the middle of nowhere in the bush! But that’s where I live.
“That’s where all this art starts and comes from.”
In 1960, Janvier earned a Fine Arts diploma with Honours at Provincial Institute of Technology — now Alberta University of the Arts — its first Indigenous graduate.
He then taught at University of Alberta, Edmonton Art Gallery and the city’s recreation department, as well as in Saddle Lake and Fort Chipewyan.
Janvier’s first solo show was at Edmonton’s Jacox Gallery in 1964, Journal art critic Dorothy Bamhouse musing, “The cleanly patterned watercolours do not lean on the cliche symbolism of most Native art.
“Rather, they achieve a kind of ‘nature mysticism’ through simplification and near-abstraction of organic forms.”
Contemporary artist Ernestine Tahedl, 83, shared gallery walls with him back then, the two tobogganing down the hill by the High Level Bridge.
“I will miss his love for creating art and his humour and friendship very much,’ she says. “A great loss, but he leaves a wonderful legacy with his work.”
In 1971, Janvier took the plunge and started painting full time, producing thousands of works at an impressive pace for the rest of his life.
“They really tried to make quite substantive change for Indigenous artists,” notes Crowston, “kind of moving artists out of tradition and craft to artists who really engaged with contemporary issues.
“In Alberta, I would place Alex’s work in relation to that of Jane Ash Poitras and people who were using their work to make critical commentary on the omission of Indigenous artists with the Canadian historical canon.”
Janvier clearly transcended such shackles, and then some.
The Denesuline and Saulteaux artist’s pinnacle is the breathtaking Morning Star (Gambeh Then’) painted on the dome of the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que. — a 418 m-sq. jaw-dropper for which he was deservedly nicknamed “Alexangelo.”
And few present will ever forget the human connection in the Round Dance at the unveiling of Janvier’s mosaic masterpiece Tsa Tsa Ke K’e — Iron Foot Place — in Edmonton’s Rogers Arena in 2016.
Janvier’s other hypnotic works around here include two immersive 1976 acrylic murals: The Circle of Life at Muttart Conservatory, and Strathcona County Hall’s dazzling Tribute to Beaver Hills — a three-storey winding wonder.
And Janvier’s diptych Sunrise and Sunset in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta’s chamber is, as Indigenous educator Lewis Cardinal noted on social media, “the only prominent display of anything Indigenous in any provincial legislative chamber in Canada.
“And those two murals will remain there for generations to come.”
“We’re actually very blessed as a city to have these gifts of Alex, open to the public,” says Edmonton city councillor Aaron Paquette. “My hope is that people will pause and appreciate just what a depth of a treasure we have in that, and the stories that they’ll find.”
With the sad news, Janvier received tributes from tribal chiefs, the prime minister, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, as well as artists and curators who appreciated his immediately recognizable expressionist hand.
The hardworking artist was well appreciated for his playful-rascal sense of humour, his hidden Easter eggs, his circular canvasses and his international impact — especially on so many young artists over decades.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Paquette, also an accomplished painter, says of first encountering Janvier’s work.
“Just seeing that there was someone from Alberta that had some of the best art I’d ever seen in my life was absolutely inspiring.”
“He was more like a great uncle to me,” says artist and musician Dwayne Martineau, whose giant Boreal Forest photo currently skins AGA’s Main Hall. “My dad and Alex played baseball together at Cold Lake First Nation when they were kids. My family went to his gallery often.
“It was inspiring to see someone close to us achieve that kind of success. Sort of proved to me that it was possible.”
Paquette, who went on to show with and curate Janvier in exhibitions, talks about the artist’s trajectory.
“His early work was rooted in the Eurocentric view of artists, but you could see, even in the early work, what was coming.”
Notably, Our Lady of the Teepee, an icon already bursting with Janvier’s individuality, was sent to the Vatican in 1950 to represent “Canadian Native Painting.”
But, says Paquette, “It wasn’t until he was on his own, outside of the Residential School system and all that dogmatic thinking, you see that development of his freedom.
“You see the brushwork and the line work, how he managed to get a single, curving line to convey this sort of beautiful tension between perfection and the risk every moment it was all going to fall apart.”
In his third year of college in 1959, Janvier recalled in 2012, the distinct curvilinear style he would often carry through life materialized unconsciously.
“I made some strokes and said, ‘My God — this is me!’ It’s unexplainable,” he said with awe.
“I think it was a spiritual experience, because it wasn’t taught.”
“Always a trickster,” remembers Paquette, “but also a mentor. He was looking at my work once and asked me to describe it and I was coming up with all this art-school analysis, and he said, ‘No that’s not it at all.’
“I was like, ‘Oh? What’s it about?’ and he’s like, ‘You’ll figure it out.’
“When I let all that go, the quality of my work exploded. So he taught me without being explicit in his teaching.”
Crowston notes Janvier often tried new things, playing off his surroundings.
“He was allowed to go up with Canadian Forces to look at the impact of low-level bombing testing in Northern Alberta,” she explains.
“And there’s a series of paintings (in part currently on display at AGA) he made that really depart from that curvilinear style that are much more dense and opaque and really speak about the earth.
“As an artist, he pushed himself and experimented.”
Janvier spoke about this himself.
“As long as I’m capable of handling that brush,” he said, “I’ll be doing something.”
Looking back on his legacy, he seemed content.
“I’m proud of all the periods,” said Janvier, “because it was like going upward — a staircase to heaven, or something like that.
“I was never quiet. My mind and activity was really energetic, creative, and something was always on the go.”