Power Lines

When Mikael and Elai were here, we decided to drive past Toronto to see aunt, uncle, and cousins. On the way we stopped to see one of the most beautiful art galleries in the world (according to us who have seen them all) the Kleinburg Art Gallery. The log and stone lodge set on 100 acres of forested land houses Canada’s most renowned artists, the Group of Seven, and feels like art, itself. We also found an exhibition of First Nations art we’d not seen before.

The Group of Seven loved Canada’s North and painted it in impressionistic styles that capture the bleak beauty and rugged isolation of its terrain. Every year I buy a Group of Seven calendar so I can have a bit of Canada in my Oaxaca home, and last school year I even had one in my classroom to inspire my kids. Robert knew about the Group of Seven because his mom, an artist, took him to the Kleinburg Art Gallery as a kid, and when we were married, since we had planned events every day of our wedding week, we packed our entire wedding party to the Gallery one day and after enjoying the art inside, we had a lunch picnic out on the lawn to enjoy God’s finishing touches. I don’t know what our wedding party thought of the Group of Seven, but we loved it.

After we were married, I used to drive to Hamilton to help my friend Dale in her framing shop called Leading Edge, and as a gift, she framed two Group of Seven prints for us that we have packed around and tacked to walls in place after place in Canada and Mexico, for twenty-five years. I love the purples of the frozen lake and the straggliness of the pine struggling against the northern wind. Remember I said that Canada’s national metaphor is the Survivor? The lonely struggling pine, fighting the wind, is the perfect example of survival and makes its way in various forms onto Canada’s calendars and postal stamps.

When we visited the gallery this time, it was our first serious introduction to First Nations artists. Their art shares the stark, block features of the Group of Seven paintings because of the stark, block features of the northern terrain and because they reflect the flat rock paintings of earlier artists. We were also impressed with how foreign the First Nations art felt to us. We weren’t drawn to it, didn’t understand it. Robert’s comment was, “The First Nations people must see the world so differently from us.”  I think this is true. I’ll include some of the art here so you can see for yourselves. It might help to know that radiating black lines reflect power. One of the pieces is called The Gift. The black spots, still symbolizing a type of power, also portray small pox, which devastated the Ojibwa tribe represented in the painting.

The Gallery, of course, celebrated the art as an expression of First Nations traditions and heritage and regretted the imposition of the white man’s power, religion, and culture, as it should. But as outsiders, peeking through the colored window of art, with its medicine men and sacred bears and thunderbirds, it is impossible for us to understand what aspect of the First Nation’s heritage was right and healthy and beneficial, and what was not, for, of course, all cultures are a mix, and we make so many mistakes when we rush in and make a judgment without knowing.  We hurt so much and destroy so much beauty. That is what I saw in this art. And many (though not all) of those who destroyed were only trying to help. And, of course, it makes me think of the Mixtecs we visit and the judgments we make and the harm we can cause when we rush in and make judgments without knowing, without looking into the colored window of their art and music and tradition, for it too, of course, is a mix of good and evil and desperately needs God to be there, redeeming and desperately needs for us to let him without getting in the way. Again. As we do with all our money and power and blind ethnocentrism. And I want to be reminded: Stop! Look! Listen! Love what they are before you change it into us. This is what I saw at the Kleinburg Art Gallery.