For more than 50 years, the work of Saulteaux Anishinaabe artist, curator and writer Robert Houle has united Indigenous cultural heritage and design with Western contemporary art practices to examine spirituality, history, cultural appropriation and the ongoing fight for Indigenous sovereignty. He calls the result “transcultural”—a synthesis of Indigenous and Euro-American ways of making and thinking about art.
The first major retrospective exhibition of his work, “Robert Houle: Red Is Beautiful,” opens May 25 at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Curated by Wanda Nanibush (Anishinaabe, Beausoleil First Nation), curator of Indigenous art at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, “Red Is Beautiful” honors not only the breadth of Houle’s oeuvre but also his singular method of processing trauma and resilience through artistic expression.
Robert Houle in 2015 with his triptych “Colours of Love.”
Courtesy of Canada Council for the Arts / Derreck Roemer
This self-portrait is Houle’s newest painting in the “Red Is Beautiful” exhibition. In this work, Houle references his spirit name, Blue Thunder. In Anishinaabe cosmology, a thunderbird embodies thunder and lightning and is one of the most powerful spirit beings.
“Transforming Blue Thunder,” 2021; oil on mylar; 87.5” x 42”.
Courtesy of the Artist
Robert Houle: Red Is Beautiful
Conceived by the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Curator of Indigenous Art Wanda Nanibush, “Robert Houle: Red Is Beautiful” is the first major exploration of the past 50 years of the artist’s creations. Houle’s paintings and mixed-media installations chronicle not only his personal development as an artist but also the influential artistic and political revitalization that emerged in Indigenous communities during the late 20th century. “‘Red Is Beautiful’ is about that renaissance, that resurgence of Indigenous culture,” says Nanibush. But it’s also about color. Houle’s bold palette is a defining aspect of his work, and the large scale of many of his paintings is part of their power.
Nanibush is also the editor of the accompanying catalog of the same name, published by the Art Gallery of Ontario. Featuring 200 images of Houle’s life and artwork, the volume showcases the extraordinary breadth of his talent.
Following is a selection and adaptation of the engaging “Red Is Beautiful” exhibition featuring Houle’s innovative artworks that will be on display from May 25, 2023, to June 4, 2024, at the NMAI in Washington, D.C.
Robert Houle asserts an Indigenous perspective of historical events. In the 1990s, Houle began to incorporate words, images and visual references into his work to amplify political messages and critique conventional, inaccurate perceptions of history.
“Kanata” is the Mohawk word for “town” and the origin of Canada’s name. In Houle’s painting by that title, this consequential battle between European empires is represented by the colors of the adjacent panels: blue for France and red for Britain. By highlighting the thoughtful witness with color, Houle emphasizes the enduring presence of Indigenous nations through centuries of colonial nation building to follow.
In his portrayal, Houle fades out Benjamin West’s original 1770 painting, reversing the more conventional view that casts Native people as powerless observers and peripheral to history by centering Native knowledge and experience, activism and empowerment.
“Kanata,” 1992; acrylic and conté crayon on canvas; 90” x 288”. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 1994.
National Gallery of Canada
In “O-ween du muh waun (We Were Told),” Houle recontextualizes the Indigenous figure from West’s painting, acknowledging the Anishinaabe prophesies that foretold the arrival of Europeans while also establishing the consistency of Native presence and sovereignty before and after.
“O-ween du muh waun (We Were Told),” 2017; oil on canvas; 84” x 144”. Confederation Centre Art Gallery, CAG 2017.1. Commissioned with the A.G. and Eliza Jane Ramsden Endowment Fund.
Courtesy of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery
Painted early in his career, Houle’s geometric paintings fuse two traditions of abstraction—modernist painting and ancestral design—to create powerful expressions of emotion tinged with spiritual resonance. He calls the result “transcultural”—a synthesis of Indigenous and Euro-American ways of making and thinking about art.
Houle was particularly drawn to the modernist idea that color and form could prompt emotion or a feeling. At the same time, he recognized that ancestral Anishinaabe artists also had created a language of abstract form and color for beadwork on regalia, or formal dress, worn in ceremony. Anishinaabe geometric symbols possess deep and often secret, sacred meanings.
“Ojibway Motif, #2, Purple Leaves Series,” 1972; oil on canvas; 36” x 24”. Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa, gift of Ray-monde Falardeau, 1998.
Photo by Justin Wonnacott
Houle developed the composition of “Ojibway Motif, #2, Purple Leaves Series” from ancestral Anishinaabe beadwork designs. On beaded sashes, shoulder bags and items of ceremonial dress, a vast language of geometric symbols describe the richness of the cosmos. Houle studied and used such designs as inspiration for his approach to modernist abstraction.
Anishinaabe bandolier bag, circa 1935; cotton cloth, ribbon, glass beads, wool yarn and thread; 42” x 13”. 18/7905
Photo by NMAI Staff
Anishinaabe bandolier bag, circa 1935; cotton cloth, ribbon, glass beads, wool yarn and thread; 42” x 13”. 18/7905
Photo by NMAI Staff
Anishinaabe people have crafted items for ceremonial use for countless generations. From rattles to regalia, these items create experiences of the divine. Houle finds his inspiration within these ancestral creations and uses color, painterly gesture and Indigenous art materials such as porcupine quills to elevate his own art to the same purpose. He strives to create contemporary works just as powerful and evocative as those created by the “Ancient Ones,” as he calls his First Nations ancestors. At the same time, Houle remains committed to the techniques of contemporary art practice.
“Parfleche for Norval Morrisseau” is a tribute to an influential Anishinaabe artist who created a unique style of painting, sometimes called the Woodland style, which echoes a style of some floral and other beadwork designs on traditional Indigenous clothing.
“Parfleche for Norval Morrisseau,” 1999; oil paint, wood and canvas; 40” x 20”. 26/9030
Photo by NMAI Staff
In this series, Robert Houle examines key historical documents in which colonial and modern Canada imposed a legal framework for its relations with First Nations. The proclamations and acts acknowledge the nation-to-nation relationship between First Nations and Canadian governments. Houle seeks Indigenous alternatives to the written documents, using expressive color to suggest Native understandings and protocols of diplomacy. His versions focus on “premises for self-rule,” the inherent sovereignty that is fundamental to First Nations peoples in both Canada and the United States.
“Royal Proclamation 1763,” 1985; acrylic on paper; 41.7” x 29.5”. Indigenous Art Collection, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada / Collection d’art autochtones, Relations Couronne-Autochtones et Affaires du Nord Canada.
Lawrence Cook
Like many of his artist contemporaries and forebears, Houle believes that abstract painting can aptly address heroic and humanistic themes. During the last few decades, some of Canada’s First Nations have resisted continued encroachments upon their lands and autonomy. Houle’s monumental paintings elevate these episodes of political resistance to a more universal and epic struggle against injustice.
In the 1980s, First Nations protestors closed roads through their territories near the Canadian town of Temagami to prevent logging of old-growth forests. This dispute is ongoing. Houle admired the tenacity of the protestors and made them warrior lances with feathers made of synthetic materials.
“Warrior Lances for Temagami,” 1989; mixed-media sculpture; 49.2” x 30”. Indigenous Art Collection, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada / Collection d’art autochtones, Relations Couronne-Autochtones et Affaires du Nord Canada.
Lawrence Cook
In the late 1990s, Houle began to explore his childhood experiences at Sandy Bay Residential School through his art. He characterized the resulting works as “painfully beautiful manifestations of survival of government/church efforts to destroy my cultural and spiritual identity. They are based on childhood memories of the trauma experienced during elementary residential school days on my reserve, Sandy Bay First Nation, Manitoba, in the early ’60s.”
In his monumental work “Sandy Bay,” Houle revisits memories of attending the Sandy Bay Residential School. The top photograph on the far left shows the school’s head priest, described by Houle as kindly; below it shows the artist’s sister’s First Communion. To their right is a shadowy image of the school. Although it was located on the Sandy Bay Indian Reserve, students could only return home on weekends. Superimposed are words from a hymn Houle’s mother often sang to comfort him: “ON SAM KI KISEWATIS ANA MANITOWIYAN” (“Oh, you are so kind and so treasured although you are god like”). At right, Houle invokes the power of color and painterly gesture to convey emotions: healing calm (blue) and violent trauma (red).
“Sandy Bay,” 1998–1999; oil, black-and-white photograph, color photograph on canvas and Masonite; 118.1” x 216”. Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Acquired with funds from the President’s Appeal 2000 and with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance program / Oeuvre achetée avec l’aide du programme d’aide aux acquisitions du Conseil des Arts du Canada, 2000-87 a-e.
Ernest Mayer, Courtesy of the Winnipeg Art Gallery
Houle embarked on this series of works as an act of healing, such as “Sister Clothilde,” which portrays one of the abusive nuns at the school.
“Sister Clothilde,” 2009; oil on paper; 44.2” x 30”. Indigenous Art Collection, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada / Collection d’art autochtones, Relations Couronne-Autochtones et Affaires du Nord Canada.
Lawrence Cook
Houle created small, untitled ink paintings as illustrations for a volume of haiku poetry by his Anishinaabe friend, poet, novelist and social critic Gerald Vizenor. Houle does not necessarily illustrate the content of the poems but strives to create a feeling or emotion with his minimal images.
morning glories cover the broken fence delayed repairs
— Gerald Vizenor
Untitled, 2013; ink on paper; 6” x 6”. 27/0629
Photo by NMAI Staff
honeysuckle climbs a withered fruit tree reach of memory
— Gerald Vizenor
Untitled, 2013; ink on paper; 6” x 6”. 27/0635
Photo by NMAI Staff
tiny red spider marches over the cascades mountain map
— Gerald Vizenor
Untitled, 2013; ink on paper; 6” x 6”. 27/0634
Photo by NMAI Staff
Liberating Cultural Heritage
Born in 1947, Robert Houle grew up within the Sandy Bay First Nation in Manitoba. Though he was raised learning the Anishinaabe language and cultural practices of his extended family, his experiences of physical and emotional abuse at his community’s Catholic mission-run residential school—part of the Canadian government’s attempt to assimilate Indigenous people—left deep wounds.
Decades later, he would process his trauma through works such as “Sandy Bay,” which recounts and records Houle’s memories as a way to heal, as well as the black-and-white depictions of his nightmares, seen in “Sister Clothilde,” and their antidotes, dream shamans. In these works that address the past and healing, Robert identifies with “pahgedenaun,” a Saulteaux term he learned from his father meaning “to let [it] go” from one’s mind. “Beauty is a way of tempering a narrative that could be a victimizing narrative,” reflected curator Nanibush on the power of “Sandy Bay.” She said, “It can fill that narrative with hope, it can fill that narrative with empowerment.”
Houle was introduced to art during high school, after which he achieved concurrent art history and art teaching degrees in the early to mid-1970s. During his art history research, he was drawn to the abstract expressionists, particularly the vibrant color works of Barnett Newman. He was further inspired by contemporary Native artists’ uniquely Indigenous approaches, which were rarely displayed in museums and galleries at the time.
In 1977, the National Museum of Man (now the Canadian Museum of History) hired Houle as its first curator of Contemporary Indian Art. Groundbreaking as his role was, Houle recognized that his colleagues remained driven by the same mindset that has characterized the museum field since the 19th century—the erroneous belief that Indigenous people were dying out and museums existed to salvage their remaining cultures. Native contemporary art remained relegated to ethnographic collections rather than being considered fine art created by living people.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Houle witnessed an Indigenous cultural renaissance concurrent with growing political activism. His position afforded him the opportunity to meet contemporary Indigenous artists such as painter Norval Morrisseau (Anishinaabe), who became both an inspiration and a close friend. This cultural resurgence occurred in stark contrast to how Houle saw some museums treating Indigenous cultural heritage items. It was the museum’s dissection of a medicine bundle left under its protection that finally triggered Houle’s resignation after three years in his position there. He then resolved to “liberate” the heritage items he left behind. “How do I do that?” he recalled in a conversation in the Autumn 1988 issue of Muse. “I am leaving. What can I do to breathe life into them, to show that they still matter?,” he said. “Up until last year I concentrated on making parfleches [pouches] and warrior staffs, trying to rehabilitate those objects I left behind.”
Since that time, Robert Houle has continued to “rehabilitate” museum collections on his own terms: in a blend of what he calls the “spiritual legacy of the ancient ones”—the rich artistic heritage of his ancestors—and Western abstraction. Early works such as his 1972 “Ojibway Motif, #2, Purple Leaves Series” interpreted ancestral beadwork designs into modernist, geometric forms. “Red Is Beautiful,” the first painting Houle sold to a museum, was inspired by patterns on woven bags. “His innovation is that he’s thinking of [traditional Indigenous designs] at the same time he’s thinking of the history of abstraction from a Western point of view,” asserted Nanibush. “He brings that together as something new.”
The Power of Color and Form
As a colorist, his intense palette is representative of his abstract approach yet is infused with meaning derived from his Indigenous identity. “Especially within an Anishinaabe point of view, color has spiritual capacity and it has emotional capacity,” Nanibush observed. Houle uses color to express gender, emotion and memory while resetting imbalances. “Sometimes the color seems to be to me an interaction with the Western tradition. So he’ll throw pink in where … the field might have been uber masculinist. It’s almost like he’s inserting a kind of feminine energy there or at least a criticism of the over-masculinist traditions within Western abstraction.”
Some of his earliest work while still a student at McGill University evidences his experimentation with color and emotion. Asked in 1972 by a professor to paint love, he drew inspiration from love poems a friend wrote to create a series of pastel, geometric paintings. His 1999 “Palisade I” combines historical significance with cultural symbolism: the vertical green canvases represent the palisades surrounding the British forts captured by Great Lakes First Nations during Pontiac’s War; the color also signifies the green wampum belts used to convey diplomatic messages.
His admiration for the color-field abstractions of Newman and innovation of Morrisseau in part allowed Houle to follow this syncretic path. “Newman was so huge because he could combine spirituality and abstraction,” said Nanibush. “With Morrisseau it’s more about him being Anishinaabe, it’s more about him taking his own people and the art community and doing something on his own, so it’s a different type of permission. It’s permission to talk about our culture in contemporary art and believe that it’s relevant.”
Similarly, Houle’s works based on the parfleche, an envelope often made of rawhide and customarily painted with geometric designs, are dedicated to contemporary Indigenous artists or delve into Houle’s exploration of spirituality. Both his Catholic and Anishinaabe religious upbringing significantly influenced his art and identity. For example, using paint and porcupine quills on paper for his 1983 “Parfleches for the Last Supper,“ Houle rendered Jesus and his apostles into parfleche form.
Taking a Stand
During the 1980s, Houle’s work increasingly critiqued colonial interpretations of history, the appropriation of Indigenous names for commercial purposes and Indigenous peoples’ resistance to continued government encroachment on their land and autonomy. In 1989, First Nations protestors blocked a logging road at the Canadian town of Temagami to challenge logging on tribal lands. In 1995 at Ipperwash, a community on Georgian Bay in Ontario, a First Nations demonstrator was shot to death during a confrontation with provincial police over the government’s occupation of tribal lands. In 1990, the Mohawk community of Kanehsatà:ke protested the expansion of a golf course into First Nations lands. Houle’s large-scale paintings dedicated to these acts of resistance stand to inform the public about First Nations’ experiences of injustice.
The quincentenary of Columbus’s landing in North America, 1992, was cause for many Indigenous artists to publicly rethink colonialism. During that year, Houle co-curated the influential exhibition “Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations” at the National Gallery of Canada. This was the first major exhibition of Indigenous contemporary art from Canada and the United States and placed both contemporary Indigenous art and land’s spiritual and political legacy at the fore.
That same year Houle completed “Kanata,” a monumental work that borrows British-American artist Benjamin West’s 1770 painting “The Death of General Wolfe” to reframe Indigenous peoples’ role in Canada’s founding. He removed the painting’s color except for the adornments on the single Native person in the image and inserted symbolic elements missing from the historical record such as a figure of an Indigenous woman and a Native person canoeing away.
Houle has continued to represent Indigenous experiences in his work, not just as a response to the dominant interpretation but also from a particularly Indigenous point of view. Throughout his lifetime of work, whether through elemental geometric works based on his cultural heritage or processing personal and community history, he adheres to traditional concepts of spirituality and beauty in his art that continue to provoke and inspire our emotions. “My art gives me a lot of strength to critique something, and I knew I had to do that,” Houle commented. “It’s been a way for me to deal with my own personal issues about our country and about our politics and about the way women are treated.”