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Power Through Truth
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By Agnieszka Matejko
auren Crazybull is a Niitsítapi, Dené artist whose powerful portraits challenge colonial representations of First Nations People. Her work has been recognized with several prestigious awards including the 2020 Eldon and Anne Foote Visual Arts Prize. When Lauren Crazybull was nominated for the Eldon and Anne Foote Visual Arts Prize for her show, The Future All At Once, held at McMullen Gallery in 2019, she was barely in her mid-twenties and as a self-taught artist came onto the Alberta art scene like a shooting star. Crazybull dabbled in art throughout her youth and later held a few small shows in a record shop in Lethbridge, but her four-year stint in radio broadcasting kept her too busy to pursue art full time. It was only when she moved to Ed-
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monton to take on a job as an art coordinator at iHuman that she began to consider painting as a career. “I am going to try to make this happen,” she said. “I know I want to be an artist.” Just then a life-changing opportunity came up: Crazybull became the first recipient of an artist residency launched at McLuhan House. “It gave me time and space to create something more serious,” she said, and she proceeded to push the scope and scale of her work to new heights. The resulting larger-than-life portraits emanate a commanding presence but consist of ordinary people – mostly young Indigenous artists and musicians Crazybull met through her social media networks. “I felt that there wasn’t a whole lot of representation of contemporary Indigenous people just being themselves, not necessarily performing a settler understanding of Indigeneity. I want to humanize all Indigenous people and show that there isn’t just one way to be Indigenous,” she says. “I wanted to humanize regular Indigenous people.” It was exactly such peers and role models Crazybull lacked during her 16 years in the child welfare system. De-
LadiesCorner — Winter 2021
