Norval Morrisseau, Observations of the Astral World, 1994.
The National Gallery of Canada purchases Observations of the Astral World (c. 1994) for its permanent collection in advance of the upcoming retrospective exhibition.
This work combines Eckankar and Anishinaabeg teachings with Morrisseau’s unique vision of spirituality.
Suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, Morrisseau moves into a nursing home in Nanaimo, BC, close to Gabe Vadas and his family.
Morrisseau and Vadas formally create the Norval Morrisseau Heritage Society (NMHS) with the aid of lawyer Aaron Milrad to create a catalogue raisonne of Morrisseau’s oeuvre after he becomes aware of the growing problem of fake works in the art market.
Original members of the NMHS include Richard Baker, Greg Hill, Lee-Ann Martin, Viviane Gray, Elizabeth McLuhan, and Ruth Phillips.
After years of targeted online abuse towards the group, the NMHS continues to work toward Morrisseau’s goal.
Today the NMHS is working on the first thirty years of Morrisseau’s artistic career as part of the Morrisseau Project: 1955-1985.
Indigenous curator Greg Hill curated a retrospective exhibition of art by Norval Morrisseau for the National Gallery of Canada (NGC).
Although the NGC had mounted retrospective exhibitions for Inuit artists, Morrisseau’s retrospective was the first for a First Nations artist.
The exhibition brought together sixty works from the entirety of Morrisseau’s career that had never been exhibited together.
The exhibition reintroduced Morrisseau’s art to viewers. Many of the works on display were masterworks that pulsated with colour, inspiring a new appreciation for him as an artist.
The opening on February 3, 2006, saw crowds flock to the galleries to view the show and meet the artist.
The exhibition toured to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, in 2007.
During the first decade of the twenty-first century, Morrisseau went from obscurity, largely forgotten to a media sensation when Curator Greg Hill chose from among Morrisseau’s finest works to mount a retrospective of his career at the National Gallery of Canada. Never before had audiences experienced such a wide selection of works by the artist. The exhibition was an symphony of colour and throbbing energy.
The Gift from 1975 is a provocative painting, that also had its international debut in the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, in Paris. Curator Greg Hill included this work in the retrospective exhibition because it exemplifies a complicated encounter between two spiritual figures.
Norval Morrisseau, The Gift, 1975.
Norval Morrisseau, Man Changing into Thunderbird, 1977.
When visitors to Morrisseau’s retrospective exhibition entered the main gallery, they encountered Man Changing into Thunderbird. Morrisseau’s six panel masterpiece offers a visual story of Morrisseau’s spiritual transformation and artistic transformation into a shaman artist. Curator Greg Hill placed this powerful work next to Androgyny.
This painting visually expresses Morrisseau’s changing ideas about spirituality. Using two separate panels and colour, Morrisseau signals his shifting understandings of shamanism after embracing Eckankar teachings.
Morrisseau also experiments with background treatments in this work, applying washes of colour to the canvas before painting his visual stories that, while interconnected, describe new ideas taking hold, translated through his visual storytelling vocabulary.
Norval Morrisseau, The Storyteller: The Artist and His Grandfather, 1978.
Norval Morrisseau, Androgyny, 1983.
Copper Thunderbird Gets His Day in the Sun
Ottawa Citizen headline, 3 February 2006.
Greg Hill brought Androgyny out of the lobby of an office building and hung it next to Man Changing into Thunderbird. Together these two works painted in radiant colours, formed a visual tour de force, bestowing new understanding of Morrisseau’s genius as an artist.
The house of invention gave me colour.
Norval Morrisseau: Return to the House of Invention, 1997, p.14.
This quote by Norval Morrisseau is read by Logan Fiddler, Great-grandson of Norval Morrisseau, 2023.
After traveling to the opening of his retrospective exhibition at National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC Morrisseau returned to Toronto where he suffered cardiac arrest and died.
An outpouring of grief was captured by newspapers nationally and internationally with full-scale obituaries that charted his influence in creating a new visual language and serving as a trailblazer for other Indigenous artists.