Exhibitions

Each year, our Aboriginal students organize and curate an exhibit in the Michael O’Brian Exhibition Commons. The exhibition provides a forum for Aboriginal students to express and celebrate their traditional and/or contemporary art practices. Aboriginal students gain valuable experience by organizing this unique cultural event which includes communicating with Aboriginal guest speakers, designing promotional materials, and installing the exhibition.

2025

Beadsoup!, the 2025 Aboriginal Gathering Place Exhibition, will be on view from February 6-19 in the Michael O’Brian Exhibition Commons. The exhibition is being co-curated by Leanne Inuarak-Dall and Rylee Taje.

Opening: Thursday, February 6 at 5pm

Beadsoup! is a constellation of works by Indigenous students, staff, faculty, and alumni of Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Beadsoup is a term used by artists to identify a mixture of beads made up of diverse colours and finishes. Beadsoup can be made on purpose or often comes from a happy accident of beads spilling from their containers. When combined, the varying hues create a new, kaleidoscopic blend with its own nourishing aesthetic qualities. The exhibition, based on this name, engages with how we, as people from different Indigenous nations far and wide, are all sovereign and also in conversation with one another. The work within Beadsoup! is multi-disciplinary, omnitemporal, and proudly Indigenous. Put together in the bead jar that is this exhibition, the artists and their works are a brilliant spectrum of creativity on an individual and collective scale. 

Past Exhibitions

2024: Frybread as Fok
Co-curated by Zoe Laycock, Aaron Rice, Vance Wright, Taylor Baptiste, and Rylee Taje.
Frybread, that coveted deep-fried comfort food, found across turtle island beckons us to gather once again. A deep-fried dough, made of water, salt, flour, and lard. It represents survival and resilience. It is resistance. It is love. It is tragic and problematic, but we love it anyway.

Honey-brown, with a light crunchy surface and a fluffy core. It can be found at powwows, potlatch, lacrosse games, the Bingo Hall, wrapped in napkins and stuffed in purses, pockets, and picnic baskets.

Dads make ‘em, aunties, and moms make ‘em, rez dogs maybe not. Frybread is best served hot and fresh. It can be topped with chili and cheese, dipped in cinnamon sugar, or slathered in home-made jam. Frybread is great with butter and wild meat stews. Frybread feeds our hungry tongues, comforts our hearts and bridges the time away from one another. We gather, we welcome one another, and we move into the future.

Frybread is everything.  

FRYBREAD AS FOK is a show that embodies the experiences of growing up unapologetically Indigenous. Over 30 artists of Indigenous heritage present their individual perspectives through painting, sculpture, film, printmaking, textile work and play. Spanning ECU students, faculty, staff, and alumni, this exhibition celebrates kin, makes space for the ancestors and for Indigenous voices. Frybread as Fok is a declaration of autonomy.

2023: Sacred Fires
Co-curated by Zoe Laycock, Aaron Rice, and Vance Wright.
Fire is healing, purifying – fire brings us together.
The fires we keep within ourselves give strength, our passion, our presence and our position, tending eons of interconnection. Our fires are our connection to culture, to self, and to community. The energy to spark warmth to embers, emanates a light that transforms and gives life. Even as it burns, smoke guides our prayers to our ancestors. Without respect or responsibility, fire can become unwieldy and dangerous, but with proper protocol it gives us both light and warmth. Fire is a portal, a doorway for contemplation and understanding that demands our presence.

2022: Currents
Co-curated by students Zoe Laycock and Aaron Rice.
Exhibition Catalogue
The spaces in between, as fluid places of connection; to
self, to culture, to community. Our waters move with
intent between the tiniest and most universal systems,
communicating as a ripple of kinship and overlapping
relations. As our residual selves transform and find
space in the liminal wakes of our dynamic actuality,
we’re presented with the opportunity to flow in these
spaces, find our stories, the changing tides of connection
to ourselves, our kin – human and non-human, and the
territories that embolden us. Grounded in the fluidity of
connectedness we look to creating a narrative in the canals
of uncertainty while we navigate our inter-relatedness like
the continuous ever-changing, life-giving, movement of the
water.

2021: Beyond Now
Co-curated by Sydney Pickering and Angela Marston.
Exhibition Catalogue

As we navigate through a time of uncertainty, we are able to find connection, community and culture through this collection of artworks by Emily Carr University’s Indigenous students, alumni, faculty, and staff. Living mindful with future generations at the forefront. Our Indigenous ancestors taught us a mindful way of taking care of our surroundings and others. This exhibition explores living towards the future. Our ancestors thought beyond the present with future generations in mind. As we live in a time of uncertainty, what do you see beyond now? What do you hope for beyond now?

2020: Here
Co-curated by students Diane Blunt, Megan Jensen, Sydney Pickering and Kelsey Sparrow.
Exhibition Website
HERE. Living here. Standing here. Creating here.
This land we stand on holds many nations from many places, some of us are guests and some of us are from here. This exhibition presents a variety of work that shows our growing and continued presence in this place. Here, is a gathering of pieces that are created from our own visions.
We are still here. 

A poster for the 2019 Aboriginal Student Exhibition. Various illustrations of hands are shown on a red background. Black text provides information on the exhibition dates and location.2019: The Hands Talk
Co-curated by students Diane Blunt, Zoe Cire, Shawna Kiesman.
The Hands Talk narrates a multifaceted memoir of the individualistic experience made as Indigenous artists. One speaks through their hands in physically creating tangible artworks that thereupon catalyze conversation, emotion and the sharing of knowledge. The Hands Talk calls upon the diverse and numerous voices of different nations and communities as Indigenous artists, each echoing a distinct acknowledgement of home. Through diversity, there is a universal language shared between artists that enables unity. In physically using our hands to produce art, we are granted expression that consolidates a form of communication, linking us as Indigenous makers. Through the work of hands the artist has the ability to shape vocabulary and synthesize voices throughout the North American expanse. The Hands Talk allows Indigenous artists to speak a language fusing our hand made stories.

2018: Shámaństut
Co-curated by students Nicole Preissl, Lacie Burning, M.V. Williams, and Veronica R. Waechter Danes.
Sháman’stut (Shaw-men-tsote) comes from the Squamish language and bears a dual meaning; to rise to the surface and to be able to heal or fix one’s self and others. Rise to the surface references how art comes to be actualized and subject matter explored. To be able to heal or fix one’s self and others speaks to the function art in conveying meaning to viewers and the healing process that happens within the artist in actualizing their work. In broader terms it is the process by which something moves and
becomes visible.

2017: ReForming
Co-curated by students Nicole Preissl, Lacie Burning, M.V. Williams, and Veronica R. Waechter Danes.
Re-Forming desires to play on the word “form” as an aesthetic critique of a creative work while proposing a reformulation of fixed understandings of aesthetic as it relates to Indigenous artists and subject matter. As a suggestive device, this title asks the viewer to deepen their consideration of “what it means to be an Indigenous artist” versus “what it means to make art of Indigenous subject matter”, and to thoughtfully re-form initial, predetermined perspectives into something more generative and open. The process of re-forming as a practice in itself encourages an enriched critical engagement with the subtleties and nuances that exist for Indigenous artists and their creative practices. We want to highlight how Indigenous people are engaging with the reformation of culture, languages, politics and creative aesthetic and how that reformation allows a necessary shift in the relationships that our audiences have with us, our art and each other in the context of contemporary art.

2016: FNAA poster for the 2016 Aboriginal Student Art Exhibition. A washed out image of mountains and water provide the background for white text which reads FNA. There is a red outlined star shape along the bottom.
Co-curated by students Derian Blake, William Callaghan, Chloe Bluebird Mustooch and Edwin Neel.
FNA, an acronym for First Nations Art, is a title that brings forward a certain slang statement saying F’n eh; First Nations Art is still here. Through centuries of turmoil from foreign dictatorships amidst what is now called the Americas, First Nations Art has survived, it is still here, we are still here, practicing our cultural heritages. With technological advancements and new and old practices of art combined, First Nations Art can be constructed to satisfy the needs of the artist’s vision for completion in whatever medium they so choose. Adaptation has happened and the spirit of First Nations Art and it’s practitioners are regenerated to fulfill the symbolic entities of their people’s creative rights. So to that we say, FNA.

2015: UNceded
Co-curated by students Lou-ann Ika’wega Neel, William Callaghan and Richard Heikkilä-Sawan.
Ceded is in some ways an unfamiliar term. It is used mainly in formal writing, relating to land and its transfer of ownership from one party to another. Very much a part of the BC Treaty process and its documents, the term means to give up, give over or give away. The exhibition’s curators, by choosing to explore its antonym, give expression to Aboriginal resilience and courage. Works in the show, however, step well beyond the bounds of land ownership and comment on any and all aspects of Aboriginal experience, arts practice, language and cultural practice. The exhibition UNceded represents a careful consideration of, and inquiry into, those things which have not been appropriated, taken or misused. UNceded poses, and answers with many different voices as well as in unison, the question of “what remains?”

2014: REDactionA poster for the 2014 Aboriginal Student Art Exhibition. Bold black lines provide the background for red and white text.
Co-curated by students Lou-ann Ika’wega Neel and Richard Heikkilä-Sawan.

 

 

 

2013: Totally Legit Native Art
Co-curated by students Xch’e’ Balam, Raven John and Ryan McKenna.

 

 

 

 

2012: I Like Your Status
Co-curated by students Lou-ann Neel, Raven John and Agnes Seaweed Wisden.

 

 

2011: Grand Entry
Co-curated by students Adrienne Greyeyes, Emma Kesler, Jennifer Chong and Michelle Sound Perich.
Today, powwows in particular are places where people can gather to celebrate and share their varying and unique cultural identities. At a powwow, the Grand Entry is the opening ceremony, in which elders, dancers, and honoured figures are brought to the centre of the circle. In the Grand Entry, the crowd honours the central figures, and all pay respect to the nation hosting the event. The exhibition is titled Grand Entry, as the Aboriginal artists participating are similar to the central participants at a Powwow. The artists bring to the centre of the circle their art, and their respect for the Coast Salish territory where we hold this event.