Allen Sapp: Portraits of Community

June 7 to September 21, 2008

Wally Dion and Allen Sapp opening reception on Friday, June 6, 2008 beginning at 7:30 p.m. Wally Dion will lead a tour through the exhibition featuring his work.

For over 50 years, the body of work produced by Allen Sapp has explored and celebrated the life, culture and daily activities of the Northern Plains Cree community. Avoiding pretense, stereotypes or staged events, he pulls images from the past and connects them with the present. His images recall community, family, particular moments in time — they are autobiographical memories.

His work, though indebted to European painting traditions and techniques, does not offer a Western take on texture, light and surface. Similarly his portraits are not historical, anthropological or scientific investigations of First Nations cultures, values or beliefs, but a representation of a culture from within. Sapp offers portraits of Aboriginal life and people by an Aboriginal artist.

Kiskayetum (“he knows/perceives it”), the name given to Sapp by his grandmother, was also the title of the retrospective exhibition curated by Bob Boyer at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in 1994. This was the first critical evaluation of Allen Sapp’s body of work within a public gallery. Painting during a time when government policy advocated total assimilation as a means of eliminating the Cree as a distinct people, his work is not unknowing. His view of an “Indian” world is the documentation of the cultural persistence of the Northern Plains Cree in Saskatchewan.

Allen Sapp Biography

Allen Sapp, born 1929, is a painter who grew up on the Red Pheasant Reserve in Saskatchewan in the 1930s; he is a descendant of the legendary Cree leader Poundmaker. He moved to North Battleford, SK in the early ‘60s and has been a resident ever since. The Allen Sapp Gallery opened there in May 1989. Now in his 70’s, he continues to paint and loves to participate in powwows as a men’s traditional dancer. He is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (1985) and an Officer of the Order of
Canada (1987). Sapp’s work has been exhibited across Canada, in the U.S. and in Europe. It can be found in the collections of the Glenbow Museum (Calgary), McMichael Collection (Kleinburg, Ont.), MacKenzie Art Gallery, Mendel Art Gallery (Saskatoon) and the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Gatineau). Sapp has produced two books: A Cree Life: The Art of Allen Sapp and I Heard the Drums.

Learn more about Allen Sapp by visiting his website.

Image:

Allen Sapp
The Pow-wow, 1987
acrylic on canvas
152.4 x 101.6 cm
Collection of the MacKenzie Art Gallery, purchased in memory of Mari Stewart

Organized by the MacKenzie Art Gallery with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board and the City of Regina Arts Commission.

Allen Sapp: Portraits of Community

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