Rebecca Belmore (born March 22, 1960) is a Canadian interdisciplinary Anishinaabekwe artist who is notable for politically conscious and socially aware performance and installation work. She is Ojibwe and a member of Obishikokaang (Lac Seul First Nation). Belmore currently lives in Toronto, Ontario. Belmore has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally since 1986. Her work focuses on issues of place and identity, and confronts challenges for First Nations People. Her work addresses history, voice and voicelessness, place, and identity. Her work, be it sculpture, video, or photographic in nature, is performance-based. To address the politics of representation, Belmore's art strives to invert or subvert official narratives, while demonstrating a preference for the use of repetitive gestures and natural materials. Belmore's art reveals a long-standing commitment to politics and how they relate to the construction of identity and ideas of representation. She has exhibited across Canada, the US, Mexico, Cuba and Australia.

Life

Belmore was born on March 22, 1960, in Upsala, Ontario, Canada. Until the age of 16, Belmore spent her summers in Northwestern Ontario with her grandparents. During these summers, her grandmother taught her about harvesting native foods from the land. Author Jessica Bradley describes Belmore's adolescence as difficult due to "the custom ingrained through the [Canadian] government imposed assimilation, she was sent to attend high school in Thunder Bay and billeted with a non-Native family." Bradley adds that as a result of her experience as an adolescent, notions of displacement and cultural loss are "reformed into acts or objects of reparation and protest [within her various works]." Belmore attended the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto in 1988. Belmore's mother was born on a small island in Northern Ontario and her journey to visit her mother's birthplace has had a significant impact on her work.

Career

Belmore has presented work in biennial exhibitions throughout her career. In 1991, she exhibited at the IV Bienal de la Habana, Havana, Cuba. She has twice represented Canada at the Sydney Biennale; in 1998 in the exhibition Every Day, and in 2006 in the exhibition ''Zones of Contact. In 2005 her work Fountain'' was shown at the Canadian Pavilion of the 51st Venice Biennale, as the first aboriginal artist ever to represent Canada at the event. In the same year she exhibited as part of Sweet Taboos at the 3rd Tirana Biennale, Tirana, Albania. Jolene Rickard's Venice Biennale Catalogue essay describes Belmore's work: "As a First Nations or Aboriginal person, Belmore's homeland is now the modern nation of Canada; yet, there is reluctance by the art world to recognize this condition as a continuous form of cultural and political exile. The inclusion of the First Nations political base is not meant to marginalize Belmore's work, but add depth to it. People think of Belmore as both Canadian and Anishinabe—l think of her as an Anishinabe living in the continuously colonial space of the Americas." Belmore has had two major solo touring exhibitions, The Named and the Unnamed, a multi-part installation that commemorates women missing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2002); and 33 Pieces, Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto at Mississauga (2001). In 2008, the Vancouver Art Gallery hosted Rising to the Occasion, a mid-career survey of Belmore's artistic production. In 2014, Belmore was commissioned to create an original work for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights The work consists of a blanket of hand pressed clay beads, engaging the community in Winnipeg to help produce them. In 2010, Belmore was involved in a legal dispute with the Pari Nadimi Gallery of Toronto, that sued her for punitive damages and for lost future revenues to $750,000. The lawsuit was settled out of court in 2013; however, inspired her 2010 performance WORTH. In 2017, Belmore's work was exhibited at documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and in Kassel, Germany. In 2018, the Art Gallery of Ontario staged a touring retrospective of Belmore's work, Facing the Monumental. Curated by Wanda Nanibush, Facing the Monumental incorporates sculptures, installations, photography and videos spanning 30 years of Belmore's career. It has been the largest exhibition of her work to date, and shown at galleries in Canada and the United States. Belmore participated in the 2022 Whitney Biennial in New York. Her sculptural installation ishkode (fire) (2021), a clay sculpture of a figure shrouded in a sleeping bag and surrounded by empty bullet shell casings, was included in the exhibition. Journalist Gabriella Angeleti described the piece in The Art Newspaper as "a critique of the historic genocide and ongoing disproportionate violence against Indigenous people," calling the work "a centerpiece" of the exhibition.

Artworks

Descriptions of important works

Belmore's interactive installation Mawa-che-hitoowin: A Gathering of People for Any Purpose (1992), featured a circle of chairs from Belmore's kitchen and kitchen chairs owned by other women close to her, arranged in a circle. Each chair had a pair of headphones resting on it. Visitors were invited to sit in each chair, put on the headphones, and listen to the stories of the struggles and triumphs of different indigenous women in Canada, told in their own voices. The work was commissioned for an exhibition of Indigenous art on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in Hispaniola. As such, it used Indigenous traditions of storytelling and passing on wisdom from elders as a way to push back against Native stereotypes and victimization.

Select works

Exhibitions

Select solo exhibitions

Selected group exhibitions

Awards, honours and residencies

Belmore has been awarded membership in the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. In 2004, Belmore completed a residency with MAWA (Mentoring Artists for Women's Art) in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In 2005, she won the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award from the Canada Council. and she was the first Indigenous woman representing Canada at the Venice Biennale. Also in 2005, OCAD University conferred an honorary doctorate on Belmore in recognition of her career. She is also a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts (2013), as well as the recipient of the 2016 Gershon Iskowitz Prize and an honorary doctorate from Emily Carr University in 2018.