Meryl McMaster

Meryl McMaster (born 1988) is a Canadian and Plains Cree photographer whose best-known work explores her Indigenous heritage, often using portraiture to explore cultural identity.

Early life and education Meryl McMaster was born in 1988, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She is a Cree woman of the Siksika Nation.

She studied photography at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, graduating in 2010.

In her work, McMaster explores "tensions surrounding understanding one's personal identity and heritage, especially her own as a woman of Indigenous (Plains Cree) and European (British/Dutch) descent." McMaster's first major series, Ancestral, from 2008, "appropriates ethnographic portraits, which she then projects onto her photographic subjects: herself and her father," noted artist and curator Gerald McMaster.

She makes use of such elaborate props in works such as Winged Callings (animal costumes) or Aphoristic Currents (collar "fashioned out of hundreds of twisted newspapers") in order to examine the tensions between cultural and personal memory as well as how they interact with imagination. Both works are part of her In-Between Worlds series (2010–2013). She continues to examine identity, colonialism, and the environment in her large-scale works. a contemporary art gallery in Montreal, Quebec, and Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto, Ontario.

Recognition and awards In 2010, McMaster won the Canon Canada Prize, and, in 2016, she was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award. In 2017, she was awarded the REVEAL Indigenous Art Award.

In 2018, she was one of the three winners of the Scotia Bank New Generation Photography Award

Other distinctions she received include the Charles Pachter Prize for Emerging Artists, and the Doris McCarthy Scholarship.

Exhibitions McMaster's first solo exhibition, In-Between Worlds, opened at Project Space, Harbourfront Centre, in 2010 before traveling to the Station Gallery, the Peterborough Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Hamilton's Design Annex, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until 2017. The exhibition was on view at CUAG from May 2 - August 28, 2016 and subsequently travelled to other venues including the Doris McCarthy Gallery, Her work was prominently featured in Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood at the Art Gallery of Ontario during the summer of 2017.

Group exhibitions Spirit in the Land, Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2024; and Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2023 Native Portraiture: Power and Perception, Tacoma Art Museum, February 10, 2018- February 10, 2019 Niigaanikwewag, Art Gallery of Mississauga, February 22 - April 15, 2018 Recover All That Is Ours, Campbell River Art Gallery, March 1 - April 25, 2018 ÀDISÒKÀMAGAN/NOUS CONNAÎTRE UN PEU NOUS-MÊMES/ WE’LL ALL BECOME STORIES, Ottawa Art Gallery, April 28 - September 16, 2018 Embodiment, Museum London, December 23, 2017 - April 1, 2018 New Generation Photography Award Exhibition, National Gallery of Canada and Onsite Gallery, 2018 In Between Worlds, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, September 8 - December 3, 2017 [touring exhibition] The Fifth World, Mendel Art Gallery, April 3 - June 7, 2015 Second Self, Latcham Gallery, 2011

Collections McMaster's work has been acquired by various public collections within Canada and the United States, including the Canadian Museum of History, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Eiteljorg Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Ottawa Art Gallery, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria as well as by Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada.