Rebecca Belmore

Rebecca Belmore (born March 22, 1960) is an interdisciplinary Anishinaabekwe artist from Canada 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 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. 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.

Career

Belmore has presented work in biennial exhibitions throughout her career. In 1991, she exhibited at the IV Bienal de la Habana, Havana, Cuba. 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:

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. The work consists of a blanket of hand pressed clay beads, engaging the community in Winnipeg to help produce them. 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 Source: Crazy Old Woman Child (1988), Indian Friendship Centre, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada

Selected group exhibitions

1988: Souvenir from the Northern Front, Mayworks, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 2018-2019: Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, USA 2019: Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA 2022: Quiet As Its Kept: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, New York City, New York, USA

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. and an honorary doctorate from Emily Carr University in 2018. In 2024 Belmore was the recipient of the Audain Prize for the Visual Arts.