Alex Janvier

Biography

From 1966 to 1977 Alex Janvier signed his paintings not with his name but with the treaty number assigned to him as a registered member of his First Nation. It was his protest against government policy toward Indigenous people. The titles of his works also referred to treaty language, for example “Sun Shines, Grass Grows, Rivers Flow”.

He was born on 28 February 1935 on the Le Goff Reserve of the Cold Lake First Nations, in northern Alberta; his family was of Dene Suline and Saulteaux descent. At eight the boy was sent to the Blue Quills Indian residential school near St. Paul, Alberta. The principal noticed his talent for drawing and encouraged him.

Janvier received his professional training at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art in Calgary (now the Alberta University of the Arts). There he encountered the work of European modernists; by other accounts, he had enrolled as early as 1950. He completed the course with honours in 1960. Among First Nations artists in Canada he was one of the first to study at a professional art school. Later he named Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky among his points of reference, and from the traditions of his own peoples he singled out the abstract patterns of hide painting, beadwork and quillwork.

Right after graduating, Janvier took a position as a boys’ supervisor at St. Michael’s Indian Residential School at Duck Lake, Saskatchewan. There he made sixteen drawings, which were shown to the public for the first time only in 2012. He then taught drawing at the University of Alberta. In 1966 the federal Department of Indian and Northern Affairs commissioned eighty paintings from him. For the Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal he helped bring together a group of artists that included Norval Morrisseau and Bill Reid. According to one account, he also painted a mural there. In 1968 Janvier returned to Alberta and taught adult courses at the Saddle Lake Indian School and at Alberta Newstart in Fort Chipewyan. At the end of 1971 he decided to make painting his main occupation. In 1977 he settled again among his own people at Cold Lake, where he lived and worked until the end of his life; with his family he ran the Janvier Gallery there.

He belonged to the “Indian Group of Seven”, the informal name of the association Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., and is regarded as one of the pioneers of contemporary Indigenous art in Canada. His abstract language was, in his own phrase, his “own visual language”, and he worked best on a large scale.

In 1976 he made murals for the Muttart Conservatory in Edmonton and for the County of Strathcona building in Sherwood Park. In 1977 he was invited to Sweden to paint and exhibit. In 1978–1981 he created “The Seasons” for the National Museum of Man, now the Canadian Museum of History. In 1987 his paintings were shown in two large exhibitions in California, and in 1992 he took part in the group exhibition “Land, Spirit, Power” at the National Gallery of Canada.

His largest work, “Morning Star”, was completed in 1993 under the dome of the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. The painting covers about 418 square metres; he worked on it from June to September with the help of his son Dean. The title refers to the morning star as a guide to direction. The composition consists of two concentric rings, inside which a coloured starry sky is divided into four zones. Yellow stands for early history in harmony with nature, blue for the changes that followed contact with European civilization, red for revival and optimism, white for reconciliation and a return to harmony. I would not read this scheme too literally: in the painting itself the zones are filled with floating organic forms, and these matter more than the allegory.

In 1992 he was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. His awards include the National Aboriginal Achievement Award (2002), membership of the Order of Canada (2007), a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2008), honorary doctorates of law from the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary (2008), and membership of the Alberta Order of Excellence (2018). In 2016 the National Gallery of Canada opened a retrospective of his work, and his large mosaic “Tsą tsą ke kʼe” (“Iron Foot Place”) was installed at Rogers Place, the arena in Edmonton. In 2019 the Alberta University of the Arts awarded him an honorary Master of Fine Arts.

Alex Janvier died on 10 July 2024, aged 89.