Benjamin Chee Chee

Biography

On 1 March 1977 Chee Chee delivered eighteen works to his exhibition manager in Ottawa. They are now known as the Black Geese Portfolio. Two weeks later the artist was dead.

He was born on 26 March 1944 in Temagami, in northern Ontario, and was given the name Kenneth Thomas Benjamin Chee Chee. His father died in a car accident when the boy was two months old. He grew up on the reserve on Bear Island in Lake Temagami. He saw little of his mother: she worked and left her son with acquaintances. At about twelve the authorities sent him to a residential school, St. Joseph’s Training School in Alfred, near Ottawa. The separation from his mother and the search for her seem to have become the central theme of his life: he looked for her for about twelve years. In 1965 Chee Chee moved to Montreal and began drawing a great deal there. Through a lawyer he knew, Frederick Brown, he met the painters Dorothy and Henry Robertson “Robin” Watt, who introduced him to the Montreal art scene, gave him lessons and helped him find work in a warehouse. In 1972 he set up his own studio. Small exhibitions brought no success, and on Brown’s advice he returned to Ottawa in 1973.

There things moved faster. In 1973 his first exhibition was held at the University of Ottawa; in the same year the Nicholas Art Gallery, owned by Marie and Pierre Gaignery, gave him a solo show, and everything was sold. The early works were abstract: bright compositions of geometric motifs printed with a block stamp. In 1974 his work was shown in “Canadian Indian Art ’74” at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

By 1976 he had arrived at the manner for which he is known: a clean line, a very sparing palette, the empty field of the sheet as part of the composition. He worked most often in acrylic on canvas and gouache on paper. His geese, eagles and deer are barely sketched, yet a sense of movement can be read in their posture. Art historians place him in the second generation of the Woodland school, which Norval Morrisseau had set going in the 1960s; unlike Morrisseau and Daphne Odjig, Chee Chee is closer to abstraction, and he has been compared with the Montreal artist Jacques Hurtubise. He himself rejected symbolic readings: he called his animals “creatures of the present” and said that he painted not the past but today. He considered himself an Ojibway artist, not simply an “Indian” one. One of his sayings: “I like to express my own feelings, not my Indian-ness.” Curators nonetheless see in the “black geese”, shown in a flock, an image of the family he was looking for.

In July 1976 he finally found his mother and brought her to live with him in Ottawa. In 1977 solo exhibitions were held in Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg, among them the Marion Scott Gallery in Vancouver. His work was also shown that year in the travelling exhibition “Links to Tradition”.

After delivering the “Black Geese” he ended up in an Ottawa jail. There, on 14 March 1977, he took his own life; according to some accounts, he died in hospital several days later. He is buried in Notre Dame Cemetery in Ottawa.

In 1983 the gallery in Thunder Bay acquired more than fifty of his works and organised the first retrospective. The second was held there in 1991, curated by Robert Houle. Chee Chee’s work is in the National Gallery of Canada, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, the Canadian Museum of History (formerly the Museum of Civilization) and the McMichael Collection. The travelling exhibition “Life and Legacy”, organised in 2018 by the Temiskaming Art Gallery, toured northern Ontario, and in 2022 a park in Milton was named after him.