From Garden River to Paris, France
By Kathleen Imbert
PARIS – Janice Toulouse was not competing for the yellow sweater in the Tour de France annual bicycle race, but she was filling her artistic agenda with French dates to show her new art works this summer.
After a successful show of one of her paintings at the Grand Palais in Paris, France, at last year’s prestigious Fall Fair her next stop was at the Mediatech of a southwestern French town of Lauzerte in June of this year.
“One of my paintings is going to London,” said Toulouse.
Her French tour then took her to Cézanne’s birthplace in Aix en Provence. Toulouse was invited by a group of art lovers in a festive show to show her paintings in the very place where modern art began. In the south of France, painters like Picasso, Matisse, and Van Gogh developed their artistic expression, adding a different approach to their understanding of light and color that changed the course of their careers and art in general.
Toulouse’s attraction to France began in the 1980s when she soaked up the techniques of French modern painters and now applies them to her own contemporary Native style. Her art she says is “a mixture of tradition and new, inspired by her own Ojibwe cultural roots as well as an expression of her own Indigenous woman consciousness”.
From Garden River, Shingwaak kwe has always cultivated a keen interest in being on the move and it has paid off. After graduating from Concordia University with a Master of Fine arts, moss has not grown under her feet. She moved to Vancouver to teach at the Emily Carr University as a visual art instructor, landed a residency at the Smithsonian Institute in 2002 and later exhibited her work in New York. From Manhattan to Menatay, The Art of Janice Toulouse Shingwaak was shown at the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York in 2006.
In 2010, a French professor, Bernadette Rigal-Cenard, wrote of Toulouse’s art work in an anthology “Tradition in Native Arts and Literature”, published by University Press of Bordeaux in 2010.
“Her strong Native identity is enrich by a contemporary expression in the arts that helps her dig into her roots and extract the essential. The calling is strong and the drive to move global increases her field of action in the arts.” http://janicetoulouse.weebly.com