Anishinaabe artist hopes to create a path for aspiring Indigenous artists

By Colin Graf

MONTREAL/HOCHELAGA/TIOHTIÀ:KE— Artist Nico Williams is taking traditional Anishinabe beadwork from its roots in the longhouse just about as far as one can go, both culturally and literally. Whether speaking, demonstrating and collaborating on artworks, or exhibiting, the dedication to beading of this young member of Aamjiwnaang First Nation has already taken him to much of the world and landed his works in some of the best-known galleries in Canada.

When you add to that, winning the prestigious $60,000 Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art while completing his Masters in Fine Art at Concordia University in Montreal, it becomes clear Williams is heading to create for himself a unique place in the world of Canadian Indigenous art.

Simply having the chance to complete the degree with beadwork “was incredible enough”, Williams says, but winning the Bronfman was shocking and shows “people are really appreciating the practice.”

Williams’ start in beading was a lucky accident in 2014. While he originally enrolled at Concordia in printmaking, one day he walked into a bead store and “just fell in love with every single colour.”

“I was thinking, ‘I don’t know how to use this,’ but I bought every colour.”

Eventually, he began work in the Master’s program, leading to his first public sculpture, Monument to the Brave,  commissioned in 2020 for Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. In fact, Williams says, he had just put the finishing touches on the sculpture and shipped it off when he received the call informing him that he got the Bronfman Fellowship.

Being accepted into the Master’s program doing beadwork, Williams also found the time and opportunity to travel and exhibit at the Venice Biennale exhibition and around Europe, to Boston and to New York. His research and creative practice led him to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and to join the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork research team which has members worldwide. He has also presented workshops at MIT, NSCAD University, the Indigenous Art Centre, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, and Carleton University.

His work has been shown internationally and across Canada, including at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Victoria Arts Council (British Columbia), and his most recent solo exhibition, chi-miigwech, at Never Apart (Montreal).

Monument to the Brave was completed earlier this year and combines William’s use of beads as an art form and the hospital’s donation of beads to patients for the treatments they undergo. The work, made up of 250,000 separate beads, including those donated by the hospital and by former patients, commemorates the courage of children with difficult health challenges.  The work will be installed in the new SickKids hospital scheduled to open in 2023.

Williams describes his work as “sculptures that are sometimes highly patterned abstracted geometric forms, sometimes sparkling representations of familiar objects, and always hand-woven from hundreds of glass beads.”

The Bronfman Fellowship has allowed Williams to enlarge his studio space and employ a team of beaders — something essential to completing the time-consuming practice.  He sees his art as an extension of the traditional communal nature of beading, employing three to five people in his team at any one time, and has even invited the public to contribute to one sculpture.

“Beading is a beautiful community practice; you just get into this peaceful mindset,” Williams explains.

He compares the teamwork needed to the traditional way the Anishinabe would make a quill box or basket. A whole family will take different roles in the construction such as cutting bark, or attaching the quills; “many hands making one single basket.”

Translating everyday, accessible objects, such as a shopping bag, status card, or lottery ticket, into beadwork “represents regular things from our daily lives [with] overlapping, shifting resonances across cultural contexts and modes of identity,” Williams explains in his online biography. He describes his art as connecting the past and present, interweaving elements of different cultures, and shaped and motivated by “both the harshness and beauty of our current reality.”

Travelling has led him to learn and teach about everything connected to beadwork, from methods for designing 3-D sculptures to the history of the fabrication of the glass beads in Venice that European traders first brought to the First Nations. Lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to most collaboration and travel for Wiliams, but it did offer him time to concentrate on his own beadwork.

His own artistic tastes are firmly rooted in Canadian and Indigenous art.

“I’m obsessed with Indigenous art,” he says.

Just as Indigenous artists of the past such as Norval Morisseau or Canadians inspired by Indigenous art forms such as Jean-Paul Riopelle have paved the way for his generation of artists, Williams hopes to create a path for others. Aspiring artists have many grant opportunities to aim for to get themselves started in a career, he explains.

“All I can hope is that we, as Indigenous artists, can make it even smoother for future artists, because a lot of the voices have been silenced. Having as much Indigenous art and language returning to the lands in which we steward — looking at the lakes and saying [their names] in Anishinaabemowin [all contribute to strengthening the culture],” he says.

The level of acclaim Nico Williams’ work has already garnered early in his career should in itself provide inspiration for those who follow.