Renowned artist Alex Janvier, part of Indian Group of Seven, dies at ...
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Published Jul 10, 2024 • Last updated 1 hour ago • 2 minute read
EDMONTON — Renowned Alberta-based artist Alex Janvier has died at the age of 89.
Officials at the Assembly of First Nations annual general meeting announced his death and held a moment of silence on Wednesday.
Janvier, who was from Cold Lake First Nations in Alberta, is considered one of Canada’s greatest painters. His work is widely collected and hangs in private homes and public galleries across the country and around the world.
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“Painting says it all for me,” Janvier said in a statement in 2012.
“It is the Redmantalk in colour, in North America’s language. Our Creator’s voice in colour.”
Janvier was a groundbreaking Indigenous artist.
In 1973, with other First Nations artists Norval Morrisseau, Daphne Odjig and Jackson Beardy, he helped found the so-called Indian Group of Seven — more formally known as Professional Native Indian Artists Inc. — to bring their work to the mainstream.
“We had to open a lot of doors,” Janvier recalled. A show in a Montreal gallery was the group’s first, and others followed.
“We finally got that rubber stamp and other gallery owners started to open their doors.”
Since then, Janvier’s work has been shown in galleries across Canada, as well as in Sweden, Paris, London, New York and Los Angeles.
It hangs in the National Gallery and the Royal Alberta Museum, Rogers Place, the Alberta legislature, as well as schools, commercial offices, municipal buildings and band offices from coast to coast.
A public school in the Edmonton neighbourhood of Westlawn was named in his honour in May 2019 where students in grades 4-9 are taught with a focus on the arts.
An arts education gives students a chance to find their voice, the residential school survivor said at the time.
“Sometimes you have to push them back to be heard, or to be known,” he said. “It was not an easy trail that I came to, this day here. But it’s enjoyable, now that I think back on it. It was the right trail.”
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