Faculty of Communication & Design

Guest Curator: Steve Loft

On January 1, 1889, Jack Wilson (or Wovoka), a young Paiute man, had a vision during an eclipse of the sun. […] Revealed to Wilson was a place where his ancestors were once again engaged in their favourite pastimes, where wild game and abundant food were restored to the lands. […] He interpreted the vision as the coming of a new age, one where Native and non-Native people would (finally) live in peace. This was the birth of the Ghost Dance. [...] It was, quite possibly, the first pan-Indian movement in the United States.*

In the autumn of 1969, thousands of American Indians occupied the abandoned remains of Alcatraz for nearly 18 months, reclaiming it as Indian land and demanding fairness and respect for Indian peoples. Using these key events as a conceptual starting point, through the works of Aboriginal artists Ghost Dance will examine the role of the artist as activist, as chronicler and as provocateur in the ongoing struggle for Indigenous rights, self-determination and sovereignty.

Steven Loft is Scholar-in-Residence at the Ryerson Image Centre and the National Visiting Trudeau Fellow at Ryerson
University.

* Candice Hopkins, “Can Beauty Be A Call to Action”, in Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, ed. Sherry Farrell Racette
(Plug In Editions: Winnipeg, 2011), 65.