Daphne Odjig’s life was as eclectic, transitional and colorful as her art. She was born September 11, 1919, on the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve on Manitoulin Island (Lake Huron), Ontario, of a Potawatomi father and an English mother. In 1932, she contracted rheumatic fever and during the next three years that she spent recuperating, her grandfather, a carver of tombstones and monuments, encouraged her to draw.
In 1945, she married her first husband, a farmer, and moved to British Colombia. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, she began to use oil paints and dabble in cubism and abstract expressionism. But only after her sister entered one of her paintings in a juried show in 1962 and she was subsequently elected as a member of the British Columbia Federation of Artists did her art career take flight. She produced a great range of works, from pen and ink drawings to watercolor and acrylic paintings.
In this Woodlands-style diptych on display at the NMAI beginning in June, a Thunderbird transforms into a human woman to marry a man, who then must later become a Thunderbird himself to be with her.
“Beckoning Call (Thunderbird Woman),” Daphne Odjig (Odawa (Ottawa)/Potawatomi); acrylic paint on canvas; 64.3” x 36.3” x 2.4” 27/0644
Photo by NMAI Staff
She began to paint in the Woodlands style, which through vibrant colors relays Indigenous stories. These often are tales of transformation, such as this 1990 diptych she entitled “Beckoning Call (Thunderbird Woman)” in the National Museum of the American Indian collection. Odjig wrote that these paintings tell the story of a Thunderbird who changes into a woman and marries a man on Earth. But then a jealous rival murders her, so she returns to her Thunderbird form in the sky. Her husband goes to the peak of a mountain to pay tribute to her and discovers her alive in the clouds. She takes him to a medicine man who transforms her husband into a Thunderbird so he may join her.
Odjig was “one of the few women artists who worked in the Woodlands style,” said former Associate Director for Museum Research and Scholarship David Penney, who helped acquire the stunning work. As Penney said, her paintings appear transitory, to be “shifting before our eyes, combining shapes, colors and figures.”
Odjig was one of most prominent First Nations artists in Canada. Among her many achievements were creating Canada’s first Indigenous-run art gallery, being granted a Doctor of Letters from multiple universities and receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from Okanagan Arts Awards in 2008. She died in 2016 at the age of 97.
Yet through her art, Odjig lives on. On the National Gallery of Canada’s website, she said, “I see my paintings as a celebration of life.”