Maanipokaa’iini | Adrian Stimson

Across installation, painting, photography, video and live performance, AUArts Alum Adrian Stimson, BFA '03, Painting re-signifies colonial history through humour and counter-memory in his new exhibition.

"Maanipokaa'iini" is the first-ever survey of the work of AUArts Alum Adrian Stimson, BFA '03, Painting. It features significant works from Stimson’s nearly 20-year practice that explore identity construction, the centrality of the bison to Blackfoot spirituality and survival, and the intergenerational impacts of the residential school system. These interconnected areas of focus form an encompassing vision wherein the fraught history of Indigenous-settler relations on the Plains is simultaneously mourned and turned on its head.

For this exhibition, Remai Modern has partnered with Wanuskewin Galleries to commission new work by Stimson inspired by the recent finding of four petroglyphs near the Newo Asiniak buffalo jump site, and the reintroduction of bison at Wanuskewin in 2019. The title of the exhibition, Maanipokaa’iini, is the Blackfoot word for newborn bison, and was chosen following the birth of a bison late in the season at Wanuskewin in September 2021, when Stimson was an artist-in-residence. The title further evokes a sense of renewal and futurity that informs the new work.

Curated by Tarah Hogue.