Exhibitions

Christian Chapman: Run to the Hills!

September 17 - December 17, 2023

Christian Chapman, "Wisdom" (2011), acrylic and oil on gesso paper. Indigenous Art Collection, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada. Photo by Lawrence Cook.

For Chapman, stories are treasures, sources of inspiration and influence that move with him into the shifting realm of Anishinaabe storytelling.

Christian Chapman is an Anishinaabe artist from Fort William First Nation in Ontario. He has always loved and attended to stories deeply, admiring their depth and elusiveness, the ways they carry meaning, and how storytellers in his family — young and old — uniquely animate their being. These stories warmly anchored him in Anishinaabe traditions from where the North Shore sleeps, stretching back to times before his own. He would listen, carefully attentive, beaming with his own curiosity. For Chapman, these stories are treasures, sources of inspiration and influence that move with him into the shifting realm of Anishinaabe storytelling.

Run to the Hills! spotlights Chapman’s gift as a storyteller who, like relatives before him, finds his own way of being in conversation with ancestral narrative traditions. Using a combination of painting, printmaking, and other mixed media techniques, he forms a new visual lexicon of narrative-leaning storying that still carries old-timey resonances.

In his work, you’ll find elements of Anishinaabeg humour, the mundane and small moments of daily life, alongside deeper political undercurrents that tug at its edges. What emerges is a practice rooted in a shifting, a place where identities blur, stories overlap, and something new begins to take form. At times, this space is grounded firmly in Anishinaabe Aki; at others, it drifts toward the fantastical, wandering in from the magical world of Disney. Across this terrain, he experiments with text, image, and a wide range of visual play—sometimes offering pointed themes, other times leaving room for more to be imagined.

Through these playful encounters, he builds a new arbour for Indigenous audiences, a space where the subtle humour of Indigenous experience and familiar symbols of popular culture coexist seamlessly. Viewers are invited into this realm, which opens with sharp yet recognizable crossings, showing how the lines between these connected worlds are always changing.

Chapman draws on the styles of visual art icons such as, Woodland School, Mishomis Norval Morrisseau and the American Pop artist Andy Warhol, bending them through his own unique lens. With a heartfelt appreciation for Anishinaabe story forms, his reinterpretations are brave, inventive and cheeky, forever connected to all the storytellers who came before him. By bringing in humour, satire, and critical analysis, Chapman sustains the Woodland style’s lasting influence for a new generation of Anishinaabe creators.

The show’s title, Run to the Hills! nods to Iron Maiden’s famous track and references Chapman’s 2017 print, Fight for Your Life. The song, widely known and sung by Native uncles across Turtle Island, serves as a rallying cry for Indigenous peoples’ empowerment and strength. Chapman taps into these forces, paying tribute to a defiance that carries on across generations — much like old stories — while always leaving an opening for laughter to slip through

Thank you/ Miigwetch! CUAG acknowledges with gratitude the many lenders whose generosity has made this exhibition possible: the Indigenous Art Collection at Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, the Government of Ontario Art Collection, Archives of Ontario, Howard Adler, Barry Ace and Earl Truelove, Blake Angeconeb, Rawlson King and Linda Grussani, Bill Staubi and Bear Witness.