Joane Cardinal-Schubert RCA

1942-2009

Cardinal-Schubert was a well-respected senior artist from the Blood Nation, and was an active advocate among native artists in Canada. In 1985, she became the fourth woman in Alberta to be inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and she was awarded the Commemorative Medal of Canada in 1993. Joane Cardinal-Schubert passed away on September 16, 2009, she was 67 years old. Her voice is sadly missed.

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A well-respected senior artist from the Blood Nation, Joane Cardinal-Schubert was a major force in contemporary North American native art. Born in 1942 in Red Deer, Alberta, Cardinal-Schubert studied at the Alberta College of Art and the University of Calgary.  She has been a lobbyist for the Society of Canadian Artists of Native Ancestry (SCANA) and has won numerous scholarships and grants, including the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Award in 1976, and Banff Centre scholarships in 1983, 1988, 1995.  In 1985, she became the fourth woman in Alberta to be inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and she was awarded the Commemorative Medal of Canada in 1993.Joane was a recipient of the Queen's Jubilee Medal in recognition of her significant achievement in the arts in Canada and she received an Honorary Doctorate at the University of Calgary in June 2003. In 2007 she was the recipient of the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation Award in Arts.  Joane Cardinal-Schubert passed away on September 16, 2009, she was 67 years old. Her voice is sadly missed.

In her forty-year career, Cardinal-Schubert’s innovative work ranged from richly colored drawings and paintings to installation works that were inspired by memories, native history, social injustice and environmental concerns. Cardinal-Schubert’s work often examined how North American aboriginal culture and European culture mutually affected one another. Inspired by the iconography of her native roots such as pictographs, war shirts and ritual objects, Cardinal-Schubert’s work explores the relationships between culture, ritual, art and the environment. “I use Indian history as subject matter,” said Cardinal-Schubert, “but more important, as a personal expression of a contemporary artist – no different from any contemporary artist who seeks the essence of that which transcends any culture or historic period (Anne Newlands, Canadian Art: From Its Beginnings to 2000, Firefly Books Ltd., 2000, 63).”

By choosing not to produce traditional artifacts, the sort of objects that the white community had long associated with native Indian artists, and by making art out of their historical and current experience as native Canadian women, Cardinal-Schubert and Edmonton artists Rebecca Gloria-Jean Baird (1954-) and Jane Ash Poitras (1951-) pushed the white community to rethink their past and present treatment of First Nation peoples.  These artists also made their viewers reconsider their ideas about native art.  They were showing that it was as acceptable for them to use western materials, iconography and techniques as it had been for Emily Carr to use totem poles for her art so many years earlier. (Maria Tippett. By A Lady. Toronto: Penguin Books, 1992:179).

For the past 25 years, Joane’s writing has been published internationally in art magazines, catalogues, and books. She worked professionally as a curator, an artist, a lecturer, and a director of video and Native Theatre.

Cardinal-Schubert's paintings and installations are known for their "penetrating ideas on contemporary First Nations experiences and [their] denunciation of Euro-American religious and governmental systems."

Her work is represented in many public collections such as The National Gallery of Canada, Canada Council Art Bank, Indian Arts Centre Collection (Ottawa), Canadian Museum of Civilization, Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, in the collections of the Canadian Embassies in Japan, New York, Stockholm and Tokyo, the President of Mexico, and the collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, (Duke and Duchess of York) London, England. Her work is included in many corporate collections such as Gulf Canada, Petro Mark, Alberta Energy, Shell Canada Limited, Bank of Montreal, Bank of America, Olympia and York, Peace Hills Trust, Nova, Molson's, Esso Resources, and Northern Telecom and many national and international private collections.  She exhibited around the world including London, Tokyo and Paris, as well as in South America, Sweden, and Korea.

"So many stories are in each work, they are not just my story, they are the stories of all the people that are a part of me – those that formed me by their actions so many years ago, those that influenced me as a child, those that are my friends, my enemies, my teachers, my colleagues, and my family," she said of her work.

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