Joane is 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
Joane Cardinal-Schubert was
born in 1942 in Red Deer and attended the Alberta College of Art, 1962 -
1964; 1966 - 67, studying, painting, printmaking, and multi-media. In
1973 she began a BA at the University of Alberta, transferring to the
University of Calgary in 1973, graduating with a BFA in 1977.
For the past 25 years, her writing has
been published internationally in art magazines, catalogues, and books.
She has worked professionally as a curator, an artist, a lecturer, and
most recently a director of video and Native Theatre.
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)
She has received numerous, scholarships,
Canada Council Grants, and Awards for her work; notable is her election
to the Royal Canadian Academy in 1985 and the receipt of the
Commemorative Medal of Canada in 1993 for her contribution to the Arts.
A video in which she participated in as Director and Art
Director/animator was shown at MOMA, NY, in the exhibition 'Walk With
the Ancients' as well as other international exhibitions.
A retrospective of her work was organized by the FAB Art Gallery
at the University of Alberta in 1993 and her retrospective Joane
Cardinal Schubert : Two Decades, organized by the Muttart Gallery in
1997, continued to tour Nationally until after the year 2000.
She appears in Vancouver filmmaker, Loretta Todd's National Film
Board of Canada documentary entitled 'Hands of History'. More
than 26 solo exhibitions in Canada, the United States and Europe and
numerous international touring group exhibitions have included her
work.
She is represented in such selected public
collections as The National Gallery of Canada, The Art Bank, The Indian
Arts Centre Collection, Ottawa, The Canadian Museum of Civilization, and
The Thunder. Bay Art Gallery, The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and
The Alberta Foundation for the Arts and in the collections of the
Canadian Embassies in Japan, New York, Stockholm and Tokyo, 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 Shell Canada Limited, Bank of Montreal, Bank of America, Esso
Resources, and Northern Telecom and many international private
collections.
Her work is published in many, catalogues,
reviews and books; notably in such publications as Canadian Art - From
It's Beginnings to 2000, Anne Newlands, Firefly Press; By A Lady,
Celebrating Three Centuries of Art by Canadian Women, Maria Tippett,
Viking Press, 1992 and The Trickster Shift, Allan J. Ryan, UBC Press,
1998.
Joane Cardinal- Schubert lives and works
in Calgary, where she continues to address her family's history and place in
Southern Alberta.
