Visual Culture Colloquium in Ithaca

Visual Culture Colloquium

Ruth Woolsey Findley History of Art Gallery

Indigenous Autoethnographies: Visual Culture and Dispossession in 19th Century Ontario

This talk will examine two important episodes of self- representation by Mississauga people in southern Ontario during the first half of the 19th century: the private ‘museum’ of the Reverend Peter Jones and the gifts presented to the Prince of Wales by Peterborough-area Mississauga during his the 1860 royal tour of Canada. It explores the dominant genres of dress and artifact display as autoethnographic visual assemblages that were generated within a transatlantic colonial culture by the radical and traumatic changes in art and life that accompanied rapid land loss and conversion to Christianity. Over time, Peter Jones’s collection and the Prince of Wales’s gifts have been constructed and reconstructed through layered gestures of refusal and gift presentation, public exhibition and withdrawal from public space.

Ruth B. Phillips is Canada Research Chair and Professor of Art History at Carleton University in Ottawa and a specialist in Native North American Art and museum representation. Her most recent book is Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, and she is also the author of Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native American Art from the Northeast, 1700 to 1900; Native North American Art, with Janet Catherine Berlo; and Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, co-edited with Christopher B. Steiner. She has curated exhibitions, served as director of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology from 1997-2003, and as the president of CIHA, the international association of art historians from 2004-2008.

Categories: Education | Art Galleries & Exhibits | University & Alumni