Open the door to a wonderful world of hot colour, celebratory spirit and amazing imagery in Alan Syliboy: the Journey So Far at Dalhousie Art Gallery to August 11.
The gallery’s retrospective for the revered, widely collected and much loved Mi’kmaw artist is Syliboy’s largest show to date and already drawing high numbers, as well as repeat visitors, says the show’s curator and gallery director Pamela Edmonds. It opens officially Thursday, June 20, 6 to 8 p.m., and Syliboy gives a talk Saturday, July 20, 2 to 3.30 p.m.
The first thing you see walking downstairs to the basement gallery is a specially commissioned, pulsating yellow mural of a horned snake, a dominant female figure and painted drums – set into the wall like stars.
Syliboy’s stunning, visual world is rooted in Mi’kmaw culture and legend with graphic images inspired by Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw petroglyphs and his own repeated motifs and symbols with wonderful abstracted elements.
It is both the world we live in and not. It is a voyage inside Syliboy’s artistry and the story of a people. His work will mean different things to different people. But everyone will be amazed.
The Journey So Far begins with Syliboy’s painting of the Mi’kmaw eight-pointed star encircled by whales, setting the show firmly within Mi’kma’ki, and telling you it’s a voyage into the world of the Mi’kmaq.
Then Syliboy’s intimate ancestor images combining photographs with vivid drawing and colour tell the artist’s story and place him within a long ancestral line. He honours his grandparents, including his grandmother Rachael Marshall, the second Mi’kmaw woman to become a chief in Nova Scotia, who encouraged him to become an artist.
She brought him to legendary Tobique First Nation artist and activist Shirley Bear, who met Syliboy in 1969 and took him with her to teach workshops at First Nations communities in New England. Bear was Syliboy’s mentor; she was the first person to teach him to paint and she introduced him to Mi’kmaw rock drawings – a lightning bolt of discovery for both of them.
In this historical record of Mi’kmaw life and culture he found his path as an artist. Born in Millbrook First Nation where he still lives, Syliboy had lost much of his Mi’kmaw language, forbidden at the Catholic day school he attended in Truro and by the church. (His mother refused to put him in residential which his father and siblings had attended; one of his father’s sisters died at the school from strep throat.)
Syliboy writes about a dream in his poem, Marks on the Ground, pinned to the gallery wall. In the dream he sees rocks with writing and pictures and hears his grandparents singing.
“And a voice told me that I was here to take these/gifts, the stories and the songs and bring them/back from the spirit world to our world, so that we would know how to make our medicine.
“Culture is our medicine, and that medicine is to be shared.”
Edmonds has a lovely light touch as a curator. She lets the art speak for itself and lets you make your own discoveries and conclusions in a show that is revelatory but not didactic or heavily academic.
There is a scattering of early works – the earliest is from 1975. While the exhibit is not chronological it’s easy to see how Syliboy has moved over the last 50 years from muted darker colours and sparer imagery to high pattern, intense colours of saturated blues and greens, hot reds and yellows and ever bolder graphic imagery in a dance of repeated figures and symbols.
Key to the exhibit and a reason for its creation is a show-within-a-show honouring the late Marcia (Ronan) Hennessy, a long-time supporter and collector of over 100 pieces of Syliboy’s art. (Her son Charles Ronan is coming to the opening on June 20, which coincidentally is Marcia’s birthday.)
This section includes the first picture she bought after encountering Syliboy’s work in Toronto in the mid-1970s; her favourite piece – Abandoned Woman, c. 2012, of a rounded, antlered, solo female figure on a ground of spirals, dots and suns and the amazing Chief Membertou with a surface beneath the robe that you can get lost in.
This show features a lot of stunning, large paintings from this year alone including three on one wall that are peppered in stars and have a wonderful celestial feel. Edmonds also includes Syliboy’s earlier serigraphs of the red crane, which became the image for his Redcrane Studios, and the butterfly, an image he painted large as a mural in the departure area of the Halifax Stanfield International Airport.
From his early days selling T-shirts and prints door-to-door Syliboy has wanted his art to be available to all people. While his paintings have gone up in price, he still sells cards, T-shirts, hoodies and scarves as well as his children’s books. Every day he posts the inspirational “Daily Drum” to Facebook with a drum image and a story about its meaning.
Syliboy recently celebrated his first year anniversary – with a The Journey So Far cake of images of paintings – at the Alan Syliboy Art Studio, 42 Legends Ave., Truro, not far from the Millbrook Cultural and Heritage Centre (which has a great gift shop). Alan Syliboy & The Thundermakers also released a new album on June 1. Last week the band performed at the International Indigenous Music Summit in Toronto.
Art by Syliboy and Indigenous artists Loretta Gould, Marcus Gosse and Jerry Evans is exhibited throughout Marine Atlantic’s new ferry to Newfoundland called Ala’suinu
(Mi’kmaw for traveller).
The Journey So Far feels communal and celebratory. Gallery staff helped the artist paint the commissioned mural and each staff member painted a star on a plinth supporting a drum.
Personally, I am moved by a sub-theme of enormous respect for women. Syliboy brought the show idea to Edmonds with the idea of honouring Marcia Hennessy. He celebrates Shirley Bear and his grandmother and he often paints a female figure, noting that the Mi’kmaq had a matriarchal society. “In this society the women in the group had the greatest influence and were deeply respected,” he writes on the label for Woman with Stars.
The Dalhousie Art Gallery is in the basement of the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium and open Wednesday and Friday, 11 to 5; Thursday, 11 to 8; Saturday and Sunday, noon to 5. Free admission.
Extra reading:
Alan Syliboy, Culture is our Medicine, by Ray Cronin, is #7 in the Gaspereau Field Guide to Canadian Artists series.
This link also includes a video of Syliboy: Alan Syliboy | The Canadian Encyclopedia
There is an excellent story on Shirley Bear, whom I met once at the MSVU Art Gallery thanks to Mary Sparling as always: Artist, activist Shirley Bear mourned, remembered as Indigenous trailblazer | CBC News
Syliboy has a very comprehensive website and his Art Studio is open daily: Alan Syliboy | Redcrane Studios – Millbrook, Nova Scotia
Kejimkujik offers guided tours of the petroglyph during the summer as well as other ways to experience Mi’kmaw culture: Guided experiences – Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site (canada.ca)
There are also two glyphs on a quartzite outcrop surface at the Bedford Petroglyphs National Historic Site of Canada.
- Corteo: A Fantastic Carnival to see this weekend
- Nipped in the Bud: a powerful journey from darkness to light by Gillian McCulloch
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: alan-syliboy, Art, indigenous-canadian-art, mikmaq, mikmaw-art, millbrook-first-nation, painting
NS reviews 
I saw this show before it opened officially – I was there for a pre-opera talk organised by Opera Nova Scotia, and decided to head downstairs to see what was on in the art gallery. The snake is stunning, and I had an interesting conversation with the curator about how she and other members of the gallery were guided by Alan Syliboy in adding to it.
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Very interesting Carol! I’m glad you got to see it and thanks for reading.
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