Patricia Deadman: The Red Feather

Patricia Deadman: The Red Feather is a selection of works from a new and significant donation to the Gallery’s Collection by the late artist and curator Patricia Deadman (b. 1963 – d. 2024). Patricia loved taking photographs and making them her own. She was constantly documenting the world around her, travelling widely across Canada, Europe and Mexico, using her camera lens to shift, destabilize, and reveal people as entities of energy and light. Experimental and prescient of an explosion of photo editing software — and long before TikTok collage trends – she manipulated printed photographs by hand with graphite, wax and other materials. In a never-before-seen series of 49 miniature images inspired by textures and colours of ceremonial regalia, including beads, feathers, skirts, headdresses, shawls, and ribbons worn by powwow dancers, Deadman created her own genre of event photography. In a grid of near-abstract mixed media works, it is as though the artist was standing, entranced, in the middle of the powwow circle. Her creativity and sense of wonder live on in her images.

Born in Oshweken, Ontario, in the heart of the Six Nations of the Grand River, Deadman’s legacy as an artist, writer, Curator of the Woodland Cultural Centre in Woodstock, Ontario, and Indigenous arts advocate made a lasting impact on contemporary art in Canada. With her meaningful ties to Thunder Bay Art Gallery, we are grateful to Patricia’s close friends and family for this donation of works directly from her personal archive, which increases public access to her transformative photography, her view of the world.

Artist Biography:

Patricia Deadman (b. 1963 – d. 2024) was born in Ohsweken, Ontario.  She received a Fine Arts Diploma from Fanshawe College and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Windsor, Ontario. Beginning in 1985, her work was exhibited in numerous solo and group shows, with accompanying publications, across Canada and the United States. With twenty years of curatorial experience at esteemed institutions, including the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Museum London, and the MacKenzie Art Gallery, her legacy remains rooted in the role as Curator of the Woodland Cultural Centre, in her home territory. Her creative vision and dedication were recognized through her selection for the Aboriginal Curators Delegation to prestigious events such as the Sydney Biennale and the Venice Biennale, making a lasting impact on the art community.

Her work is in permanent and private collections throughout Canada, the United States, and Great Britain, including the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Alberta; Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Thunder Bay, Ontario; and the Indian Art Centre, Ottawa, Ontario. Patricia’s work has been documented in books such as Lucy R. Lippard, The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on Art, New York, New York, 1995, and Aperture 139, Strong Hearts: Native American Visions and Voices, New York, New York, 1995.

Image: Patricia Deadman, The Red Feather, photography and mixed media, 1988.