Outsider Art Fair 2023

Donald Ellis Gallery is pleased to present a selection of Plains Indian Ledger Art, created by male warrior artists as records of personal and communal histories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Produced at a time of increasing American imperial expansion on the Great Plains, Ledger Drawings speak to Plains warrior culture and the importance of the horse to it. The gallery is also exhibiting a select group of drawings by highly acclaimed Haida artist and author Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas (b. 1954). Yahgulanaas is known for reinterpreting Northwest Coast formline design with riffs on Asian manga to create fluid imagery that reflects oral tradition and environmental activism. His works are shown alongside a group of gouache drawings by Chief Henry Speck (U’dzistalis, 1908-1971), a hereditary chief of the Kwakwaka’wakw nations. Reinterpreting mythological subject matter, his works are characterised by a distinct modernist sensibility of space and colour.

The works in this exhibition are at once deeply rooted in the formalised visual traditions of Indigenous Northwest Coast and Plains art and constitute highly innovative forms of painterly expression. Trained within their own communities, these artists operated outside of dominant art academies and institutions and their work remains largely absent from the mainstream canon of art historical discourse. We believe that each of the artists in this exhibition represents a formative aspect of North American art history and including their work in leading international art fairs is timely and appropriate to their artistic importance.