On Aboriginal Representation in the Gallery

edited by Lynda Jessup with Shannon Bagg, Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2002.

In recognizing the established intellectual and institutional authority of Native North American artists, curators and academics working in cultural institutions and universities today, this publication serves as an important primer on key questions accompanying the changing representational practices of the community cultural centre, the public art gallery and the anthropological museum. In this anthology, Native North American and other contributors address current and provocative issues arising from Native North American historical and contemporary art, and its production, collection and exhibition.


Order this book from the Canadian Museum of Civilization or Amazon Books.   

Publications

Antimodernism and Artistic Experience:

Policing the Boundaries of Modernity

edited by Lynda Jessup, University of Toronto Press, 2001.

Antimodernism is a term used to describe the international reaction to the onslaught of the modern world that swept across industrialized Western Europe, North America, and Japan in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. Scholars in art history, anthropology, political science, history, and feminist media studies explore antimodernism as an artistic response to a perceived sense of loss - in particular, the loss of 'authentic' experience. Embracing the 'authentic' as a redemptive antidote to the threat of unheralded economic and social change, antimodernism sought out experience supposedly embodied in pre-industrialized societies - in medieval communities or 'oriental cultures,' in the Primitive, the Traditional, or Folk. In describing the ways in which modern artists used antimodern constructs in formulating their work, the contributors examine the involvement of artists and intellectuals in the reproduction and diffusion of these concepts. In doing so they reveal the interrelation of fine art, decorative art, souvenir or tourist art, and craft, questioning the ways in which these categories of artistic expression reformulate and naturalise social relations in the field of cultural production.


Order this book from the University of Toronto Press or Amazon Books.   

Nass River Indians (Reconstruction)

concept, research and sequencing by Lynda Jessup; intertitle scans and digital reconstruction by Dale Gervais, produced in collaboration with the National Archives of Canada, 2001.


This 35 mm film is a reconstruction of the lost, 1928 film Nass River Indians, which was produced by Associated Screen News Ltd in Montreal specifically for use by the National Museum of Canada. It was first screened in 1928 in conjunction with the National Gallery of Canada "Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern," a show combining the work of Canadian west coast Aboriginal peoples with paintings and sculptures by prominent Euro-Canadian artists, chief among them the members of the Group of Seven.


With the generous support of the National Archives of Canada, the film has been reconstructed as a postcolonial object, which includes introductory intertitles in English and Nisga'a. The film is now touring internationally in Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941, organized by the Anthology Film Archives and Deutsches Filmmuseum.

Books

Around and About Marius Barbeau: Modelling Twentieth-Century Culture edited by Lynda Jessup, Andrew Nurse and Gordon Smith, Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2007. Marius Barbeau (1883-1969) played a vital role in the shaping of emergence of Canadian culture in the twentieth century. Around and About Marius Barbeau: Modelling Twentieth-Century Culture is designed to extend discussion about Barbeau beyond the life and work framework by providing critical and interpretive approaches to the different aspects of Barbeau. Rooted in the premise that his cultural work –in anthropology, fine arts, music, film, folklore studies, fiction, historiography– cannot be read uni-dimensionally, this book advances the idea that, by merging disciplinary perspectives about Barbeau, we can move toward deepening our evaluations and understandings of the situation around Barbeau. The sixteen articles that comprise this book bear this idea out, suggesting that Barbeau’s cultural work needs to be considered from a variety of different perspectives, each of which carries with it complex and competing dynamics, as well as a critical and subject context. Together, they present alternative stances from which we might reflect on Barbeau’s historical situation and the implications of his work today. Lynda_Jessup,_Department_of_Art,_Queens_University_-_Home.html

Scholarly Editions

Recent Articles


Marius Barbeau and Early Ethnographic Cinema, in Around and About Marius Barbeau: Modelling Twentieth-Century Culture, co-edited with Andrew Nurse and Gordon Smith, Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2007, pp. 269-304.


Around and About Marius Barbeau, in Around and About Marius Barbeau: Modelling Twentieth-Century Culture, co-edited with Andrew Nurse and Gordon Smith, Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2007, pp. 1-12.


Art for a Nation?, reprinted in John O’Brian and Peter White, Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007, pp. 187-92.



Landscapes of Sport, Landscapes of Exclusion: The “Sportsman’s Paradise” in Late Nineteenth Century Canadian Painting,” Journal of Canadian Studies 40.1 (Winter 2005-06): 71-124.



Confessions of a Selfish Teacher, College Quarterly 8.3 (Summer 2005).



The Group of Seven and the Tourist Landscape in Western Canada, or The More Things Change... Journal of Canadian Studies 37 (1): 144-79. Reprinted in People, Places, and Times: Readings in Canadian Social History, vol. 2: Post-Confederation, ed., Cynthia R. Comacchio and Elizabeth Jane Errington (Toronto: Thomson-Nelson, 2006), pp. 462-82.


Hard Inclusion. In On Aboriginal Representation in the Gallery. Edited by Lynda Jessup with Shannon Bagg. Hull: Canadian Museum of Civilization. Pp. xi-xxviii.


Moving Pictures and Costume Songs at the 1927 "Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern." Canadian Journal of Film Studies 11 (1): 144-79.



James Sibley Watson's Nass River Indians. In Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941. Edited by Bruce Posner. New York: Black Thistle Press/Anthology Film Archives. Pp. 116-20.


Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: An Introduction. In Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity. Edited by Lynda Jessup. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pp. 3-9.


Bushwhackers in the Gallery: Antimodernism and the Group of Seven. In Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity. Edited by Lynda Jessup. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pp. 130-52.



Tin Cans and Machinery: Saving the Sagas and Other Stuff Visual Anthropology 12: 49-86. Reprinted in www.canadianfilm.ca, 2000, pp. 1-51.



Prospectors, Bushwhackers, Painters: Antimodernism and the Group of Seven International Journal of Canadian Studies 17 (1): 193-214.






Winners' History: Exhibiting the Group of Seven

A study of recent exhibitions of the Group of Seven as sites of official nationalism in Canada, and of the ways in which national art histories function as an operative part of increasingly post-national processes of globalization.


Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada


Current Projects

2007

2006

2005

2002

2001

1999

1998