ABOUT THE ARTIST BARRY ACE

As an accomplished and award-winning writer, educator and artist, Barry has worked in the milieu of visual, literary and performing arts for more than 30 years. In the early 1990s, he was a lecturer with the University of Sudbury in the Indigenous Studies Program. He has also written numerous essays on contemporary Indigenous art and artists.

From 1994 to 2000

Barry served as chief curator with the Indigenous Art Centre, Crown-indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, and during his tenure, he curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including the international touring exhibition, Transitions: Contemporary Canadian Indian and Inuit Art (1997). In 1999, he and his team won the Deputy Minister’s Outstanding Achievement Award for the development and implementation of a groundbreaking artist-in-residence and exhibition program that featured an impressive roster of emerging and established Indigenous artists. In 2006 Barry co-founded and served as the inaugural Director of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective (ACC/CCA), an incorporated national nonprofit arts service organization in support of the Indigenous critical and curatorial communities with membership in Canada, the U.S.A., New Zealand and Australia. Building on his work with collectives, he co-founded the Ottawabased artist collective— Ottawa Ontario Seven (OO7)— with local Ottawa-based Indigenous artists to provide opportunities for self-curation, public engagement and critique, and he regularly exhibits under this moniker in Canada and the U.S.A.

In 2010 At the invitation of artist Robert Houle, Barry travelled to Paris (France) and undertook four sitespecific dance performances honouring the Ojibwa dance troupe lead by Maungwaudaus (George Henry), who in 1844 performed in George Catlin’s travelling portrait gallery exhibition. Barry’s essay, “A Reparative Act” won the Ontario Association of Art Gallery’s Curatorial Writing Award for 2012. Under special commission by the Ottawa Art Gallery, a film short on Barry’s performances by Shelley Niro entitled Homage

to Four in Paris was included in the Ottawa Art Gallery’s 2017 exhibition Àdisòkàmagan / We’ll All Become Stories.

In November 2018

Barry was selected as the first Indigenous artist for the newly established Art + Law Indigenous Artist in Residence Program at the University of Windsor. The program residency brought together 94 students, faculty and participants from the Indigenous community and the general public around a collaborative project. Barry proposed a work that would distill a very complex legal document— The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action— into a single work of art, taking the form of an 11.5-metre-long contemporary wampum belt. Each participant was asked to confirm their involvement by first surrendering their rights to the work by signing a witnessed document and symbolically accepting one dollar in exchange. The surrender was a wry reference to the treaty-making process in Canada, which is also reflected in the work’s title, “For as long as the sun shines, grass grows and water flows.” For more, visit www.barryacearts.com and the Kinsman Robinson Galleries website at www.kinsmanrobinson.com.