October 4, 2024

Meryl McMaster: Bloodline is a survey exhibition featuring the pioneering large-scale photographic works of Canadian artist Meryl McMaster (b. 1988), reflecting her mixed Plains Cree/Siksika, Dutch, and British ancestry. This exhibition spans McMaster’s past accomplishments (2008-2019) and her recent explorations (2022-2023) of family histories, particularly those of her Plains Cree/Métis female forebears from the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in present-day Saskatchewan, Canada.

The exhibition features 48 photographs across six bodies of work, evoking themes of memory, containment, erasure, and self-determination. Her most recent series “Stories of My Grandmothers” (2022-2023) highlights McMaster’s deep reckoning with her family’s history focusing on the lives and experiences of her great-great-grandmother Mathilda “Tilly” Schmidt, great-grandmother Isabella “Bella” Wuttunee, and grandmother Lena McMaster. In dialogue with McMaster’s large-scale photographs, the exhibition includes two new video-based works titled Niwaniskân isi Kiya | I Awake to You (2023) and Nipēhtēnān Kiteh | We Can Hear Your Heartbeat (2023).

Meryl McMaster: Bloodline presents her photographic work to a primarily U.S.-based audience, highlighting the complexities of a mixed heritage Indigenous woman in Canada. McMaster interrogates colonial histories, residential schools, and ancestral trauma, re-creating and re-imagining oral histories and stories in reclamation.

Credit: Overview from museum website